Does your talent lie in travel or in living abroad? Though some people are good at both and others not cut out for either, the skill sets involved are surprisingly different.

There’s a great passage about the difference between being a born traveler and a born expat in Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sequel to her astonishingly successful travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

Committed is a skeptic’s look at marriage from all angles, sparked by Gilbert’s decision to wed Felipe, the Brazilian man she meets in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. (Javier Bardem plays Felipe in the upcoming movie, which almost makes up for Julia Roberts playing Gilbert.)

The eight chapters of Committed have titles like “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Ceremony,’ and “Marriage and Subversion.” The event that started Gilbert’s exhaustive look at this hallowed and maligned institution was that she and her boyfriend Felipe were pushed into marriage because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suddenly decides that Felipe can no longer enter the U.S. Now if she were married to a U.S. citizen, suggests a friendly Homeland Security agent, things might be easier…

But the official hoops they have to jump through and the strains it puts in their relationship are anything but easy.

Gilbert’s experience mirrors some of what I’ve been through—marrying for immigration purposes to a foreign-born lover you’re already committed to, so hey, Why not make it legal so that your lives are easier in the face of capricious and punishing laws? And then the fun (aka trouble) begins, especially if you both have different ideas of just what marriage means.

Although the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of just that–what marriage means–I’m not finding what I was looking for in Committed. For my tastes, there’s not enough about cross-cultural relationships, or about how a relationship can change (and not always for the better) when you make it official. But of course that’s not the book Gilbert set out to write, so I can’t really fault her for not writing what I most want to read. As many writers have noted, when you don’t find what you want to read, well, then go write it yourself!

What I did find in Committed, on pages 216 – 221, was a sharply drawn description of the differences between a born traveler and a born live-abroader.

Here’s the background: Gilbert and Felipe, her Brazilian honey, are homeless, waiting to have his visa approved so they can both return to the U.S. and start building a life there together. They’re wandering through Southeast Asia, and after six months of such travel and of being with each other night and day, tempers are fraying. Gilbert has been hurrying them from one cheap hotel room to the next, trying to keep their anxiety at bay, when she realizes that that technique doesn’t seem to work for her partner. Gilbert writes:

“Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep in a moving car, I have always been comforted with the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle; since he was the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to enjoy any of this drifting.

…The reality about Felipe, as I was beginning to realize, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all.

But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South American to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.”

So how about you? Are you more of a traveler, like Gilbert, or a born expat, like Felipe?

Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous travel memoir, is now a movie starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert. If the trailer is any indication, the film emphasizes the glib aspects of a memoir that teeters between messy real life and staged epiphanies. In the film, our first glimpse of Roberts/Gilbert, reacting to the prophecy of the requisite toothless holy man, shows a flash of Robert’s patented self-satisfied smirk. This doesn’t bode well for the film, which opened August 13.

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

the woman of the hour: Maria Belen Chapur

During the last week of June 2009, no one could locate South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, a Republican in his second term. Aids said Sanford, married and with four sons, was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but even they seemed unsure. Then the cat clawed its way out of the bag—Sanford was in Argentina, with his Argentine girlfriend (the press used the old-fashioned word “mistress” to make the story juicier). His wife, it came out, had known about la argentina, Maria Belen Chaper, for a few weeks, and had given Sanford the boot.

“The mistress” is 43, divorced, with 2 children of her own. She works at a multinational agribusiness corporation and is fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Chinese. She lives, the press reported (with photos and google maps!) in the upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo.

Belen Chaper sounds like a woman of substance and accomplishment. But even if she weren’t, she has, to Sanford, one other enticing allure: she’s foreign. She doesn’t look, smell, sounds or taste like the women in Sanford’s South Carolina home. The very way she thinks, moves, and scrambles an egg is decidedly unfamiliar. And he, in turn, is foreign to her.

Anyone who’s had a foreign fling knows that
ho-hum + foreign accent = doable
& appealing + foreign accent = utterly irresistible

What happens when the fling steadies into a real relationship? Well, then things get tricky. The same foreignness that first drew you in is now, subtly and not-so-subtly, pushing you away. It’s the same thing that happens in every relationship—what draws you in starts to drive you crazy. But with a cross-cultural relationship, the differences are wider and deeper. Those who can manage it end up with a wider frame of reference and a deeper understanding of the varieties of humanness. Either that or they go stark raving mad.

If Sanford ends up staying with his ‘mistress,” let’s check in in a year or two to see how things are going.