Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

By late October 2006, we had returned to Bali and settled back into Felipe’s old house in the rice fields. There, we planned to wait out the rest of his immigration process quietly, with our heads down, inciting no more stress or conflict. It felt good to be in a more familiar place, good to stop moving. This was the house where, almost three years earlier, we had first fallen in love. This was the house that Felipe had given up only one year earlier in order to move in with me “permanently” in Philadelphia. This house was the closest thing to a real home that we could find right now, and man, were we happy to see it.

I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say, seduced me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me. There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor’s friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called “Roger”), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.

There was even a coffeepot.

Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe’s fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months-something like our friend Keo’s meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.

Here’s something you wouldn’t necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody loud. I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sail-​boat’s rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.

One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange stories with each other-to literally trade in personal intimacies. The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like “sister,” or “wolf,” or “buried treasure.” Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that’s when the men discover that their memories really have been traded-that, as Calvino wrote, “their sister had been exchanged for another’s sister, their wolf for another’s wolf.”

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other’s biography can grow. Felipe’s private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-​trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes-at three o’clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali-feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more-of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions…

I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

“Please tell me a story about fish,” I requested.

Felipe thought for a long while.

Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days-barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn’t as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn’t as charming as his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

Felipe’s main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn’t talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan-man to man-for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe’s father would ask his six-​year-​old son, “Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that’s halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?” and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

Felipe’s father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry. Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current-knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father’s beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air, swimming, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact sound that his father’s arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters: “Shush-​a, shush-​a, shush-​a…”

And now that memory-that sound-swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe’s father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe’s father at all anymore, and only one of them-until the moment Felipe shared this story with me-recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father’s swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil-all of this, too, has somehow become me.

A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I’d passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe’s immigration application. If all went well-if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiance visa-he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and only a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone’s questions. Truthfully, I hadn’t planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancee, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, “If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say.”

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod-and I’d never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren’t there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-​mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, “You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy.” But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-​mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still…

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn’t really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, “What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?”

I committed to no such thing.

She tried again: “What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn’t even have to come downstairs? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even that too threatening?”

Oddly, indefensibly, perversely: yes.

When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one’s family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one’s first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn’t they all seen this film already? One’s credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.

Furthermore, I could never forget what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners has to say on this very subject. While expressing her conviction that people should be allowed to marry as many times as they like, she does believe that each of us is entitled to only one big fanfare wedding ceremony per lifetime. (This may seem a bit overly Protestant and repressive, I know-but curiously enough, the Hmong feel the same way. When I’d asked that grandmother back in Vietnam about the traditional Hmong procedure for second marriages, she had replied, “Second weddings are exactly the same as first weddings-except with not as many pigs.”)

Moreover, a second or third big wedding puts family members and friends in the awkward position of wondering if they must shower repeat brides with gifts and abundant attention all over again. The answer, apparently, is no. As Miss Manners once coolly explained to a reader, the proper technique for congratulating a serial bride-​to-​be is to eschew all the gifts and galas and simply write the lady a note expressing how very delighted you are for her happiness, wishing her all the luck in the world, and being very careful to avoid using the words “this time.”

My God, how those two indicting little words-this time-make me cringe. Yet it was true. The recollections of last time felt all too recent for me, all too painful. Also, I didn’t like the idea that guests at a bride’s second wedding are just as likely to be thinking about her first spouse as they are to be thinking about her new spouse-and that the bride, too, will probably be remembering her ex-​husband on that day. First spouses, I have learned, don’t ever really go away-even if you aren’t speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism. “We know you better than you know yourselves” is what the ghosts of our ex-​spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately, is often not pretty.

“There are four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman,” says a fourth-​century Talmudic document-and indeed, our former spouses do often haunt our beds. I still dream about my ex-​husband, for instance, far more than I would ever have imagined back when I left him. Usually these dreams are agitating and confusing. On rare occasions, they are warm or conciliatory. It doesn’t really matter, though: I can neither control the dreams nor stop them. He shows up in my subconscious whenever he pleases, entering without knocking. He still has the keys to that house. Felipe dreams about his ex-​wife, too. I dream about Felipe’s ex-​wife, for heaven’s sake. I sometimes even dream about my ex-​husband’s new wife, whom I have never met, whose photograph I have never even seen-yet she appears in my dreams sometimes, and we converse there. (In fact, we hold summit meetings.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in this world my ex-​husband’s second wife is intermittently dreaming about me-trying in her subconscious to work out the strange folds and seams of our connection.

