In 2006, Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, romanticized her decision to leave her husband in search of self-discovery and happiness. In it, she travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia where she finds gustatory, spiritual, and finally romantic fulfillment with her soulmate, a charming 52-year-old Brazilian divorcé named Jose. But that’s not the end of the story.
After 10 years of marriage to Jose, she left him for a new soulmate and quipped, “I don’t think marriage is supposed to be an endurance contest.” In his new book, Get Married, Brad Wilcox, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, points out, “It’s probably no accident that Gilbert, who has had four ‘soulmates’ since she left her first husband in 2002, is by last count a single fiftysomething.”
In Wilcox’s view, Gilbert’s story is emblematic of a larger pattern of anti-nuptial and anti-natalist messaging from the cultural elites of academia, journalism, and Hollywood.
Defying the Elites
Articles like The Atlantic’s “The Case Against Marriage,” Time’s “Having It All Without Having Children,” and The New York Times’ “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love” glorify individualism, hedonism, and workism, but Wilcox’s data shows traditional commitments such as marriage and religion are more reliable paths to happiness.
Of course, determining cause and effect in social science is always tricky. For instance, Wilcox analyzes that the odds of being very happy increase by 545 percent for people in
