“You could leave me. Divorce me. Seriously. You could.” I said to Nick, my husband of just four months. I slumped lower on the sofa and stared down at the blurry outline of a red wine stain on the orange cushion. “I mean it. You didn’t sign up for this. Find someone else. Find a healthy wife.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Nick stated with his trademark midwestern certainty, sitting beside me and placing one of his giant bear-paw hands on my lower back. His default is calm and cool, while mine leans toward hysterics and dramatic declarations. I narrowed my eyes, wanting to be mean and to be comforted at the same time. I slid away from him, adding physical space between us in case he took me up on my offer.
“I’m honest. I’m being honest. This isn’t what you signed up for!” Why was I saying this? Stop, I thought. Just stop. But I couldn’t. My eyes stung, my voice shook, and my heart slammed into my throat as I buried my face in the sofa we’d bought together. We’d decided it was cheerful and cozy, but also durable enough to withstand destruction from our big gross dog and, one day, our kids.
Hours earlier, following a routine checkup with my doctor, a genetics counselor named Violet, with a strangely chirpy upbeat tone, told me I had a good chance of developing the disease that was slowly killing my father—muscular dystrophy. For most of my life, my parents and doctors told me I couldn’t inherit his condition, but they were wrong. Violet went on to explain that this particular kind of muscular dystrophy could strike at any time in my late thirties (I was thirty-five). Once it starts, there’s no reversing its course. Your muscles, particularly in your legs, back, and face, stop working. Many people with the disease end up in a wheelchair and need assistance from a machine to breathe.
“It’s a fifty-fifty chance you have this disease.”
“Excuse me?”
“Fifty-fifty you have it. You’ll do a genetic test and we’ll need to check. Do you want to know or not? Some people don’t want to know. By the way, I meant to ask you, are you planning on having kids?” Violet said all of this in the casual tone someone might use to ask if you’re planning on watching the new season of The Bachelor.
My father showed symptoms before he turned forty and the progression of the disease was long, slow, and excruciating. By the time Violet delivered her news to me, my dad was confined to a hospital bed in the living room of my parents’ house, unable to walk, to stand, or breathe on his own.
For my mother, the lines between wife, caretaker, and servant became invisible, a fact that eroded their marriage as well as her own mental and physical health. My mother’s life, one of a dutiful but miserable caretaker, wasn’t something I wanted for Nick—not now, not ever. I was trying to be humane, or maybe I thought that by creating a different awful situation I could make the current awful situation go away.
That’s why I told my new husband—a man who loved riding bikes, hiking, skiing, climbing things, and doing anything with a strong set of two legs—to divorce me, I felt ruined, damaged, and powerless. I didn’t want to ruin his life.
But let me back up a little. I set out to write this book six months before I heard from Violet. That was a happier time. And I promise this book isn’t all doom and gloom and crying on couches. I was in the middle of planning my wedding and after months of receiving unsolicited advice about “the big day,” I realized I had no idea what happened when the wedding was over. I had no idea how to be married.
Sure, there are plenty of books about fixing a bad marriage, but mine wasn’t broken yet—it hadn’t even started. Besides, none of them spoke to me. With their pastel covers emblazoned with flowers, sunrises, and couples who had perfect hair, those books were talking to someone more mature, someone more refined, someone who already owned napkin rings and didn’t kill houseplants.
As my friend Jessica put it, “There are lots of books on how to be married, but they’re awful.” Speaking at a conference in 2011, the Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the crowd that the most important career choice a woman can make is to marry well. But there was no guidebook on how to be well married.
My other conundrum was that I loved my life. Before Nick. Adding him to it was wonderful, but I didn’t want being married to become the most important thing about me. I felt all tangled up inside when my engagement received more Facebook likes than that time I got a great job, or when I sold my first book, or made that excellent meme of Liz Lemon eating French fries with Leslie Knope. Everything else I’d ever done paled in comparison to the fact that I. Was. Getting. Married.
I’m not alone in finding my hard-won accomplishments outshone by a ring. During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the Chinese diver He Zi did something none of us could ever dream of doing when she won a silver medal. Her boyfriend proposed immediately afterward. The BBC article celebrating Zi read:
“Chinese diver He Zi had just received a silver medal for the women’s three-metre springboard at the Rio Olympics on Sunday. But she ended up with an even bigger prize when her boyfriend Qin Kai, in front of a global TV audience, went down on one knee.” Emphasis mine.
Just as a ring can overshadow a woman’s achievements, personality, and identity, marriage itself can be completely eclipsed by the “twelve hours that change everything.” No matter how progressive we think we’ve become in America, we’re still a society obsessed with weddings. The New York Times allots premium real estate to dozens of wedding announcements in its top-selling issue of the week. Millions of viewers tune in to the Bachelor franchises, reality shows that toy with the viewer’s fear of not finding “the one” before forcing two panicked and inebriated strangers into an engagement ceremony on top of a precariously windy seaside cliff. And even though it has long been hailed for breaking television’s glass ceiling by portraying strong, independent women, three of the four heroines on Sex and the City were brides before the show’s conclusion.
