by Jo Piazza
“You’re a good girl. We’ll like it in San Francisco,” I whispered to the dog. I looked over at Glynnis. “I’m moving across the country,” I said, in shock.
“Yeah, you are,” she answered as she fiddled with the radio and used her other hand to expertly apply a second coat of lipstick.
“And I’m getting married,” I added, staring at the traffic of New York City one last time.
Glynnis landed on a Taylor Swift song and turned to look at me. The sun caught her wild curls, illuminating them into a halo of flames. “Babe, is this just sinking in for you?” It was.
Now that I had my movie-perfect happy ending, I projected the face of a happy and confident bride-to-be, but on the inside I was terrified. I was terrified I’d lose my identity and my independence by joining my life to another person. I was terrified I would fail—that Nick and I wouldn’t work and I would lose him. This made it all the more important not to lose myself in the process. The media tells us over and over again that half of all marriages in America end in failure. No matter how special and unique I believed my bond with Nick to be, I knew the road ahead was going to be difficult to navigate.
My worries hit me in waves as Glynnis and I lazily drove across the country. Starting in Wyoming, at a dude ranch called Paradise, I began to have nightmares. In those dreams, Nick was gone. Just gone. I knew I had been in love. I knew I had been with someone special. But it didn’t last, didn’t stick, and I didn’t know why. Then there was the opposite dream. Nick was still there, we were married, and we were miserable. We’d morphed into my parents—needy, codependent, and violently dysfunctional.
My parents have had a long but miserable marriage, the kind where they fought and screamed and threatened to leave each other every day during my formative years but didn’t, out of a sense of obligation to me and a misguided notion that staying in an unhappy marriage equalled success and divorce equalled failure. Women used to be able to model how to behave in their marriage on their mothers, but that just isn’t the case for many of us. I couldn’t do that.
For most of human history there have been real economic and societal imperatives for a woman to find a husband. Marriage was both destiny and social imperative for my grandmother Carolyn, who met her husband Merwin as a fourteen-year-old farm girl in Rockford, Illinois, desperate for a better life. When he got a football scholarship to the University of Colorado she told him to put a ring on it and get her the hell out of there. She was barely sixteen. When he graduated she became a Mad Men–era housewife. Around the time Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, Carolyn was the dissatisfied woman who “made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies,” and was “afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’ ” Three decades later, once my grandfather passed away, she traded in her Marilyn Monroe bottle-blond hair for a chic brown bob, began collecting abstract art, and never married again.
My own mother, who came of age during the second wave of feminism, told me she went to college with the intention of marrying a doctor or a lawyer. She wanted her “MRS.” She met my law-student father on her first night of college and married him when she was twenty-one years old. For her and many of her peers in 1976 this was not unusual.
I was the first woman in my family who didn’t feel like she had to get married.
I talked about this evolution of marriage with the academic and author Stephanie Coontz, who wrote the book on modern marriage, literally, in Marriage, a History.
“Marriage is no longer about making alliances to further your parents’ interest or about linking a dependent female to a dominant male. Now both women and men can say they want to marry someone with similar ideals, talents, aspirations, and qualities. We want equals,” Coontz told me. Of course, that comes with its own downsides.
“It creates new tensions when each person in a marriage has the ability to just walk away,” Coontz added.
I could walk away from my marriage at any time. I could support myself, protect myself, feed myself, buy my own property, and even make a baby alone with the help of a very expensive doctor and a turkey baster.
I also asked Erica Jong, the inimitable feminist writer of Fear of Flying, why she still believed in marriage in a world where women no longer need to be married. Erica’s been married four times, the last time for twenty-seven years and they’re still going strong. Three failed marriages didn’t scare her away from tying the knot a fourth time.
“It’s both essential and nice to have one best friend in a hostile world,” she told me.
When I told Erica I was working on a book about marriage, I didn’t know what she’d say, and I was a little surprised that she was all for it. “Good! It’s up to us to create a new form of marriage, a new way of being married, one where both partners feel fulfilled, one where nobody’s work is more important than the other’s, one where you are both caretakers. The template doesn’t exist yet.”
In the months leading up to my own wedding, my job as a travel editor had me constantly on the move, regularly waking up in a strange new hotel and opening the curtains to remember where I was. I found myself asking all strangers with wedding rings what makes a successful marriage. Not for any assignment, but for me. I asked Jamaican hairdressers, Malaysian street food vendors, Maldivian scuba guides, and even the conservative Muslim Qatari who took me on a 4x4 off-road adventure near the border with Saudi Arabia.
“Marriage is very, very hard,” my guide grumbled as he steered our Land Rover into a giant mountain of sand at speeds that seemed above one hundred miles an hour. He was wearing a white thobe, a loose robe that reminded me how much I missed wearing caftans, and a red-checked ghutrah around his head. His enthusiastic mustache reminded me of an early Tom Selleck.
“I have just one woman; I do not want another wife. I love my wife and more wives means more headaches. I don’t need another headache. I have advice for your husband! I make myself listen to my wife even when my mind is somewhere else. Tell him that.”
