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"  I have a fantasy\u2014spurred by the fact that the United States has one of the world&amp;#039;s highest divorce rates\u2014that every person in this country, before he or she weds, would take a class in marriage and pass with at least a B+ (an A if you&amp;#039;re under 25, since your odds of splitting up are much higher). The text? Elizabeth (Eat, Pray, Love) Gilbert&amp;#039;s lively and info-packed new book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (Viking).  In the class, as in the book, you&amp;#039;d learn that before 1975, a married woman in Connecticut wasn&amp;#039;t legally permitted to open a checking account without written permission from her husband, and that not until 1984 did the state of New York overturn the vividly descriptive &amp;quot;marital rape exemption&amp;quot; law. Gilbert notices that &amp;quot;whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates...immediately begin to skyrocket.&amp;quot; As she eloquently concludes, &amp;quot;love-based unions make for strangely fragile tethers.&amp;quot; Gilbert intersperses such findings with witty asides (&amp;quot;psychologists call [infatuation] `narcissistic love.&amp;#039; I call it `my twenties&amp;#039; &amp;quot;); fun literary and philosophical quotes (Goethe: &amp;quot;When two people are really happy about one another, one can generally assume they are mistaken&amp;quot;); and anecdotes from her own latest journey to the altar, which began when a Homeland Security officer told her that in order to get her Brazilian-born boyfriend\u2014yes, the one from Eat, Pray, Love\u2014into the country, she would have to marry him. Having endured a hideous divorce and resolved never to wed again, Gilbert decided to explore every aspect of matrimony\u2014history, psychology, cultural implications\u2014in an attempt to make peace with the institution before trying it afresh.  Early on, Committed tends toward an Eat, Pray, Love\u2013ish, lit-lite feel\u2014Liz as charming- if-vaguely-ditzy globe-trotter\u2014but that fades as Gilbert passes, with hard thought and some lovely writing (her mother &amp;quot;sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart&amp;#039;s more quiet desires&amp;quot;), into such questions as, &amp;quot;What am I to conclude when my grandmother says that the happiest decision of her life was giving up everything for her husband and children but then says...that she doesn&amp;#039;t want me making the same choice?&amp;quot; By the time she describes how her own mother relinquished a deeply satisfying career ( running a Planned Parenthood office, ironically enough) after her daughters got chicken pox and Dad wouldn&amp;#039;t help out (&amp;quot;she could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn&amp;#039;t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband&amp;quot;), we&amp;#039;re lamenting, with Gilbert, the stark conflicts faced by virtually every ambitious working woman: for one, how to take care of business and maintain a sense of self while also doing the myriad tasks required of mothers and wives.  In the end, Committed\u2014just like my fantasy course!\u2014is, among other things, an attempt to help readers not make the mistake Gilbert did: namely, marrying too young and too unenlightened. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s this expression in Brazil: If you&amp;#039;re smart, you learn from your mistakes, but if you&amp;#039;re a genius, you learn from other people&amp;#039;s mistakes,&amp;quot; she tells me on the phone, adding that if women would consider the prospect of marriage for half as long as they do the color of their bridesmaids&amp;#039; dresses, it would be a great improvement. &amp;quot;Marriage is not a game for the young,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a huge amount of sacrifice and compromise involved. If I could say four words to anyone under 25 who&amp;#039;s considering getting married, they&amp;#039;d be: `Wake up, slow down.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a10738/committed-a-skeptic-makes-peace-marriage-388553/>