to give Tom back the expensive pearl necklace he bought and to call off the wedding. Jordan also recalls Daisy holding on to a letter, which was probably written byGatsby, and remembers seeing the letter fall to pieces after she forced Daisy to get into the tub to sober up. Once Daisy became sober, she ended up marrying Tom Buchanan the next day. While Fitzgerald never explicitly explains Daisy's decision to marry Tom, one can assume that Daisy married Tom simply because he is extremely wealthy. Daisy is portrayed as a materialistic, shallow individual, who prefers wealth over love, which is why she decides to stay with Tom rather than marry Gatsby toward the end of the novel. Daisy knows that she will remain a member of the upper class if she marries Tom and disregards the fact that she does not genuinely love him. Subsequently, Daisy and Tom have a terrible marriage, and each person carries on an affair.

It is in this chapter that Jordan relates to Nick the past of Daisy and Tom and Gatbsy, and how this love triangle apparently resolved itself with the marriage of Tom and Daisy. However, Jordan remembers on the eve of Daisy's marriage finding Daisy drunk and clutching a letter. It is then that she drunkenly slurs that the marriage is over. Although we are not told, we can assume that the letter was from Gatsby. However, once she had been sobered up, she carried on with the original plan and was married after all:

But she didn't say another word. We gate her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months' trip to the South Seas.

So, presumably, we can infer that having expressed her feelings and love for Gatsby with her drunkenness, she has managed to "get it out of her system," and is able to carry on with the original plan, which was of course to marry someone who was more her social equal than Gatsby.

In chapter eight, Nick visits Gatsby's home in the wake of Myrtle's death and advises him to skip town until things settle down. However, Gatsby refuses to leave until Daisy has made a decision whether or not to stay with her husband. Gatsby is such a hopeless romantic that he refuses to recognize that Daisy is not willing to leave her affluent, stable lifestyle with Tom. From the moment Daisy learned that Gatsby was a bootlegger, she made up her mind to stay with her husband. Nick and Gatsby proceed to have an intimate conversation, and Gatsby reveals the truth about his past.

Gatsby describes meeting Daisy in Louisville for the first time and elaborates on the way he seduced her under false pretenses before heading overseas to fight in WWI. Despite their brief, passionate romance, the distance between them continued to grow while Gatsby was away, and Daisy began entertaining other possible suitors. Nick goes on to offer the reader insight into why Daisy chose to marry Tom Buchanan instead of waiting for Jay Gatsby by writing,

And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.

According to Gatsby, Daisy felt pressure from her family and society to settle down with someone and desired to have her life shaped immediately. Given the fact that Daisy is a completely superficial, selfish woman, she made the shallow decision to marry an affluent, upper-class man, who would provide her with the financial security and status she desired. Shortly after meeting Tom Buchanan, Daisy married him with some reservations, which she was able to suppress until meeting Gatsby five years later.

In this chapter, Gatsby explains to Nick the history of his relationship with Daisy, describing how the two of them fell in love, to Gatsby’s own surprise, before the war, under the false pretense that Gatsby was a young man from a rich background and able to support Daisy. Daisy even seems to have slept with Gatsby on this basis, although, for Gatsby, this seems to have been, initially, more of a conquest——“he took her because he had no real right to take her hand.”

The intervention of the war and the long wait to be reunited, however, is too much for Daisy, who inhabits an “artificial” world at home far removed from Gatsby’s at the Front. She “wanted her life shaped now, immediately,” something in her “crying out for a decision.” Daisy becomes accustomed again to “moving with the season” and needs some force to tell her what to do; when Tom Buchanan appears, he represents that force.

In Chapter 8, Gatsby explains to Nick (who relays to the reader) the story of how he met and then lost Daisy.

According to Gatsby, he was penniless when he and Daisy fell for one another, but he acted as if he was rich like her and would be able to take care of her:

"...he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her."

So we assume that Daisy didn't stop waiting for him because of money, since she was led to believe he was rich.

While he was away at war, Gatsby stayed in touch with Daisy, but in her letters she seemed to be getting impatient waiting for him to come back: "—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come." This shows that Daisy loved Gatsby, but she was too impatient to wait an uncertain length of time for him to return and marry her. Gatsby was away at war and nobody knew when the war would end, or who would survive.

Daisy was immature and materialistic, living in a world of money, fashion, and flowers, which throughout the novel symbolize the short-lived beauty of love:

"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed."

The beads and chiffon symbolize wealth and parties, and the dying orchid symbolizes Daisy's dying love for Gatsby. Daisy was also impatient and decided not to wait any longer for Gatsby to return:

”She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand."

This means that Daisy made a conscious decision not to wait anymore for Gatsby, because she wanted her life to continue immediately. It might have been love or it might have been money that forced her to make the decision. That was when Tom Buchanan came along, and she married him.