My friend Ann-divorced twenty years ago and happily remarried since to a wonderful, older man-assures me that this will all go away over time. She swears that the ghosts do recede, that there will come a time when I never think about my ex-​husband again. I don’t know, though. I find that hard to picture. I can imagine it easing, but I can’t imagine it ever going away completely, especially because my first marriage ended so sloppily, with so much left unresolved. My ex-​husband and I never once agreed on what had gone wrong with our relationship. It was shocking, our total absence of consensus. Such completely different worldviews are probably also an indication of why we should never have been together in the first place; we were the only two eye-​witnesses to the death of our marriage, and we each walked away with a completely different testimony as to what had happened.

Thus, perhaps, the dim sense of haunting. So we lead separate lives now, my ex-​husband and I, yet he still visits my dreams in the form of an avatar who probes and debates and reconsiders from a thousand different angles an eternal docket of unfinished business. It’s awkward. It’s eerie. It’s ghostly, and I didn’t want to provoke that ghost with a big loud ceremony or celebration.

Maybe another reason Felipe and I were so resistant to exchanging ceremonial vows was that we felt we’d already done it. We’d already exchanged vows in an utterly private ceremony of our own devising. This had happened back in Knoxville, in April 2005-back when Felipe first came to live with me in that odd decaying hotel on the square. We had gone out one day and bought ourselves a pair of simple gold rings. Then we’d written out our promises to each other and read them aloud. We put the rings on each other’s fingers, sealed our commitment with a kiss and tears, and that was it. Both of us had felt like that was enough. In all the ways that mattered, then, we believed that we were already married.

Nobody saw this happen except the two of us (and-one hopes-God). And needless to say, nobody respected those vows of ours in any way whatsoever (except the two of us and-again, one hopes-God). I invite you to imagine how the deputies of the Homeland Security Department, for instance, might have responded back at the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport if I had tried to convince them that a private commitment ceremony held in a Knoxville hotel room had somehow rendered Felipe and me as good as legally married.

Truth be told, it seemed mostly irritating to people-even to people who loved us-that Felipe and I were walking around wearing wedding rings without having had an official and legal marriage ceremony. The consensus was that our actions were confusing at best, pathetic at worst. “No!” declared my old friend Brian in an e-​mail from North Carolina when I told him that Felipe and I had recently exchanged private vows. “No, you cannot just do it that way!” he insisted. “That’s not enough! You must have some kind of real wedding!”

Brian and I argued over this subject for weeks, and I was surprised to discover his adamancy on the topic. I thought that he, of all people, would understand why Felipe and I shouldn’t need to marry publicly or legally just to satisfy other people’s conventions. Brian is one of the happiest married men I know (his devotion to Linda makes him the living definition of the marvelous word uxorious, or “wife-​worshiping”), but he’s also quite possibly my most naturally nonconformist friend. He bends comfortably to no socially accepted norm whatsoever. He’s basically a pagan with a Ph.D. who lives in a cabin in the woods with a composting toilet; this was hardly Miss Manners. But Brian was uncompromising in his insistence that private vows spoken only before God do not count as marriage.

“MARRIAGE IS NOT PRAYER!” he insisted (italics and capitals his). “That’s why you have to do it in front of others, even in front of your aunt who smells like cat litter. It’s a paradox, but marriage actually reconciles a lot of paradoxes: freedom with commitment, strength with subordination, wisdom with utter nincompoopery, etc. And you’re missing the main point-it’s not just to ’satisfy’ other people. Rather, you have to hold your wedding guests to their end of the deal. They have to help you with your marriage; they have to support you or Felipe, if one of you falters.”

The only person who seemed more annoyed than Brian about our private commitment ceremony was my niece Mimi, age seven. First of all, Mimi felt prodigiously ripped off that I hadn’t thrown a real wedding, because she really wanted to be a flower girl at least once in her life and had never yet been given the chance. Meanwhile, her best friend and rival Moriya had already been a flower girl twice-and Mimi wasn’t getting any younger here, people.

Moreover, our actions in Tennessee offended my niece on an almost semantic level. It had been suggested to Mimi that she could now, after that exchange of private vows in Knoxville, refer to Felipe as her uncle-but she wasn’t having it. Nor did her older brother Nick buy it. It wasn’t that my sister’s kids didn’t like Felipe. It’s just that an uncle, as Nick (age ten) instructed me sternly, is either the brother of your father or mother, or he is the man who is legally married to your aunt. Felipe, therefore, was not officially Nick and Mimi’s uncle any more than he was officially my husband, and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise. Children at that age are nothing if not sticklers for convention. Hell, they’re practically census takers. To punish me for my civil disobedience, Mimi took to calling Felipe her “uncle” using the sarcastic air quotes every time. Sometimes she even referred to him as my “husband”-again with the air quotes and the hint of irritated disdain.

One night back in 2005, when Felipe and I were having dinner at Catherine’s house, I had asked Mimi what it would take for her to consider my commitment to Felipe a valid one. She was unyielding in her certainty. “You need to have a real wedding,” she said.

