Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

  On the other hand, maybe not.

  There was a lot wrong with that marriage. I'm not sure we could have endured together even if we'd had the entire village of Manhattan working on our collective behalf. Besides, we had no cultural template for anything like family or community intervention. We were modern, independent Americans who lived hundreds of miles away from our families. It would have been the most foreign and artificial idea in the world for us to have summoned our relatives and neighbors together for a tribal council meeting on matters that we had deliberately kept private for years. We might as well have sacrificed a chicken in the name of matrimonial harmony and hoped that that would fix things.

  Anyhow, there's a limit to how far you can go with such musings. We must not allow ourselves to get trapped in eternal games of second-guessing and regret about our failed marriages, although such anguished mental contortions are admittedly difficult to control. For this reason, I'm convinced that the supreme patron of all divorced people must be the ancient Greek Titan Epimetheus, who was blessed--or, rather, cursed--with the gift of perfect hindsight. He was a nice enough fellow, that Epimetheus, but he could see things clearly only in reverse, which isn't a very useful real-world skill. (Interestingly, by the way, Epimetheus was a married man himself, although with his perfect hindsight he probably wished he'd chosen another girl: His wife was a little spitfire named Pandora. Fun couple.) In any case, at some point in our lives we must stop beating ourselves up over bygone blunders--even blunders that seem so painfully obvious to us in retrospect--and we must move on with our lives. Or as Felipe once said, in his inimitable manner, "Let us not dwell on the mistakes of the past, darling. Let us concentrate instead on the mistakes of the future."

  In that vein, it did cross my mind that day in Laos that maybe Ting and her community were on to something here about marriage. Not the business about the husband being the captain, of course, but the thought that perhaps there are times when a community, in order to maintain its cohesion, must share not only money and not only resources, but also a sense of collective accountability. Maybe all our marriages must be linked to each other somehow, woven on a larger social loom, in order to endure. Which is why I made a little note to myself that day in Laos: Don't privatize your marriage to Felipe so much that it becomes deoxygenated, isolated, solitary, vulnerable . . .

  I was tempted to ask my new friend Ting if she had ever intervened in a neighbor's marriage, as a sort of village elder. But before I could get to my next question, she interrupted me to ask whether perhaps I could find a good husband in America for her daughter, Joy? The one with the university education? Then Ting showed off one of her daughter's beautiful silk weavings--a tapestry of golden elephants dancing across a wash of crimson. Maybe some man in America would like to marry a girl who could make something like this with her own two hands, she wondered?

  The whole time Ting and I were talking, by the way, Joy was sitting there sewing in silence, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her hair clipped in a loose ponytail. Joy alternated between politely listening to her mom and at other times--in classic daughterly manner--rolling her eyes in embarrassment at her mother's statements.

  "Aren't there any educated American men who might want to marry a nice Leu girl like my daughter?" Ting asked again.

  Ting wasn't kidding, and the tension in her voice signaled a crisis. I asked Keo if he could gently probe at the problem, and Ting quickly opened up. There had been some big trouble in the village lately, she said. The trouble was that the young women had recently started making more money than the young men, and had also started getting themselves educated. The women of this ethnic minority are exceptionally gifted weavers, and now that Western tourists are coming to Laos, outsiders are interested in buying their textiles. So the local girls can make a fair bit of cash, and they often save that money from a young age. Some of them--like Ting's daughter, Joy--use their money to pay for college, in addition to buying goods for their families, like motorcycles, TVs, and new looms, whereas the local boys are all still farmers who hardly make any money at all.

  This hadn't been a social problem when nobody made money, but to have one gender--the young women--now thriving, everything was getting thrown out of balance. Ting said that the young women in her village were growing accustomed to the idea of being able to support themselves, and some of them were delaying marriage. But that wasn't even the biggest problem! The biggest problem was that when young people did get married these days, the men quickly got used to spending their wives' money, which meant that they didn't work as hard anymore. The young men, developing no sense of their own worth, drifted away into lives of drinking and gambling. The young women, observing this situation unfold, didn't like it one bit. Therefore, many girls had decided lately that they didn't want to get married at all, and this was upending the whole social system of the tiny village, creating all kinds of tensions and complications. This was why Ting was afraid that her daughter might never marry (unless perhaps I could arrange a match with an equally well-educated American?), and then what would happen to the family line? And what would become of the boys in the village, whose girls had outgrown them? What would become of the village's entire intricate social network?

  Ting told me that she referred to this situation as a "Western-style problem," which meant she'd been reading the newspapers, because this is entirely a Western-style problem--one that we've been watching play out in the Western world for several generations now, ever since avenues to wealth became more available to women. One of the first things that changes in any society when women start to earn their own income is the nature of marriage. You see this trend across all nations and all people. The more financially autonomous a woman becomes, the later in life she will get married, if ever.

