Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (19 page)

Only at Stage Four--if all else fails--is there an admission of hopelessness. If the family can't fix the dispute and if the community can't fix the dispute (which is rare), then and only then will the couple go off to the big city, outside the realm of the village, to secure a legal divorce.

Listening to Ting explain all this, I found myself thinking all over again about my own failed first marriage. I wondered whether my ex-husband and I might have saved our relationship if only we'd interrupted our free fall sooner, before things turned so completely toxic. What if we had called in an emergency council of friends, families, and neighbors to give us a hand? Maybe a timely intervention could have righted us, dusted us off, and guided us back together. We did attend six months of counseling together at the very end of our marriage, but--as I've heard so many therapists lament about their patients--we sought outside help too late, and put in too little effort. Visiting someone's office for one hour a week was not enough of a fix for the massive impasse we had already reached in our nuptial journey. By the time we took our ailing marriage to the good doctor, she could do little beyond offering up a postmortem pathology report. But maybe if we'd acted sooner, or with more trust . . . ? Or maybe if we'd sought help from our family and community . . . ?

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 their 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?