“But what makes something a real wedding?” I asked.

“You need to have a person there.” Now she was frankly exasperated. “You can’t just make promises with nobody seeing it. There has to be a person who watches when you make promises.”

Curiously enough, Mimi was making a strong intellectual and historical point there. As the philosopher David Hume explained, witnesses are necessary in all societies when it comes to important vows. The reason is that it’s not possible to tell whether a person is telling the truth or lying when he speaks a promise. The speaker may have, as Hume called it, “a secret direction of thought” hidden behind the noble and high-​flown words. The presence of the witness, though, negates any concealed intentions. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you meant what you said; it matters merely that you said what you said, and that a third party witnessed you saying it. It is the witness, then, who becomes the living seal of the promise, notarizing the vow with real weight. Even in the early European Middle Ages, before the times of official church or government weddings, the expression of a vow before a single witness was all it took to seal a couple together forever in a state of legal matrimony. Even then, you couldn’t do it entirely on your own. Even then, somebody had to watch.

“Would it satisfy you,” I asked Mimi, “if Felipe and I promised wedding vows to each other, right here in your kitchen, in front of you?”

“Yeah, but who would be the person?” she asked.

“Why don’t you be the person?” I suggested. “That way you can be sure it’s done properly.”

This was a brilliant plan. Making sure that things are done properly is Mimi’s specialty. This is a girl who was veritably born to be the person. And I’m proud to report that she rose to the occasion. Right there in the kitchen, while her mother cooked dinner, Mimi asked Felipe and me if we would please rise and face her. She asked us to please hand her the gold “wedding” rings (again with the air quotes) that we had already been wearing for months. These rings she promised to hold safely until the ceremony was over.

Then she improvised a matrimonial ritual, cobbled together, I supposed, from various movies she had seen in her seven long years of life.

“Do you promise to love each other all the time?” she asked.

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through sick and not sick?”

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through mad and not mad?”

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through rich and not so rich?” (The idea of flat-​out poor, apparently, was not something Mimi cared to wish upon us; thus “not so rich” would have to suffice.)

We promised.

We all stood there for a moment in silence. It was evident that Mimi would have liked to remain in the authoritative position of the person for a bit longer, but she couldn’t come up with anything else that needed promising. So she gave us back our rings and instructed us to place them on each other’s fingers.

“You may now kiss the bride,” she pronounced.

Felipe kissed me. Catherine gave a small cheer and went back to stirring the clam sauce. Thus concluded, right there in my sister’s kitchen, the second non-​legally-​binding commitment ceremony of Liz and Felipe. This time with an actual witness.

I hugged Mimi. “Satisfied?”

She nodded.

But plainly-you could read it all over her face-she was not.

What is it about a public, legal wedding ceremony that means so much to everybody anyhow? And why was I so stubbornly-almost belligerently-resistant to it? My aversion made even less sense, considering that I happen to be somebody who loves ritual and ceremony to an inordinate degree. Look, I’ve studied my Joseph Campbell, I’ve read The Golden Bough, and I get it. I thoroughly recognize that ceremony is essential to humans: It’s a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don’t stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change, much the same way that a stable boy can lead a blindfolded horse right through the center of a fire, whispering, “Don’t overthink this, buddy, okay? Just put one hoof in front of the other and you’ll come out on the other side just fine.”

I even understand why people feel it’s so important to witness each other’s ritualistic ceremonies. My father-not an especially conventional man by any means-was always adamant that we must attend the wakes and funerals of anyone in our hometown who ever died. The point, he explained, was not necessarily to honor the dead or to comfort the living. Instead, you went to these ceremonies so that you could be seen-specifically seen, for instance, by the wife of the deceased. You needed to make sure that she catalogued your face and registered the fact that you had attended her husband’s funeral. This was not so you could earn social points or get extra credit for being a nice person, but rather so that the next time you ran into the widow at the supermarket she would be spared the awful uncertainty of wondering whether you had heard her sad news. Having seen you at her husband’s funeral, she would already know that you knew. She would therefore not have to repeat the story of her loss to you all over again, and you would be saved the awkward necessity of expressing your condolences right there in the middle of the produce aisle because you had already expressed them at the church, where such words are appropriate. This public ceremony of death, therefore, somehow squared you and the widow with each other-and also somehow spared the two of you social discomfort and uncertainty. Your business with each other was settled. You were safe.

This is what my friends and family wanted, I realized, when they were asking for a public wedding ceremony between Felipe and me. It wasn’t that they wanted to dress in fine clothing, dance in uncomfortable shoes, or dine on the chicken or the fish. What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. This was what Mimi wanted-to be squared and spared. She wanted the clear assurance that she could now take the words “uncle” and “husband” out of air quotes and continue her life without awkwardly wondering whether she was now required to honor Felipe as a family member or not. And it was quite clear that the only way she was ever going to offer up her full loyalty to this union was if she could personally witness the exchange of legal vows.