  Some people decry this as the Breakdown of Society, and suggest that female economic independence is destroying happy marriages. But traditionalists who look back nostalgically on the halcyon days when women stayed at home and tended to their families, and when divorce rates were much lower than they are today, should keep in mind that many women over the centuries remained in wretched marriages because they could not afford to leave. Even today, the income of your average divorced American woman still drops 30 percent after her marriage has ended--and it was much worse in the past. An old adage used to warn, accurately enough: "Every woman is one divorce away from bankruptcy." Where would a woman leave to, exactly, if she had small children and no education and no way to support herself? We tend to idealize cultures in which people stay married forever, but we must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment.

  During the Great Depression, for instance, American divorce rates plummeted. Social commentators of the day liked to attribute this decline to the romantic notion that hard times bring married couples closer together. They painted a cheerful picture of resolute families hunkering down to eat their sparse meals together out of one dusty bowl. These same commentators used to say that many a family had lost its car only to find its soul. In reality, though, as any marriage counselor could tell you, deep financial trouble puts monstrous strains on marriages. Short of infidelity and flat-out abuse, nothing corrodes a relationship faster than poverty, bankruptcy, and debt. And when modern historians looked closer at the lowered divorce rates of the Great Depression, they discovered that many American couples had stayed together because they could not afford to separate. It was hard enough to support one household, much less two. Many families elected to ride their way through the Great Depression with a sheet hung in the middle of their living rooms, dividing husband from wife--which is a greatly depressing image, indeed. Other couples did separate but never had the money to file for legal divorce through the courts. Abandonment was epidemic during the 1930s. Legions of bankrupted American men just got up and walked away from their wives and kids, never to be seen again (where do you think all those hobos came from?), and very few women made the effort to officially report t
heir missing husbands with the census takers. They had bigger things to worry about, like finding food.

  Extreme poverty breeds extreme tension; this should surprise nobody. Divorce rates all over America are highest among uneducated and financially insecure adults. Money brings its own problems, of course--but money also brings options. Money can buy child care, a separate bathroom, a vacation, the freedom from arguments over bills--all sorts of things that help stabilize a marriage. And when women get their hands on their own money, and when you remove economic survival as a motivation for marriage in the first place, everything changes. By the year 2004, unmarried women were the fastest growing demographic in the United States. A thirty-year-old American woman was three times more likely to be single in 2004 than her counterpart in the 1970s. She was far less likely to become a mother, too--either early, or at all. The number of households in America without children reached an all-time high in 2008.

  This change isn't always welcomed by society at large, of course. In Japan these days, where we find the highest-paid women in the industrial world (as well as, not coincidentally, the lowest birth rates on earth), conservative social critics call young females who refuse to get married and have children "parasite singles"--implying that an unmarried, childless woman helps herself to all the benefits of citizenship (e.g., prosperity) without offering up anything (e.g., babies) in return. Even in societies as repressive as contemporary Iran, young women are choosing to delay marriage and child rearing in increasing numbers in order to concentrate instead on furthering their education and careers. Just as day follows night, the conservative commentators are denouncing the trend already, with one Iranian government official describing such willfully unmarried women as "more dangerous than the enemy's bombs and missiles."

  As a mother, then, in rural developing Laos, my new friend Ting carried a complicated set of feelings about her daughter. On one hand, she was proud of Joy's education and weaving skills, which had paid for the brand-new loom, the brand-new television, and the brand-new motorcycle. On the other hand, there was little that Ting could comprehend about her daughter's brave new world of learning and money and independence. And when she looked into Joy's future she saw only a puzzling mess of new questions. Such an educated, literate, financially independent, and frighteningly contemporary young woman had no precedent in traditional Leu society. What do you do with her? How will she ever find parity with her uneducated farmer-boy neighbors? Sure, you can park a motorcycle in your living room, and you can stick a satellite dish on the roof of your hut, but where on earth do you park such a girl as this?

  Let me tell you how much interest Joy herself had in this debate: She got up and walked out of the house in the middle of my conversation with her mother and I never saw her again. I didn't manage to get a single word out of the girl herself on the subject of marriage. While I'm sure she had strong feelings on the topic, she certainly didn't feel like chatting about it with me and her mom. Instead, Joy wandered off to do something else with her time. You kind of got the feeling she was going around the corner to the deli, to pick up some cigarettes and then maybe go see a movie with some friends. Except that this village had no deli, no cigarettes, no movies--only chickens clucking along a dusty road.

  So where was that girl going?

  Ah, but therein lies the whole question, doesn't it?

  By the way, have I mentioned the fact that Keo's wife was pregnant? In fact, the baby was due the very week that I met Keo and hired him to be my translator and guide. I found out about his wife's pregnancy when Keo mentioned that he had been especially happy for the extra income, on account of the baby's imminent arrival. Keo was enormously proud to be having a child, and on our last night in Luang Prabang, he invited Felipe and me to his house for dinner--to show us his life and to introduce us to pregnant young Noi.

