This system makes brilliant sense in a country of such extreme poverty and economic chaos. Laos suffered for decades behind the most restrictive communistic “Bamboo Curtain” in all of Asia, where one incompetent government after another presided over a financial scorched earth policy, and where national banks withered and died in corrupt and incompetent hands. In response, the people gathered together their pennies and turned their wedding ceremonies into a banking system that really worked: the nation’s only truly trustworthy National Trust. This entire social contract was built on the collective understanding that, as a young bride and groom, your wedding money doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the community, and the community must be paid back. With interest. To a certain extent, this means that your marriage doesn’t entirely belong to you, either; it also belongs to the community, which will be expecting a dividend out of your union. Your marriage, in effect, becomes a business in which everyone around you owns a literal share.
The stakes of that share became clearer to me one afternoon when Keo drove me far out of the mountains of Luang Prabang to a tiny village called Ban Phanom-a distant lowland community populated by an ethnic minority called the Leu, a people who had fled to Laos from China a few centuries earlier, seeking relief from prejudice and persecution, bringing with them only their silkworms and their agricultural skills. Keo had a friend from university who lived in the village and was now working as a weaver, just like every other Leu woman around. This girl and her mother had agreed to meet with me and talk to me about marriage, and Keo had agreed to translate.
The family lived in a clean square bamboo house with a concrete floor. There were no windows, in order to keep out the ferocious sun. The effect, once you were inside the house, was something like sitting in a giant wicker sewing basket-which was fitting in this culture of gifted weavers. The women brought me a tiny stool to sit on and a glass of water. The house was almost empty of furniture, but in the living room were displayed the family’s most valuable objects, lined up in a row in order of importance: a brand-?new loom, a brand-?new motorcycle, and a brand-?new television.
Keo’s friend was named Joy, and her mother was Ting-an attractive, roundish woman in her forties. While the daughter sat in silence, hemming a silk textile, her mother bubbled over with enthusiasm, so I directed all my questions at Mom. I asked Ting about the traditions of marriage in her particular village and she said that it was all fairly simple. If a boy likes a girl, and the girl likes the boy in return, then the parents will meet and talk over a plan. If all goes well, both families will soon find themselves visiting a special monk, who will consult the Buddhist calendar to find an auspicious date for the couple to marry. Then the young people will marry, with everyone in the community lending money. And those marriages last forever, Ting was eager to explain, because there is no such thing as divorce in the village of Ban Phanom.
Now I had heard remarks like this before in my travels. And I always take it with a grain of salt, because nowhere in the world is there “no such thing as divorce.” If you dig a bit, you will always find a story buried somewhere about a marriage that failed. Everywhere. Trust me. It all reminds me of that moment in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth when a gossipy old society lady observes: “There is a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.” (And the “case of appendicitis,” by the way, was polite old Edwardian code for “abortion”-and that happens everywhere, too, and sometimes in the most surprising circles.)
But yes, there are societies where divorce is extremely rare.
And so it was in Ting’s clan. When pressed, she owned up that one of her childhood friends did have to move to the capital because her husband had abandoned her, but that was the only divorce she could think of in the last five years. Anyway, she said, there are systems in place to help keep families bonded together. As you can imagine, in a tiny impoverished village like this, where lives are so critically (and financially) interdependent, urgent steps must be taken to keep families whole. When problems arise in a marriage, as Ting explained, the community has a four-?tiered approach to finding solutions. First of all, the wife in the troubled marriage is encouraged to keep peace by bending to her husband’s will as much as possible. “A marriage is best when there is only one captain,” she said. “It is easiest if the husband is the captain.”
I nodded politely at this, deciding it was better to just let the conversation slide as quickly as possible on to Stage Number Two.
But sometimes, Ting explained, not even absolute submission can solve all domestic conflicts, and then you must outsource the problem. The second level of intervention, then, is to bring in the parents of both the husband and the wife to see if they can fix the domestic problems. The parents will have a conference with the couple, and with each other, and everyone will try as a family to work things out.