I knew all this, and I understood it. Still, I resisted. The main problem was that-even after several months spent reading about marriage and thinking about marriage and talking about marriage-I was still not yet entirely convinced about marriage. I was not yet sure that I bought the package of goods that matrimony was selling. Truthfully, I was still feeling resentful that Felipe and I had to marry at all merely because the government demanded it of us. And probably the reason this all bothered me so deeply and at such a fundamental level, I finally realized, is that I am Greek.

Please understand, I do not mean that I am literally Greek, as in: from the country of Greece, or a member of a collegiate fraternity, or enamored of the sexual passion that bonds two men in love. Instead, I mean that I am Greek in the way I think. Because here’s the thing: It has long been understood by philosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival worldviews-the Greek and the Hebrew-and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life.

From the Greeks-specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens-we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-​mindedness and what we might call today “multiculturalism.” The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate.

On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say “Hebrew” here, I’m not specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. (In fact, most of the contemporary American Jews I know are very Greek in their thinking, while it’s the American fundamentalist Christians these days who are profoundly Hebrew.) “Hebrew,” in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient worldview that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, patriarchal, authoritarian, moralistic, ritualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders. Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with God always firmly on “our” side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is more important than happiness, and vows are inviolable.

The problem is that modern Western culture has somehow inherited both these ancient worldviews-though we have never entirely reconciled them because they aren’t reconcilable. (Have you followed an American election cycle recently?) American society is therefore a funny amalgam of both Greek and Hebrew thinking. Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek. We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God’s will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.

And when it comes to our ideas about love-well, we are a tangled mess of both. In survey after survey, Americans express their belief in two completely contradictory ideas about marriage. On one hand (the Hebrew hand), we overwhelmingly believe as a nation that marriage should be a lifetime vow, never broken. On the other, Greek, hand, we equally believe that an individual should always have the right to get divorced, for his or her own personal reasons.

How can both these ideas be simultaneously true? No wonder we’re so confused. No wonder Americans get married more often, and get divorced more often, than any other people in any other nation on earth. We keep ping-​ponging back and forth between two rival views of love. Our Hebrew (or biblical/moral) view of love is based on devotion to God-which is all about submission before a sacrosanct creed, and we absolutely believe in that. Our Greek (or philosophical/ethical) view of love is based on devotion to nature-which is all about exploration, beauty, and a deep reverence for self-​expression. And we absolutely believe in that, too.

The perfect Greek lover is erotic; the perfect Hebrew lover is faithful.

Passion is Greek; fidelity is Hebrew.

This idea came to haunt me because, on the Greek-​Hebrew spectrum, I fall much closer to the Greek end. Did this make me an especially poor candidate for matrimony? I worried that it did. We Greeks don’t feel comfortable sacrificing the Self upon the altar of tradition; it just feels oppressive and scary to us. I worried about all this even more after I stumbled on one tiny but critical piece of information from that massive Rutgers study on matrimony. Apparently the researchers found evidence to support the notion that marriages in which both husband and wife wholeheartedly respect the sanctity of matrimony itself are more likely to endure than marriages where couples are perhaps a bit more suspicious of the institution. It seems, then, that respecting marriage is a precondition for staying married.

Though I suppose that makes sense, right? You need to believe in what you’re pledging, don’t you, for a promise to have any weight? Because marriage is not merely a vow made to another individual; that’s the easy part. Marriage is also a vow made to a vow. I know for certain that there are people who stay married forever not necessarily because they love their spouses, but because they love their principles. They will go to their graves still bound in loyal matrimony to somebody they may actively loathe just because they promised something before God to that person, and they would no longer recognize themselves if they dishonored such a promise.

Clearly, I am not such a being. In the past, I was given the clear choice between honoring my vow and honoring my own life, and I chose myself over the promise. I refuse to say that this necessarily makes me an unethical person (one could argue that choosing liberation over misery is a way of honoring life’s miracle), but it did bring up a dilemma when it came to getting married to Felipe. While I was just Hebrew enough to dearly wish that I would stay married forever this time (yes, let’s just go ahead and use those shaming words: this time), I had not yet found a way to respect wholeheartedly the institution of matrimony itself. I had not yet found a place for myself within the history of marriage where I felt that I belonged, where I felt that I could recognize myself. This absence of respect and self-​recognition caused me to fear that not even I would believe my own sworn vows on my own wedding day.