He paused for a moment and raised his binoculars to what he told me was a security checkpoint on the border with Saudi Arabia.
“Those guys are always messing with us,” he spat about the Saudis, adding over the blaring Emirati pop rock on the radio, “Seriously. You tell your husband to listen to you. Your marriage will fail otherwise. You want to drive over there and freak those guys out?”
“No, thank you.” I replied with all the diplomacy I could muster. “Let’s leave the Saudis alone.”
I called Nick that night and mentioned, casually, that he should listen to me more. “My Qatari dune-bashing guide suggested I tell you that when we drove down to the border of Saudi Arabia.”
Nick grew quiet. “I always listen to you. Get back safe. Okay? Don’t go to Saudi Arabia.”
With few exceptions, the answers I got about how to be married were strikingly similar. I made lists of them on napkins and the backs of boarding passes.
Never stop talking
Talk about things that make you feel uncomfortable and itchy and happy and sad and strange
Talk in person, on the phone, over text, via emoji; just keep talking
Shut the door when you pee
You do you
Complaining is contagious; don’t start the complaining or you’ll never stop
Buy sexy new underwear once a month
Walk naked around the house, but don’t lie around in sweatpants…ever.
A prostitute in Amsterdam told me that a wife needs to be strong and must “remain the captain of her own ship.”
Plenty of men and women admitted to struggling in their own marriages. Still others had irritatingly perfect unions filled with happiness, date nights, and unicorns.
As my ramblings grew to ten pages and then twenty, I realized I was sitting on a treasure trove of wisdom from around the world. I had no idea how to be married, but wha
t if, like Lin Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton, I could write my way out of my conundrum.
Marriage experts call the first year of marriage “the wet cement year,” because it’s the time when both members of a couple are figuring out how to exist as partners without getting stuck in the murk, without being trapped by bad habits. It’s a time to set and test boundaries and create good habits that will continue for the rest of your marriage.
“In that first year of marriage we create the momentum for the rest of the marriage. We decide whether we’ll be a team or whether we’ll take the other one for granted. That year sets the stage for how we deal with everything life throws at us during a marriage, and a lot of it isn’t pretty,” Dr. Peter Pearson, a marriage therapist and the founder of the Couples Institute, told me when I explained my mad cap experiment.
What if Nick and I could spend our wet cement year searching the globe for insight into marriage, love, and partnership and trying to implement it in our own marriage?
Growing pains grow faster on the road and hard conversations can’t be avoided. Research suggests that couples who travel together end up more satisfied with their partnership. It leads to better sex, pushes your buttons, and takes you out of your comfort zone. There’s this TED talk by the psychotherapist and relationship guru Esther Perel about sustaining desire and passion in a long-term relationship. I must have listened to it a dozen times while I researched this book, particularly the part where she explains that both men and women have a strong need “for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise, for journey, for travel.” Nick and I could spend the first twelve months of our marriage binge-watching Netflix, or we could take a journey into the unknown, getting into and out of uncomfortable situations together while we figured out how to be married.
In the months leading up to our wedding, as we pored over venues and catering details, we spent as many nights looking at maps and airline routes. There were so many interesting models for marriage—polygamy in Kenya, arranged marriage in India, open marriage in France. And there were so many questions to be answered. Why were marriages on the decline in northern Europe? Did French marriages succeed because everyone was having an affair? I found a couples’ therapist running a practice in the middle of the Mexican jungle who was said to be able to save any marriage worth saving. We needed to meet that guy!
I lined up reporting trips, and even our honeymoon, to take us to cultures that would have interesting things to say about marriage and commitment. Nick runs his own Web site, so he was often able to come with me and work from the road. My husband is also a hoarder of frequent-flier miles, which subsidized what should have been a cost-prohibitive endeavor.
In researching this book I’ve interviewed hundreds of men and women around the world—ordinary people as well as experts—to find out what makes a modern, and sometimes not so modern, marriage work. Many of the things I learned were surprising. The truth is that marriage is evolving everywhere and most people our age, from cosmopolitan Paris to rural India, are also trying to figure out how to be a husband or a wife in wildly changing times.
I didn’t find the answer, but I did get plenty of remedies, suggestions, and advice. There were some key things I heard over and over again: patience, good communication, a healthy sex life, teamwork, having a strong community of peers, gratitude, equality, having similar views on raising kids, being on the same page about personal finance, keeping a sense of adventure, compromise. I slowly began to form a portrait of what it meant to be a good partner.
This book also traces our own wet cement year from start to finish—the wonderful, the bad, the strange, and the sometimes surprising. As I share stories of my travels, both alone and with my new husband, I’m also telling the story of how I dug into my heart, my guts, and my fears to figure out how to make this marriage thing work.
