Madeline’s Reviews > Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage > Status Update

2/2 But the Hmong ladies did not seem remotely interested in doing that. Nor did I see these Hmong women crafting the character of "the husband" into either the hero or the villain in some vast, complex, and epic Story of the Emotional Self.”

1/2 “I did not see a group of women sitting around weaving overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages. The reason I found this so notable was that I have watched women all over the world weave overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages, in all sorts of mixed company, and at the slightest provocation.

“In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world.”

“Neither the grandmother nor any other woman in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar to me.”


Hmong village women discussing marriage/confused by questions about how they met their husband, fell in love, etc.

“You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. What you've got are two, possibly three, or maybe sometimes four people rattling around together in a giant space, each person with her own private physical and psychological domain, each person spending large amounts of the day completely separated from the others.”

“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he doesn’t love her.” - Oscar Wilde

“I hoped that all this studying might somehow mitigate my deep aversion to marriage. I wasn't sure how that would happen, but it had always been my experience in the past, anyhow, that the more learned about something, the less it frightened me. (Some fears can be vanquished, Rumpelstiltskin-like, only by uncovering their hidden, secret names.)”

“Within one year - like it or not, ready or not—I had to get married. That being the case, it seemed imperative that I focus my attention on unraveling the history of monogamous Western marriage in order to better understand my inherited assumptions, the shape of my family's narrative, and my culturally specific catalogue of anxieties.”

“I should clarify right away here that I limited my studies largely to an examination of marriage in Western history, and that this book will therefore reflect that cultural limitation. Any proper matrimonial historian or anthropologist will find huge gaps in my narrative, as I have left unexplored entire continents and centuries of human history.”

MARRIAGE IS A FRIENDSHIP RECOGNIZED BY THE POLICE.

- Robert Louis Stevenson