Trying to sort this out, I brought up the question with Felipe. Now I should say here that Felipe was considerably more relaxed about all this than I was. While he didn’t hold any more affection for the institution of marriage than I did, he kept telling me, “At this point, darling, it’s all just a game. The government has set the rules and now we have to play their game in order to get what we want. Personally, I’m willing to play any game whatsoever, as long as it means that I ultimately can live my life with you in peace.”

That mode of thinking worked for him, but gamesmanship wasn’t what I was looking for here; I needed a certain level of earnestness and authenticity. Still, Felipe could see my agitation on this subject, and-God bless the man-he was kind enough to listen to me muse for quite a long while on the rival philosophies of Western civilization and how they were affecting my views on matrimony. But when I asked Felipe whether he felt himself to be more Greek or more Hebrew in his thinking, he replied, “Darling-none of this really applies to me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’m not Greek or Hebrew.”

“What are you then?”

“I’m Brazilian.”

“But what does that even mean?”

Felipe laughed. “Nobody knows! That’s the wonderful thing about being Brazilian. It doesn’t mean anything! So you can use your Brazilianness as an excuse to live your life any way you want. It’s a brilliant strategy, actually. It’s taken me far.”

“So how does that help me?”

“Perhaps it can help you to relax! You’re about to marry a Brazilian. Why don’t you start thinking like a Brazilian?”

“How?”

“By choosing what you want! That’s the Brazilian way, isn’t it? We borrow everyone’s ideas, mix it all up, and then we create something new out of it. Listen-what is it that you like so much about the Greeks?”

“Their sense of humanity,” I said.

“And what is it that you like-if anything-about the Hebrews?”

“Their sense of honor,” I said.

“Okay, so that’s settled-we’ll take them both. Humanity and honor. We’ll make a marriage out of that combination. We’ll call it a Brazilian blend. We’ll shape this thing to our own code.”

“Can we just do that?”

“Darling!” Felipe said, and he took my face between his hands with a sudden, frustrated urgency. “When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.”

Can we, though?

I prayed that Felipe was right, but I wasn’t sure. My deepest fear about marriage, when I dug right down to the very bottom of it, was that matrimony would end up shaping us far more than we could ever possibly shape it. All my months of studying marriage had only caused me to fear this potentiality more than ever. I had come to believe that matrimony as an institution was impressively powerful. It was certainly far bigger and older and deeper and more complicated than Felipe or I could ever possibly be. No matter how modern and sophisticated Felipe and I might feel, I feared we would step onto the assembly line of marriage and soon enough find ourselves molded into spouses- crammed into some deeply conventional shape that benefited society, even if it did not entirely benefit us.

All this was disquieting because, as annoying as it may sound, I do like to think of myself as vaguely bohemian. I’m not an anarchist or anything, but it does comfort me to regard my life in terms of a certain instinctive resistance to conformity. Felipe, to be honest, likes to think of himself in much the same way. Okay, let’s all be truthful here and admit that most of us probably like to think of ourselves in these terms, right? It’s charming, after all, to imagine oneself as an eccentric nonconformist, even when one has just purchased a coffeepot. So maybe the whole idea of bending under the convention of marriage stung a bit for me-stung at that stubborn old level of anti-​authoritarian Greek pride. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would ever get around that issue.

That is, until I discovered Ferdinand Mount.

Pawing through the Web one day for further clues on marriage, I stumbled on a curious-​looking academic work titled The Subversive Family by a British author named Ferdinand Mount. I promptly ordered the book and had my sister ship it to me in Bali. I loved the title and was certain this text would relay inspiring stories of couples who had somehow figured out ways to beat the system and undermine social authority, keeping true to their rebel roots, all within the institution of marriage. Perhaps I would find my role models here!

Indeed, subversion was the topic of this book, but not at all in the manner I’d expected. This was hardly a seditious manifesto, which shouldn’t have been surprising given that it turns out Ferdinand Mount (beg pardon-make that Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet) is a conservative columnist for the London Sunday Times. I can honestly say that I never would have ordered this book had I known that fact in advance. But I’m happy that I did find it, because sometimes salvation comes to us in the most unlikely of forms, and Sir Mount (surmount?) did provide me with a sort of rescue, offering up an idea about matrimony that was radically different from anything I’d unearthed before.

Mount-I’ll eschew his title from here on out-suggests that all marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority. (All nonarranged marriages, that is. Which is to say all nontribal, nonclannish, non-​property-​based marriages. Which is to say Western marriage.) The families that grow out of such willful and personal unions are subversive units, too. As Mount puts it: “The family is a subversive organization. In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, bishops and commissars but also humble parish priests and cafe intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming up against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last.”

Now that is some seriously strong language, but Mount builds a compelling case. He suggests that because couples in nonarranged marriages join together for such deeply private reasons, and because those couples create such secret lives for themselves within their union, they are innately threatening to anybody who wants to rule the world. The first goal of any given authoritarian body is to inflict control on any given population, through coercion, indoctrination, intimidation, or propaganda. But authority figures, much to their frustration, have never been able to entirely control, or even monitor, the most secret intimacies that pass between two people who sleep together on a regular basis.

