How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  I also realized marriage means lifting up the other person when they can’t do it themselves. How many times had Nick already done that for me? Too many to even count. He innately understood this about our commitment. It took climbing a very tall mountain thousands of miles away from home for me to grasp it. There would be days when I was stronger than Nick, when I needed to be the one to carry him.

  “Thanks for taking care of me, Squeak,” Nick said as we turned around and began our descent, his symptoms abating as soon as we went down another thousand feet.

  I was quiet for a beat. “That’s my job.”

  That night the nightmares would stop for good. My legs had proven they were strong, carrying me up over fifteen thousand feet. I was able to breathe, even in a place where the air is thin and cold and deprived of oxygen—a place where human beings shouldn’t be able to breathe.

  We didn’t die on the mountain.

  Before we left Africa I did pet a baby elephant at the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage. His name was Mwashoti and he held my hand with his trunk.

  We’d been together.

  We were happy.

  “This is going to be like Brigadoon meets Thelma and Louise,” I said to Glynnis as she maneuvered our small black rental car onto the wrong side of the road away from the Edinburgh airport.

  “But without the murder or getting lost in a mythical village,” she said.

  “But with the red lipstick.”

  With my first wedding anniversary a couple weeks away, I’d flown across the country and over the Atlantic Ocean to the Scottish Highlands, an assignment for Alaska Airlines that became a weeklong trip with Glynnis. She flew in from Paris, where she was finishing her own book, to meet me for the week.

  I can hear the wheels turning in your head. You’re not ending the book with Nick? Is everything OK?

  Everything is better than OK. But, after twelve months of being married and researching what marriage and partnership mean in the twenty-first century, I learned a few truths. Yes, I can tell you all about teamwork and communication and divvying up chores and duties and date nights and going to bed angry, or not angry, but one of the most important things I learned was to maintain my own life outside my marriage. I needed to make sure I still felt like me.

  And so Scotland. With Glynnis.

  “Life doesn’t get much better than driving through the Scottish countryside while eating Cadbury chocolate,” Glynnis said, reaching into a plastic bag filled with Twirls, Flakes, Crunchies, and Dairy Milks that we’d picked up at the local Tesco.

  “I can’t believe Cadbury hasn’t asked us to make a commercial yet,” I added.

  “It’s a real oversight on their part.”

  Glynnis was the one who drove me into my first year of marriage, literally thousands of miles across the country in a tiny yellow car that smelled like potato chips and giant dog and metaphorically by being the officiant at our wedding. Now she’d be the one to drive me, in a tiny black car with a stick shift, on the wrong side of the road, out of the first twelve months. That meant a lot to me. Getting married doesn’t mean you leave the support systems that existed before the marriage behind you, or that they become less necessary. We create families for ourselves well before we get married, intricate webs of relationships that aren’t recognized by law, but are no less important, valuable, and meaningful. Maintaining those is a crucial part of making any relationship work. Your spouse can’t be your everything. Amazing friends can still feed your heart and soul in a different way, a way that ultimately supports the health of your partnership.

  In researching the history of male-female relationships I also learned that it is much too easy for today’s modern, independent ladies to forget that a married woman’s freedom to travel without her spouse is a relatively new phenomenon. For most of human history a woman rarely traveled outside the boundaries of her hometown unless accompanied by her husband or her father. I planned to make the most of this privilege.

  It isn’t just a privilege in the sense that getting to see the world on your own or with your girlfriends is a wonderful treat, it’s that the time away puts your relationship with your spouse in perspective. The moment I landed in Scotland, I realized two things. The first was that I’d missed traveling on my own, where I was forced to take care of myself. When Nick is around to handle things, it’s easy to complain, to be a pain in the ass. It’s easier than I ever expected to enjoy being taken care of. Nick has grown so good at noticing when I am cold or hungry or about to be crabby that sometimes I forget to anticipate my own needs. It’s a pretty big difference from the girl who wouldn’t let her husband help her off the devils’ chairlift in Chile. It was nice to be that girl again. But the more important thing I realized was that I missed Nick like crazy and I began to appreciate all those small things he does for me without my ever having to ask for them.

  When you wake up next to someone every day, pick their hair out of the drain, clean up their dirty dishes, socks, and underwear, listen to them bitch about their job and tell the same stories and jokes over and over again, it’s nice to be reminded of what it’s like when they’re not around—and to realize things are better when they are.

  I often think about what Bobby Klein said to Nick and me in the Mexican jungle: “People come to me right after they get married and they say, ‘Now we’re one.’ That’s bullshit. And it’s a problem. You’re not one. Becoming one is impossible.” The intensity and newness of marriage compelled Nick and me to be together as much as we possibly could during year one. But as I learned from Chana in Israel, moving apart is also an excellent way to come back together stronger and happier.