I should tell you the most important thing I’ve learned, even if it means you aren’t going to keep reading past this introduction. The most important thing I’ve discovered is that a good marriage isn’t about shit always going right. It’s about the times when shit goes wrong, very wrong, and two people coming out the other side and saying, “Okay. We’re still in this together. I still want you to be here when I wake up in the morning.” I didn’t expect our first year of marriage to be filled with loss, death, drama, and illness. I thought the hardest thing we’d have to face would be deciding what color to paint the living room and whether the dog could sleep in the bed.
But life happened.
What I’ve learned along the way is figuring out how to be married is an actual journey, a different one for everyone. What matters is being willing to take that journey together.
As we were lying in bed the night after I talked to Violet about the muscular dystrophy, after I’d told my still-new husband to divorce me, Nick kissed my shoulder and nudged the back of my calf with his big toe until I rolled to look at him. I wasn’t asleep, just staring at the numbers on the alarm clock as they ticked closer to dawn.
“I need you to know this changes nothing between the two of us. Our marriage is exactly the same as it was yesterday. If I have to push you around in a wheelchair, we’ll get you a lovely wheelchair with cup holders and room for a cheese plate.”
For the first time since we’d been married, I understood how it felt to face obstacles and adversity with another human by my side, how it felt to share both the good things and the bad things life throws at you. It was nice to have a friend in this hostile world.
We’d figure this out. Together. That’s what this story is really about.
A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.
—ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING
When I was single I wondered what made being married so different from dating, so much harder. Was it the fact that it was more difficult to walk away from a marriage? That it was legally binding? That the commitment was more intense? That the stakes were higher? Was it the fact that you now had to take another person into consideration all of the time? To constantly worry about their needs, their wants, and their feelings?
Plenty of people gave me unsolicited advice about getting married, including my gynecologist, Amy.
“It’s a lot of work,” she said, her arm wrist deep in my pelvis and her voice slightly muffled by my vagina. “But no one tells you what kind of work you have to do. That’s not fair. Sometimes I think it would be easier to be alone.”
“Really? That’s a big bomb to drop on someone right before they walk down the aisle,” I said, scooching my butt closer to the end of the metal table. She was too distracted by her inspection of my cervix to answer.
Ben Affleck also told us marriage was hard. Remember that? It was right before he ran away with the nanny and got the kind of tattoo that appeals to teenage boys who work at gas stations.
The hard part for me was learning to live in tandem with another human being. For a long time I was the captain of my own ship—the boss. I’d spent fifteen years taking care of one person—me. I was good at it. I reveled in my solitude and independence. While the cliché tells us it’s the man in a relationship who “needs more space,” in my relationships, it was me. I delighted in stretching out alone in my queen-size bed. I loved taking myself out for Chinese food and a matinee. I even preferred dancing alone. I was always the girl on wedding dance floors fist pumping and doing the lawn mower solo while couples bobbed and weaved their heads and hips in tandem.
Well before I’d met Nick on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I’d gotten it in my head that dancing well as a pair was an important asset for a successful long-term relationship. I’d just never found anyone I wanted to dance with. When I first moved to New York after college, my neighbors were a Chilean couple in their sixties who were approaching their fortieth wedding anniversary. The wife wore long gypsy skirts that rustled when she walked on four-inch heels down the hallway, always carryi
ng their feeble terrier in her arms like a baby. The husband was smaller and quieter with an interesting mustache. They leaned in close to each other whenever they spoke, their heads touching. They didn’t have kids. It was just the two of them and a sequence of ever-daintier dogs, but they were both kind and nurturing to me, a broke kid new in the city. They’d often have me over for drinks that turned into meals so large I wouldn’t need to eat for another twenty-four hours. This was welcome during a time in my life when I survived on appetizers passed at parties and drinks paid for by dates. When I broke up with my lousy college boyfriend and began lusting after someone equally unsuitable, I asked them the secret to their long marriage.
The woman threw her head back and laughed straight from her fleshy belly.
“We dance together every week,” she said. “We’ve been dancing for forty years. When we dance we become one. He sees me, and I see him. Everything I know about him, I learned while dancing.”
Many years later, I still had my ex-neighbors’ advice rattling around in my brain when I was given a reporting assignment in Chile at the end of August—four weeks before our wedding day—entitled “Skiing in SUMMER? Head South of the Border!” Besides the prospect of hitting the slopes, Chile was enticing as a launchpad for writing about marriage. The South American country has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world, mainly because in 2004 it was one of the last countries in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce. But more important, Chile was a country where Nick and I could learn to dance together.
Dancing successfully with a partner is all about patience and anticipating what the other person is going to do. It demands communication without speaking. These three skills are also cornerstones of a successful marriage. A bit of research also informed me that dancing has been proven to boost general happiness and improve emotional well-being. The novelist Vicki Baum once wrote, “There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them!” In a study conducted at the University of Derby in England, depressed patients were given salsa-dancing lessons. Their moods improved significantly after only nine weeks of hip swiveling. Researchers attributed the improvement to the endorphin boost from exercise and the increased self-confidence brought about by learning a new skill.