Even the Stasi of communist East Germany-the most effective totalitarian police force the world has ever known-could not listen in on every single private conversation in every single private household at three o’clock in the morning. Nobody has ever been able to do this. No matter how modest or trivial or serious the pillow talk, such hushed hours belong exclusively to the two people who are sharing them with each other. What passes between a couple alone in the dark is the very definition of the word “privacy.” And I’m talking not just about sex here but about its far more subversive aspect: intimacy. Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two-creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else can be privy.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Of all the Souls that stand create-/ I have elected-One.” That right there-the idea that, for our own private reasons, many of us do end up electing one person to love and defend above all others-is a situation that has exasperated family, friends, religious institutions, political movements, immigration officials, and military bodies forever. That selection, that narrowness of intimacy is maddening to anyone who longs to control you. Why do you think American slaves were never legally permitted to marry? Because it was far too dangerous for slave owners to even consider allowing a person held in captivity to experience the wide range of emotional freedom and innate secrecy that marriage can cultivate. Marriage represented a kind of liberty of the heart, and none of that business could be tolerated within an enslaved population.

For this reason, as Mount argues, powerful entities across the ages have always tried to undercut natural human bonds in order to increase their own power. Whenever a new revolutionary movement or cult or religion comes to town, the game always begins the same way: with an effort to separate you-the individual-from your preexisting loyalties. You must swear a blood oath of utter allegiance to your new overlords, masters, dogma, godhead, or nation. As Mount writes, “You are to renounce all other worldly goods and attachments and follow the Flag or the Cross or the Crescent or the Hammer and Sickle.” In short, you must disown your real family and swear that we are your family now. In addition, you must embrace the new, externally mandated, family-​like arrangements that have been imposed on you (like the monastery, the kibbutz, the party cadre, the commune, the platoon, the gang, etc.). And if you choose to honor your wife or husband or lover above the collective, you have somehow failed and betrayed the movement, and you shall be denounced as selfish, backwards, or even treasonous.

But people keep doing it anyhow. They keep on resisting the collective and electing one person among the masses to love. We saw this happen in the early days of Christianity-remember? The early church fathers instructed quite clearly that people were now to choose celibacy over marriage. That was to be the new social construct. While it’s true that some early converts did become celibate, most decidedly did not. Eventually the Christian leadership had to cave and accept that marriage was not going away. The Marxists encountered the same problem when they tried to create a new world order in which children would be raised in communal nurseries, and where there would be no particular attachments whatsoever between couples. But the communists didn’t have any more luck enforcing that idea than the early Christians had. The fascists didn’t have any luck with it either. They influenced the shape of marriage, but they couldn’t eliminate marriage.

Nor could the feminists, I must admit in all fairness. Early on in the feminist revolution, some of the more radical activists shared a utopian dream in which, given the choice, liberated women would forever select bonds of sisterhood and solidarity over the repressive institution of marriage. Some of those activists, like the feminist separatist Barbara Lipschutz, went so far as to suggest that women should quit having sex altogether-not only with men, but also with other women-because sex was always going to be a demeaning and oppressive act. Celibacy and friendship, therefore, would be the new models for female relationships. “Nobody Needs to Get Fucked” was the title of Lipschutz’s infamous essay-which is not exactly how Saint Paul might have phrased it, but essentially came down to the exact same principles: that carnal encounters are always tarnishing, and that romantic partners, at the very least, distract us from our loftier and more honorable destinies. But Lipschutz and her followers didn’t have any more luck eradicating the desire for private sexual intimacy than the early Christians, or the communists or the fascists. A lot of women-even very smart and liberated women-ended up choosing private partnerships with men anyhow. And what are today’s most activist feminist lesbians fighting for? The right to get married. The right to become parents, to create families, to have access to legally binding unions. They want to be inside matrimony, shaping its history from within, not standing outside the thing throwing stones at its grotty old facade.

Even Gloria Steinem, the very face of the American feminist movement, decided to get married for the first time in the year 2000. She was sixty-​six years old on her wedding day and just as brilliant as ever; one has to assume she knew exactly what she was doing. To some of her followers, though, it felt like a betrayal, as though a saint had fallen from grace. But it’s important to note that Steinem herself saw her marriage as a celebration of feminism’s victories. As she explained, had she gotten married back in the 1950s, back when she was “supposed to,” she would have effectively become her husband’s chattel-or at the very most his clever helpmeet, like Phyllis the math whiz. By the year 2000, though, thanks in no small part to her own tireless efforts, marriage in America had evolved to the point where a woman could be both a wife and a human being, with all her civil rights and liberties intact. But Steinem’s decision still disappointed a lot of passionate feminists, who could not get over the stinging insult that their fearless leader had chosen a man over the collective sisterhood. Of all the souls in creation, even Gloria had elected one-and that decision left everybody else out.