  “So has it sunk in yet? Being married?” Glynnis teased me as we drove through rolling green hills dotted with fluffy clouds of sheep.She had asked me this a year earlier when nothing had sunk in, when I was terrified about failing as a partner and giving up my independence in favor of an entirely new and uncertain future. And she already knew the answer. Hardly a week went by when we didn’t text each other from halfway around the world about big things and little things—sick parents, failed pregnancy tests, work drama, a bad haircut, a creepy Uber driver, and weird doctors’ visits.

  “I don’t know if it ever really sinks in,” I said, stretching my legs out over the dashboard, my toes making smudges on the windshield.

  “It’s one year later, we’re in a different country, you’re married, and I’m driving you on the wrong side of the road. There’s got to be a metaphor for marriage in that,” Glynnis said, nipping at her Twirl bar.

  I just shook my head. “I’m so done with metaphors for marriage.”

  There were 365 days in the first year of our marriage, our wet-cement year, and I still remember each and every one. Not just the long, lazy ones in Paris or the panicked ones faxing mortgage documents or being carried through a mud pit in Maine, but the “boring” ones where we sat on the orange couch and read different sections of the newspaper, or stood side by side in the kitchen chopping vegetables. These memories would fade soon and be replaced by new ones, milestones and ordinary moments alike, but for now I held these close rather than think about what lay ahead.

  I started this book believing that somewhere someone has figured out the secret to the perfect marriage. Now I know everyone, no matter how good their relationship, struggles to make it work.

  If you visited my Instagram in my first year of our marriage, you’d see a cute couple with a ridiculously good-looking dog traveling to exotic locations together, climbing mountains, strolling along Dutch canals, eating too much delicious food. You’d have no idea that I lost my job, that I had a shitty medical diagnosis, that the doctors told me my dad was close to dying three times, or that my mother had a nervous breakdown. You wouldn’t know about all the times I fought with my husband or drank too much wine and cried myself to sleep, confused about whether I’d made any of the right decisions in my life. I hope this book showed some of that. Because that’s what’s real. That
’s what the first year of marriage is really like.

  There were times during our first year of marriage when I wondered if Nick and I would still be together if we hadn’t actually gotten married. In a single day I could wake up in the morning thinking, I’m the luckiest girl alive for finding this wonderful, handsome man, and by noon, with little to no provocation, wonder, How I can possibly be with this person for the rest of my life? But by bedtime it would all change again. And then there were weeks when I didn’t think about my marriage at all, where it was all routine and simple like the flat bits on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  Glynnis and I planned to camp in a run-down little cabin in the Cairngorm mountains, the highest mountains in the UK (which isn’t saying a lot), a tundralike wilderness filled with dense groves of ancient Caledonian pines reminiscent of fairytale forests. Nick is the camper in our family, but I did OK preparing for Glynnis and my overnight survival by packing ample provisions of chocolate and Scotch whiskey. It took a few hours of driving to make it to Aviemore, the sleepy village from where we’d set out on a three-mile hike up the mountain where we’d sleep for the evening.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Glyn asked me.

  “I think so,” I said with false certainty once we began walking. “I studied the maps. It should be a straight shot. There will be a lake, a curve in the road, and then we should be there.”

  We walked in silence for a beat, letting our bodies adjust to the rhythm of the hike.

  “So what have you learned?” Glynnis asked as we huffed our way up the slope. “Are you a marriage guru now?”

  I laughed. “Not even a little bit.”

  I could tell her, and you, that Nick and I immediately took to heart and implemented all the advice in the book, but that would be a lie.

  It takes time for things to sink in, and old habits are hard to break. Every time I tell someone that I wrote a book about marriage, they ask me for the best thing I’ve learned. I don’t have a quick and easy answer to that question. The best advice has nothing to do with instant gratification or measurable results. Different advice is helpful at different times. There are some things, like the Five Minutes exercise, that we practice almost every week, and others, like building a strong community around us, that will take time. I have made three new friends in San Francisco, ones who call me back and actually meet me when we make plans. The hardest advice to integrate into our lives has been figuring out a positive work/life balance and articulating our feelings about money, how much we need, how much we can spend, and what both of us are willing to sacrifice to meet our shared goals. It’s an ongoing conversation.

  In her 2005 book Marriage, a History, the researcher and author Stephanie Coontz wrote that “Leo Tolstoy once remarked that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But the more I study the history of marriage, the more I think the opposite is true. Most unhappy marriages in history share common patterns, leaving their tear-stained—and sometimes bloodstained—records across the ages. But each happy, successful marriage seems to be happy in its own way.”

