Read Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage for Free Online

me, and certainly educational, to have delved more deeply into an examination of every possible marital custom on earth, but I didn't have that kind of time. Trying to get a handle on the complex nature of matrimony in Islamic societies alone, for instance, would have taken me years of study, and my urgency had a deadline that precluded such extended contemplation. A very real clock was ticking in my life: 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 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 I learned about something, the less it frightened me. (Some fears can be vanquished, Rumpelstiltskin-like, only by uncovering their hidden, secret names.) What I really wanted, more than anything, was to find a way to somehow embrace marriage to Felipe when the big day came rather than merely swallowing my fate like a hard and awful pill. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought it might be a nice touch to be happy on my wedding day. Happy and conscious, that is.
    This book is the story of how I got there.
    And it all begins--because every story must begin somewhere--in the mountains of northern Vietnam.

CHAPTER TWO
    Marriage and Expectation

A MAN CAN BE HAPPY WITH ANY WOMAN
AS LONG AS HE DOES NOT LOVE HER.
    --Oscar Wilde

    A little girl found me that day.
    Felipe and I had arrived in this particular village after an overnight journey from Hanoi on a loud, dirty, Soviet-era train. I can't rightly remember now why we went to this specific town, but I think some young Danish backpackers had recommended it to us. In any case, after the loud, dirty train journey, there had been a long, loud, dirty bus ride. The bus had finally dropped us off in a staggeringly beautiful place that teetered on the border with China--remote and verdant and wild. We found a hotel and when I stepped out alone to explore the town, to try to shake the stiffness of travel out of my legs, the little girl approached me.
    She was twelve years old, I would learn later, but tinier than any American twelve-year-old I'd ever met. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her skin was dark and healthy, her hair glossy and braided, her compact body all sturdy and confident in a short woolen tunic. Though it was summertime and the days were sultry, her calves were wrapped in brightly colored wool leggings. Her feet tapped restlessly in plastic Chinese sandals. She had been hanging around our hotel for some time--I had spotted her when we were checking in--and now, when I stepped out of the place alone, she approached me full-on.
    "What's your name?" she asked.
    "I'm Liz. What's your name?"
    "I'm Mai," she said, "and I can write it down for you so you can learn how to spell it properly."
    "You certainly speak good English," I complimented her.
    She shrugged. "Of course. I practice often with tourists. Also, I speak Vietnamese, Chinese, and some Japanese."
    "What?" I joked. "No French?"
    " Un peu ," she replied with a sly glance. Then she demanded, "Where are you from, Liz?"
    "I'm from America," I said. Then, trying to be funny, since obviously she was from right there, I asked, "And where are you from, Mai?"
    She immediately saw my funny and raised it. "I am from my mother's belly," she replied, instantly causing me to fall in love with her.
    Indeed, Mai was from Vietnam, but I realized later she would never have called herself Vietnamese. She was Hmong--a member of a small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call "an original people") who inhabit the highest mountain peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China. Kurdish-like, the