But you cannot stop people from wanting what they want, and a lot of people, as it turns out, want intimacy with one special person. And since there is no such thing as intimacy without privacy, people tend to push back very hard against anybody or anything that interferes with the simple desire to be left alone with a loved one. Although authoritarian figures throughout history have tried to curb this desire, they can’t get us to quit it. We just keep insisting on the right to link ourselves up to another soul legally, emotionally, physically, materially. We just keep on trying, again and again, no matter how ill-​advised it may be, to recreate Aristophanes’ two-​headed, eight-​limbed figure of seamless human union.

I see this urge playing out everywhere around me, and sometimes in the most surprising forms. Some of the most unconventional, heavily tattooed, antiestablishmentarian, and socially rebellious people I know get married. Some of the most sexually promiscuous people I know get married (often to disastrous effect-but still, they do try). Some of the most misanthropic people I know get married, despite what appears to be their equal-​opportunity distaste for humanity. In fact, I know of very few people who haven’t attempted a long-​term monogamous partnership at least once in their lives, in one form or another-even if they never legally or officially sealed those vows inside a church or a judge’s chambers. In fact, most people I know have experimented with long-​term monogamous partnerships several times over-even if their hearts may have been utterly destroyed by this effort before.

Even Felipe and I-two dodgy survivors of divorce who prided ourselves on a certain degree of bohemian autonomy-had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved. Before we’d ever heard of Officer Tom, we had been living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship-and what do you call that, if not marriage? We’d even had a ceremony to seal our fidelity. (Hell, we’d had two!) We were shaping our lives in that particular form of partnership because we yearned for something. As so many of us do. We yearn for private intimacy even though it’s emotionally risky. We yearn for private intimacy even when we suck at it. We yearn for private intimacy even when it’s illegal for us to love the person we love. We yearn for private intimacy even when we are told that we should yearn for something else, something finer, something nobler. We just keep on yearning for private intimacy, and for our own deeply personal set of reasons. Nobody has ever been able to completely sort out that mystery, and nobody has ever been able to stop us from wanting it.

As Ferdinand Mount writes, “Despite all official efforts to downgrade the family, to reduce its role and even to stamp it out, men and women obstinately continue not merely to mate and produce children but to insist on living in pairs together.” (And I would add to this thought, by the way, that men and men also keep insisting on living in pairs together. And that women and women also keep insisting on living in pairs together. All of which just drives the authorities crazier still.)

Faced with this reality, repressive authorities always eventually surrender in the end, bowing at last to the inevitability of human partnership. But they don’t go down without a fight, those pesky powers-​that-​be. There is a pattern to their surrender, a pattern that Mount suggests is consistent across Western history. First, the authorities slowly glean that they are unable to stop people from choosing loyalty to a partner over allegiance to some higher cause, and that marriage is therefore not going away. But once they have given up trying to eliminate marriage, the authorities now attempt to control it by establishing all sorts of restrictive laws and limits around the custom. When the church fathers finally surrendered to matrimony’s existence in the Middle Ages, for instance, they immediately heaped on the institution a giant pile of tough new conditions: There would be no divorce; marriage would now be an inviolable holy sacrament; nobody would be allowed to marry outside of a priest’s purview; women must bow to the laws of coverture; etc. And then the church went a little crazy, trying to enforce all this control over marriage, right down to the most intimate level of private marital sexuality.

In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. “Sexual activity,” Brother Cherubino instructed, “should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation.” The wife could look at her husband’s private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and “never allow yourself, woman, to be seen in the nude by your husband.” And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not anywhere! “The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife,” Brother Cherubino lamented. “He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment…”

Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once the lovemaking was over-and this was perhaps the most threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression.

In the end, the couples tend to win.

Once the authorities have failed at eliminating marriage, and once they have failed at controlling marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. (Amusingly, Ferdinand Mount calls this the signing of a “one-​sided peace treaty.”) But then comes an even more curious stage: Like clockwork, the powers-​that-​be will now try to co-​opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the Western world for several centuries now-acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values.

This is the pattern that happened with the Soviets and with the twentieth-​century Chinese, too. First, the communists tried to eliminate marriage; then they tried to control marriage; then they fabricated an entirely new mythology claiming that “the family” had always been the backbone of good communistic society anyhow, don’t you know.

