Elizabeth Gilbert knows more about love than you do

In the four years since its release, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love seems to be in a state of perpetual backlash—all while selling over 6 million copies. On the surface, this makes little sense. The mere mention of the title will cause most people to react like they’ve just been handed a bag of dog poop, yet it keeps selling (and selling and selling). The paradox is easier to understand if you take into account that by the end of the book everything in Gilbert’s life turned out so peachy: She traveled for a year on her publisher’s dime, found inner peace, ate a bunch of great food, fell in love with her white knight in Bali, and rabbit-fucked herself into a urinary tract infection. Oh, and she works as a writer and is almost certainly rich.

For all talk of being culturally oblivious, and Gilbert being self-obsessed, the biggest cause for the book's disdain probably lies in the fact that she’s so damn happy and successful. Maybe we’re all just a wee bit jealous. So with the release of her latest book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, and a speaking engagement on Thursday, Feb. 11 at the 7:30 p.m. at the Overture Center, The A.V. Club seeks understanding instead of arming itself with haterade. The event falls a few days before Valentine’s Day, so we perused Committed to cherry-pick some love lessons from one of the most conflicted and famous purveyors of Zen-like bliss.

Gilbert: “By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.”
Lesson (we think): Get the dozen roses, pay for dinner, hell, even buy the ring if you’re so inclined. Just know it all might eventually go to shit for no good reason whatsoever.

Gilbert: “We humans come into this world—as Aristophanes so beautifully explained—feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find someone who will recognize and repair us.”
Lesson (we think): Remember all those failed relationships that didn’t live up to your weighty expectations? It’s not your fault. Just blame your mom for cutting the cord.

Gilbert: “Married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.”
Lesson (we think): A wedding ring plus a penis equals joy.

Gilbert: “In my family at least, the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.”
Lesson (we think): Men mostly suck.