If parental supervision is unsuccessful, the couple moves on to the third stage of intervention. Now they must go before the village organization of elders-the same people who married them in the first place. The elders will take up the problem in a public council meeting. Domestic failures, then, become civic agenda items, like dealing with graffiti or school taxes, and everyone must pull together to solve the issue. Neighbors will toss out ideas and solutions, or even offer relief-such as taking in young children for a week or two while the couple works out their troubles without distractions.
Only at Stage Four-if all else fails-is there an admission of hopelessness. If the family can’t fix the dispute and if the community can’t fix the dispute (which is rare), then and only then will the couple go off to the big city, outside the realm of the village, to secure a legal divorce.
Listening to Ting explain all this, I found myself thinking all over again about my own failed first marriage. I wondered whether my ex-?husband and I might have saved our relationship if only we’d interrupted our free fall sooner, before things turned so completely toxic. What if we had called in an emergency council of friends, families, and neighbors to give us a hand? Maybe a timely intervention could have righted us, dusted us off, and guided us back together. We did attend six months of counseling together at the very end of our marriage, but-as I’ve heard so many therapists lament about their patients-we sought outside help too late, and put in too little effort. Visiting someone’s office for one hour a week was not enough of a fix for the massive impasse we had already reached in our nuptial journey. By the time we took our ailing marriage to the good doctor, she could do little beyond offering up a postmortem pathology report. But maybe if we’d acted sooner, or with more trust…? Or maybe if we’d sought help from our family and community…?
On the other hand, maybe not.
There was a lot wrong with that marriage. I’m not sure we could have endured together even if we’d had the entire village of Manhattan working on our collective behalf. Besides, we had no cultural template for anything like family or community intervention. We were modern, independent Americans who lived hundreds of miles away from our families. It would have been the most foreign and artificial idea in the world for us to have summoned our relatives and neighbors together for a tribal council meeting on matters that we had deliberately kept private for years. We might as well have sacrificed a chicken in the name of matrimonial harmony and hoped that that would fix things.
Anyhow, there’s a limit to how far you can go with such musings. We must not allow ourselves to get trapped in eternal games of second-?guessing and regret about our failed marriages, although such anguished mental contortions are admittedly difficult to control. For this reason, I’m convinced that the supreme patron of all divorced people must be the ancient Greek Titan Epimetheus, who was blessed-or, rather, cursed-with the gift of perfect hindsight. He was a nice enough fellow, that Epimetheus, but he could see things clearly only in reverse, which isn’t a very useful real-?world skill. (Interestingly, by the way, Epimetheus was a married man himself, although with his perfect hindsight he probably wished he’d chosen another girl: His wife was a little spitfire named Pandora. Fun couple.) In any case, at some point in our lives we must stop beating ourselves up over bygone blunders-even blunders that seem so painfully obvious to us in retrospect-and we must move on with our lives. Or as Felipe once said, in his inimitable manner, “Let us not dwell on the mistakes of the past, darling. Let us concentrate instead on the mistakes of the future.”
In that vein, it did cross my mind that day in Laos that maybe Ting and her community were on to something here about marriage. Not the business about the husband being the captain, of course, but the thought that perhaps there are times when a community, in order to maintain its cohesion, must share not only money and not only resources, but also a sense of collective accountability. Maybe all our marriages must be linked to each other somehow, woven on a larger social loom, in order to endure. Which is why I made a little note to myself that day in Laos: Don’t privatize your marriage to Felipe so much that it becomes deoxygenated, isolated, solitary, vulnerable…
I was tempted to ask my new friend Ting if she had ever intervened in a neighbor’s marriage, as a sort of village elder. But before I could get to my next question, she interrupted me to ask whether perhaps I could find a good husband in America for her daughter, Joy? The one with the university education? Then Ting showed off one