Meanwhile, throughout all this contorted history, throughout all the thrashing and frothing of dictators and despots and priests and bullies, people just keep on getting married-or whatever you want to call it at any given time. Dysfunctional and disruptive and ill-​advised though their unions may be-or even secret, illegal, unnamed, and renamed-people continue to insist on merging with each other on their own terms. They cope with all the changing laws and work around all the limiting restrictions of the day in order to get what they want. Or they flat-​out ignore all the limiting restrictions of the day! As one Anglican minister in the American colony of Maryland complained in 1750, if he had been forced to recognize as “married” only those couples who had legally sealed their vows in a church, he would have had to “bastardize nine-​tenths of the People in this County.”

People don’t wait for permission; they go ahead and create what they need. Even African slaves in early America invented a profoundly subversive form of marriage called the “besom wedding,” in which a couple jumped over a broomstick stuck aslant in a doorway and called themselves married. And nobody could stop those slaves from making this hidden commitment in a moment of stolen invisibility.

Seen in this light, then, the whole notion of Western marriage changes for me-changes to a degree that feels quietly and personally revolutionary. It’s as if the entire historical picture shifts one delicate inch, and suddenly everything aligns itself into a different shape. Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals).

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. Because “they” (the powers-​that-​be) have never been entirely able to stop “us” (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so “they” eventually have no choice but to legally permit “us” to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.

So perhaps I’ve had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It’s like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

To a certain extent, then, Felipe was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

Do I sound like I’m trying to talk myself into something here?

People, I am trying to talk myself into something here.

This entire book-every single page of it-has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself. Such comfort is not necessarily always an easy thing to find. On my friend Jean’s wedding day over thirty years ago, she asked her mother, “Do all brides feel this terrified when they’re about to get married?” and her mother replied, even as she calmly buttoned up her daughter’s white dress, “No, dear. Only the ones who are actually thinking.”

Well, I have been thinking very hard about all this. The leap into marriage has not come easily for me, but perhaps it shouldn’t be easy. Perhaps it’s fitting that I needed to be persuaded into marriage-even vigorously persuaded-especially because I am a woman, and because matrimony has not always treated women kindly.

Some cultures seem to understand the need for feminine marital persuasion better than others. In some cultures, the task of vigorously enticing a woman to accept a marriage proposal has evolved into a ceremony, or even an art form, in its own right. In Rome, in the working-​class neighborhood of Trastevere, a powerful tradition still dictates that a young man who wants to marry a young woman must publicly serenade his lover outside her home. He must beg for her hand in song, right out there in the open where everyone can witness it. Of course, a lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.

The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved’s house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman’s window and belt out-in loud, rough, local dialect-a song with the decidedly unromantic title “Roma, nun fa’la stupida stasera!” (”Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!”) Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn’t dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it’s too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.

“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” the young man sings beneath the girl’s window. “Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-​of-​a-​bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!”

When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-​participation portion of the evening’s entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, “Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!”

Then the young woman herself-the object of desire-comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.

“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” she implores in song. “Please put those clouds back across the moon! Hide your most brilliant stars! Stop blowing, you son-​of-​a-​bitch Western wind! Hide the perfumed air of spring! Help me to resist!”

All the women in the neighborhood lean out their apartment windows and sing along loudly with the girl, “Please, Rome-give her some help!”

It becomes a desperate duel between the men’s voices and the women’s voices. The scene becomes so pitched that it honestly starts to feel as though all the women of Trastevere are begging for their lives. Strangely, though, it feels like all the men of Trastevere are begging for their lives, too.

In the fervor of the exchange, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the end, this is just a game. From the first moment of the serenade, after all, everyone knows how the story will conclude. If the young woman has come to her window at all, if she has even glanced down at her suitor in the street, it means she has already accepted his wedding proposal. By merely engaging in her half of the spectacle, the girl has demonstrated her love. But out of some sense of pride (or perhaps out of some very justifiable sense of fear), the young woman must stall-if only to give voice to her doubts and hesitations. She must make it perfectly clear that it will take all the mighty powers of this young man’s love, combined with all the epic beauty of Rome, and all the brilliance of the starlight, and all the seduction of the full moon, and all the perfume of that son-​of-​a-​bitch Western wind before she concedes her yes.

Given what she is agreeing to, one might argue that all this spectacle and all this resistance is necessary.

In any case, that is what I’ve needed, too-a clamorous song of self-​persuasion about marriage, belted out in my own street, underneath my own window, until I could finally relax into my own acceptance. That has been the purpose of this effort all along. Forgive me, then, if, at the end of my story, I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount’s reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive. I received that theory as a great and soothing balm. Now, maybe that theory doesn’t work for you personally. Maybe you don’t need it the way I needed it. Maybe Mount’s thesis isn’t even entirely historically accurate. Nonetheless, I will take it. Like a good almost-​Brazilian, I will take this one verse of the persuasion song and make it my own-not only because it heartens me, but because it actually also excites me.

In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony’s long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself-right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.

Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.