committed - Alain Cajeux is person of the week

Elizabeth Gilbert: "...this distressing truth: that every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe."

my dad: "don't put all your eggs in 1 basket"

I am reading the sequel to Elizabeth Gilbert's "eat pray love", which is titled: Committed.

This is how her website introduces this book:

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married.

(Both were survivors of previous divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which—after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing—gave the couple a choice:
they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.

So: it is odd and at the same time marvelous, how you sometimes buy or borrow a book and it patiently waits on the shelf for you to be ready to read it.
Well; I became ready this week and wonderfully coincidental to the theme of this book, my best friend pledged her love and loyalty to her Swiss-French partner yesterday. They topped the commencement of this special journey, with a stylish and beautiful celebration at Diemersdal Wine Estate.



Alain: you are person of the week.

You have been through a divorce and managed to coax your heart to open and to trust and love once again.

For somebody unfamiliar with the wreckage of untying that "eternal promise" of a knot, I have to rely on Elizabeth's description of her own divorce.
Here goes:

"...had also learned that marriage is an estate that is very much easier to enter than it is to exit. Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you- the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love-
may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave.

Thus, you can feasibly find yourself trapped for months or even years in a loveless legal bond that has come to feel rather like a burning building.
One in which you are handcuffed to a radiator somewhere down in the basement, unable to wrench yourself free, while the smoke billows forth and the rafters are collapsing."

so with that horrific description: I feel it is very fitting that the escapee (be crowned person of the week) as it is courageous to see how this person manages to trust the opposite sex again and devote his/her time and attention to the immense investment, which a long-term relationship/ life- partnership is.

I'll be writing a lot more about and quoting from Liz' book as it really is so tactfully, wonderfull-sincerely written.

Happy Sunday.