Bali just ain't for blond divorcees

I love Elizabeth Gilbert as much as the next girl. I even envy her and think she is brilliant. Not that I think she had an easy road by any stretch: a marriage she didn’t want to be in, divorce in New York, one of the at fault states and consequently most expensive places to get divorced in the country and a case of depression alongside both?

Yuck.

But I do envy her and think she is brilliant. If only because in my experience, cases of depression, broken relationships that result in broken hearts are at some point inevitable.

Yet when I left my broken relationship with my broken heart, my depression already medicated because it was by that time an old and chronic companion, it didn’t occur to me to take a year off and go to Italy, India, or Indonesia.

I instead took what could have been travel money, and got a dog with as many heart and psychological issues as I had, bought a house and went back to graduate school. In the end, I can’t begrudge Gilbert too much, as I too found yoga, met and married the love of my life, and along the way weaned myself off of my security blanket of antidepressants, so that now I can live happily ever in Bali without having to resort to Gilbert’s medicine man.

I do admittedly envy Gilbert’s 3 months of doing nothing but eating in Italy, and it seems her year of travel has earned her considerably far more money than my stint in graduate school has earned me. But other than than, my only contention with Gilbert is what I imagine is a repercussion of her book, Eat, Pray, Love she herself could not foresee: the droves of divorcees who flocked to Bali to heal their hearts and find their Felipes. I don’t know why, but it seems that most of them, like Gilbert, are white and blond. From the sales of her book, I know it resonated with women of all hair and skin colors, but for some reason, the blond ones who come to Bali (The brunettes maybe went to Italy?).

I see them all over Bali. I have even met some of Gilbert’s precursors. It turns out that blond women have been coming to Bali to heal their hearts and find love and success long before Gilbert. The ones I have met have beautiful accents and look like a cross between Meryl Streep and Glenda the Good Witch. They tend to be older, even nearing sixty, have a contented glow and a sense of satisfaction.

I can’t say all of Gilbert’s followers fit this description; it does seem a fair amount look hungry, needy, even desperate. Some look like they just want a different life, but they don’t know how to get it. My husband and I see them in restaurants, and I admit, we act less enlightened than we are and quietly make fun of them. When they leave, they generally look like they have been stood up, and we kind of feel ashamed of ourselves.

Yet, what most of what we encounter in Bali are actually families. We’ve met a lot of families who are traveling for a year, either because one parent is on sabbatical, or they are, like us, taking a break from the run of the mill, and maybe even looking for a new place to live and create a home. We’ve met several families who started out like us, traveling, and have settled in Bali.

We talk with these other parents about the perks of Bali, that you can have a good quality of life for not much money. We talk about how much we don’t miss doing the laundry or cleaning our own houses or the good quality affordable playgroups for our children. While it can be a stretch to afford buying a house in our country of origin, you can build a house in Bali for $30,000. Add an extra ten if you want a pool.With all the good reasons to stay in Bali, I'm not sure why Gilbert still doesn't live here.

We also like Bali not just for the view of rice paddies or that the wait staff in any restaurant will play with our baby while we eat or that while the Green School isn’t perfect, it is of a far higher quality than the alternatives stateside. We like Bali because in addition to the cheaper cost for a higher quality of living, we enjoy the values of the Expat community. Generally speaking, they are forward thinking people, willing to try new models for education, energy use, and businesses. They are wanting to live lives that they haven’t had role models for.

Then I realize that those blond divorcees aren’t just looking for their Felipes. They are like us, and looking for a new beginning and a life we not only love, but that lines up with our values and that we can live authentically. We may stay and build a house in Bali, we may not, but we'll certainly be in good company as we figure it out.