  That’s true. There are no right or wrong answers. Nick and I are happy in our own way. Our society has a narrow definition of a “successful” marriage. My parents stayed married and slept in the same bed for forty years, but they couldn’t stand each other. Still, in many people’s eyes, their marriage is a success because they stuck it out. I also talked about this with Katherine Woodward Thomas, the author of Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After. Her phrase “conscious uncoupling” made headlines when the actress Gwyneth Paltrow used it to speak about her split from husband Chris Martin. Woodward Thomas agreed with me that our paradigm for assessing marital success is ridiculously skewed. “We go to this automatic assumption that a relationship has failed if it ends before one or both people die. We’re judging the relationship according to how long it lasts rather than by the quality of the connection. Yet, the reality of our time is that most people will not meet and mate with one person for life. ‘Happily ever after’ is an antiquated model from four hundred years ago, when the life span was under forty years of age. Rather than judge the value of a union according to how long it lasts, we may want to begin looking for the growth that happened for both people in that relationship, and the amazing things that union created, no matter how long they were together.” That advice was a good lesson for me to resist passing judgment on anyone’s marriage or divorce and to stop automatically thinking about the end of any marriage as a failure. Just staying married isn’t my goal for Nick and me. The goals are constantly moving and shifting, but they include things like being fulfilled, growing together, and making a positive impact in our little corner of the world. Just sticking it out, that’s not enough for us. I keep going back to Erica Jong’s challenge that we create a new kind of marriage. It is up to us to figure out what the modern marriage looks like. It’s scary, but it’s also exciting and inspiring.

  Even though I’m loath to single out any advice as the key to how to be married, there are insights that have stuck with us, words that ring with wisdom when times get tough, and they’re worth mentioning again.

  Don’t let your job dictate your marriage.

  Nick and I don’t know where we’ll be living five years from now. We could be in our cozy (so hygge) apartment in San Francisco, we could go back to Philadelphia or Milwaukee to take care of our parents, or we could give it all up to live in Madagascar. The one thing we know is that we don’t want our jobs to make that decision for our family. We don’t want work to decide where we live or how often we get to see each other. We want to make those choices. This is what a work/life balance means to us.

  Go easy on yourselves.

  We both learned a lot about taking care of ourselves in the midst of taking care of our marriage. Every day won’t be perfect or easy, or even good, and that has to be okay. We talk about the imperfections and the hurts. We don’t beat ourselves up, because we’re in this for the long run. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. Although some days do feel like an obstacle course where you carry your spouse up a mountain and through a pit of mud.

  Obsessing over whether you have a good marriage, whether you’re doing everything right, is a great way to set yourself up for failure.

  There are no steps.

  This advice from the Megs is something we tell ourselves often. Don’t make the next move (buying a house, having a baby, having another baby, buying a second house) because it feels like the next step. There are no steps. Just enjoy each other. Let the marriage unfold the way it’s supposed to rather than looking for the next big step.

  It’s okay to go to bed angry.

  Everything looks better and less scary after a good night’s sleep. It’s okay to not like each other once in a while, even when that once in a while is after midnight.

  Don’t pee with the door open.

  There’s something to the French notion about maintaining a little bit of mystery in your marriage, just a little. Our small bathroom dictates that sometimes I do still pee with the door open, but I try to maintain mystery in other ways. Sometime in the middle of our first year I stopped texting Nick a play-by-play of my entire day. It’s nice to leave a little something new to talk about at the end of the day.

  Lose your expectations.

  If twelve months of traveling taught us anything, it was that it’s a waste of time to be disappointed when things don’t work out exactly the way you expected. Smaller indignities like canceled flights, food poisoning, and altitude sickness teach you the value of being flexible in both life and your relationship, helping prepare you for the big stuff. Both of us can honestly say that learning to travel well together, which included compromising on the road, letting the other person lead, and knowing when to take charge, helped us get through some of the very difficult things we’ve faced.

  Getting married doesn’t turn you into a grown-up.

  In fact, some of the most childish peop
le I’ve ever met have been married for longer than I’ve been alive. Being married doesn’t turn you into anything new except for a married person. We’re still a mess in a lot of ways. We fight and go to bed angry. Our spare bedroom is filled with crap—a vortex of unfolded laundry, a guitar Nick will never play, still-packed boxes, and an eerily accurate watercolor portrait of Lady Piazza someone gave us as a wedding gift. One day a baby will live in there. But not just yet.

  You’re in the driver’s seat.

  The people you love and whose opinions you value may still not want the same kind of marriage as you. You’re in charge of your happily ever after. You and your partner are in control of making the marriage you want. The institution of marriage carries a lot of baggage, but it doesn’t mean that you have to keep it.

  Modern marriage in America is about choice. We’ve broken free of antiquated traditions and been given the freedom to craft our own kind of partnership.

  Nick and I gathered different ingredients from around the world. We stirred them together to create our perfect marriage cocktail, to design a life well-lived by how we love. Sheryl Sandberg told women how important it was to marry well. How well you are married is up to you.

  Say thanks.