  "We met at school," Keo had said of his wife. "I always liked her. She is somewhat younger than me--only nineteen years old now. She is very pretty. Although it's odd for me now that she is having the baby. She used to be so tiny that she barely weighed any kilos at all! Now it appears that she weighs all the kilos at once!"

  So we went to Keo's house--driven there by his friend Khamsy the innkeeper--and we went bearing gifts. Felipe brought several bottles of Beerlao, the local ale, and I brought some cute gender-neutral baby clothes that I'd found in the market and now wanted to present to Keo's wife.

  Keo's house stood at the end of a rutted dirt road just outside Luang Prabang. It was the last house on a road of similar houses, before the jungle took over, and it occupied a twenty-by-thirty-foot rectangle of land. Half of this property was covered by concrete tanks, which Keo had filled with the frogs and fighting fish he raises to supplement his income as an elementary school teacher and occasional tour guide. He sells the frogs for food. As he proudly explained, they go for about 25,000 kip--$2.50--a kilo, and on average there are three to four frogs in a kilo because these frogs are quite hefty. So it's a good little side living. In the meantime, he also has the fighting fish, which sell for 5,000 kip each--fifty cents--and which are breeding happily. He sells the fighting fish to local men who bet on the aquatic battles. Keo explained that he had begun raising fighting fish as a young boy, already looking for a way to make some extra money so he would not be a burden to his parents. Though Keo does not like to boast, he could not help but reveal that he was perhaps the best breeder of fighting fish in all of Luang Prabang.

  Keo's house took up the rest of his property--that which was not overrun by tanks of frogs and fish--which meant the house proper was about fifteen feet square. The structure was made of bamboo and plywood, with a corrugated metal roof. The one original room of the house had recently been divided into two rooms, to make a living area and a sleeping area. The dividing wall was just a plywood separation that Keo had wallpapered neatly with pages from English-language newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune. (Felipe told me later that he suspects Keo lies there at night, reading every word of his wallpaper, always working to better his English.) There was only one lightbulb, which hung over the living room. There was also a tiny concrete bathroom with a squat toilet and a basin for bathing. On the night of our visit, however, the basin was filled with frogs, because the frog tanks out front were at capacity. (Here is a side benefit of raising hundreds of frogs, as Keo explained: "Among all our neighbors, we alone do not have a problem with the mosquitoes.") The kitchen was outside the house, beneath a small overhang, with a dirt floor, tidily swept.

  "Someday we will invest in a real kitchen floor," Keo said with the ease of a suburban man predicting that he will someday build a winterized deck off the family room. "But I will need to make some more money first."

  There was no table anywhere in this house, nor chairs. There was a small bench outside in the kitchen, and underneath that bench was the family's tiny pet dog, who'd just had puppies a few days earlier. Those puppies were about the size of gerbils. The only embarrassment Keo ever expressed to me about his modest lifestyle was that his dog was so very small. He seemed to feel that there was something almost ungenerous about introducing his honored guests to such an undersized dog--as though the petite stature of his dog did not match Keo's station in life, or at the very least did not match Keo's aspirations.

  "We are always laughing at her because she is so small. I'm sorry she is not bigger," he apologized. "But she really is a nice dog."

  There was also a chicken. The chicken lived in the kitchen/porch area, with a bit of twine tying her to the wall so that she could wander but not escape. She had a small cardboard box and in this box she laid her one egg a day. When Keo presented us with his hen and her cardboard box, he did so in the manner of a gentleman farmer, with a proudly outstretched arm: "And this is our chicken!"

  At that moment, I caught a glimpse of Felipe out of the corner of my eye, and watched as a series of emotions rippled across his face: tenderness, pity, nostalgia, admiration, and a little dose of sadness. Felipe g
rew up poor in southern Brazil, and--like Keo--he'd always been a proud soul. In fact, Felipe is still a proud soul, to the point that he likes to tell people he was born "broke," not "poor"--thereby conveying the message that he'd always regarded his poverty as a temporary condition (as though somehow, as a helpless babe in arms, he had been caught just a little short on cash). And, as did Keo, Felipe leaned toward a scrappy entrepreneurship that had expressed itself at an early age. Felipe's first big business idea came to him at the age of nine when he noticed that cars were always stalling out in a deep puddle at the bottom of a hill in his town of Porto Alegre. He enlisted a friend to help him, and the two of them would wait at the bottom of that hill all day long to push stalled cars out of the puddle. The drivers would give the boys spare change for their efforts, and with this spare change many American comic books were purchased. By the age of ten, Felipe had entered the junk metal business, scouring his town for scraps of iron, brass, and copper to sell for cash. By thirteen, he was selling animal bones (scavenged outside the local butcher shops and slaughterhouses) to a glue manufacturer, and it was partly with this money that he bought his first boat ticket out of Brazil. If he had known about frog meat and fighting fish, trust me: He would have done that, too.