The Daily Telegraph’s
website featured an article the other day
about women who suddenly decide in middle age to divorce their “boring” husbands
and “find themselves”.

Call it the “Eat,
Pray, Love” phenomenon, after the book of the same name. The story, based on
real life, is about a woman who decides that her life with her husband is not
fulfilling enough, and decides to leave to go on a journey of
“self-discovery”.

In other words,
self-fulfillment trumps commitment. Increasingly, this theme is running through
our culture. It can be seen in programmes like “Sex in the City” and films like
“Friends with Benefits” which glorify uncommitted sex.

It could also be seen
in the more seriously minded “Revolutionary Road” which celebrated a married
couple who decided to abort their child and reject “middle-class suburbia” for a more bohemian
lifestyle.

In the case of the
woman in Eat, Pray Love, after dumping her boring
husband, the quest for self-fulfillment involved spending four months in Italy, eating and
enjoying life, three months in India, finding her spirituality and five months
in Bali, Indonesia finding love in the form of a “dashing
Brazilian”.

In the Telegraph
article, the woman in question, Lucy Valentine, left her husband of five years
and “had a tattoo and bought a Harley-Davidson motorbike, which she rode across
Australia and New Zealand. She taught English in Costa Rica and China, worked in
a Zambian orphanage and travelled through Siberia and Mongolia”.

Prior to this,
Valentine tells us that her life “was perfect”. “We had a gorgeous Victorian
house in the Home Counties, I had a great job with a blue-chip company, and my
husband was a lovely chap. He was kind and gentle and my friends all loved him.”

But all of this
perfection, apparently wasn’t enough. “I
wanted to change my life,” she says.

Of
course,
if a man was to leave his wife and go on a round the world trip, satisfying his
every whim in this fashion, he would be regarded as being in the grip of a mid-life crisis, as someone worthy of
pity at best, contempt at worst.

Can you imagine a man
engaging in a similar “journey of self-discovery” and being rewarded with a
bestselling book and movie? I don’t think so.

The Telegraph author,
on the other hand, implicitly lauds women who run off like this by saying:

“Fifty years ago, a
woman such as Valentine would have been rare
indeed. Divorce was taboo and few women had the guts, let alone the financial
means, to brave the social stigma of walking out on a decent husband simply
because she felt there must be ‘something more’”.

What all of this
ignores is the obvious fact that it is easy sticking with someone when a
relationship is based on romance and excitement; what really counts is sticking
with someone when life becomes more mundane,
especially when kids are involved.

Instead of valuing
committment, however, there is a strain of popular culture which seems intent on
rubbishing real commitment in favour of narcissism and
“self-actualisation”.

The cult of
self-fulfillment and its boosters are like a cultural acid eating away at one of
the key values- commitment – that bind society together.