Nearly every romantic comedy ever made ends with the wedding and leaves out the most interesting part—the marriage.
As a culture, we’re less interested in the machinery of a marriage, the quotidian challenges, the joys, pitfalls, irritations, surprises, and intimacies. No one would click on the headline: “Beyoncé Annoyed Jay Finished Watching Game of Thrones Without Her” or “Kanye Wishes Kim Would Stop Texting at the Dinner Table” or “Justin HATES That Jen Forgets to Put the Cap Back on the Shampoo.” Although all of these things are definitely true.
If the wedding is the fairy-tale ending then what is the marriage? A sequel? What do we actually do after “I do”?
I have to be honest. My own marriage was the “fairy-tale ending” in the mad cap romantic comedy that had been my life for thirty-four years. I’d long been in the habit of selecting all the wrong men, gotten myself into hilarious misunderstandings, kissed all the frogs, and drunk all the pinot grigio with all the gay best friends. In my early thirties, I was the last woman standing among my girlfriends from college…the spinster, the one who would have cats and affairs with other people’s husbands. And then, when I least expected it, I found my prince on a sightseeing boat during a business trip to the Galápagos Islands.
Yeah. I know.
I was working as the managing editor for Yahoo!’s travel Web site. Nick also worked in journalism, the serious business kind that sent him to the Galápagos to write about the stability of Ecuador’s tourism plans. I was there to write about how to take wonderful selfies with baby sea lions. Nick quickly became my favorite person on the boat. We’d each brought our own tattered copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos to the Galápagos. When we went snorkeling, he grabbed my hand and showed me midget penguins swimming beneath the surface. He had none of the arrogant bullshit that oozed from the boys in New York City. And even though I’d shown up on this ecocruise with no makeup, no agenda, and not a single adorable outfit, he kissed me on our last night at sea. Either that kiss was going to be the start of something wonderful or I’d never see him again.
When we said good-bye at the airport in Ecuador he looked so sad, like a Labrador retriever who’d misplaced his favorite ball.
“I want to see you again,” he murmured as we exited the security line to fly to our homes on opposite sides of the country.
“Maybe I’ll see you on Tinder,” I joked to make the moment less awkward.
“Can I call you?”
“Don’t you even want to play a little hard to get?” Who was this guy.
He shrugged. “What’s the point?”
I thought about it for a second, carefully considering my reply. “In a couple of weeks, I’ll be in Palm Springs for a conference. I could come early. We could go to Joshua Tree. I’ve never been.”
“I’ll take you camping!” he exclaimed with glee, kissed me, and ran to catch his flight.
As soon as I got back on the Internet, I Google and Facebook stalked him to ensure that he wasn’t a serial killer.
Nick promised to meet me in the parking lot of LAX, but I surprised him at baggage claim instead. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about seeing this near stranger again. But when he turned around, grinned, and enveloped me in an enormous hug with a full kiss on the lips, I knew I was a goner. He’d brought along a tent, a grill, two sleeping bags, and a first aid kit that included a foil blanket in case I got hypothermia.
“I also have iodine pills in case we need to purify water,” he said matter-of-factly. “They taste like crap, but you won’t get sick.”
This was someone who was ready for anything. Nick Aster was clearly a man who could fix my broken garbage disposal with his bare hands, one who would know how to keep houseplants alive.
He was also handsome and clever and funny. When I asked him to help me with things, he said, “As you wish.” This was particularly attractive to a girl whose first sexual fantasy was about Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. But he wasn’t the kind of guy I usually dated. Nick is very, very outdoorsy. He had long hair, rode his bike everywhere, wore hiking sandals, and once, while backpacking in Colorado, was chased and almost killed by a mountain lion. I always dated guys who were indoorsy—bankery types who drank overpriced vodka and would rather have dated supermodels than me.
Soon after we met, I lamented to my shrink, Jen, that Nick wasn’t my type. She made a face like she’d swallowed a bad oyster.
“Your type isn’t working for you!” she shouted and rolled her eyes. She was right, of course, and I was smitten, and that was all there was to it. To misquote F. Scott Fitzgerald, we slipped briskly into an intimacy from which we never recovered.
We were engaged just three months after we met.
“I couldn’t wait to propose to you. The world makes sense to me with you in it,” Nick declared as he pulled out a slender gold band spiraled in very delicate (fair trade, conflict-free) diamonds.
“Gahhhhhhhhhhhh!” I yelled. “What? SERIOUSLY?” Then I remembered I was supposed to say yes.
By falling in love with Nick I learned all of the clichés are true. When you know, you know. When it’s right, it’s easy. Love happens when you least expect it. When I was single I thought the people who said those things were liars. I knew the truth. The truth was you dated someone for two to three years and then tricked them into marrying you. But I was the one who was wrong all along.
It took a while to sink in that I was actually getting married. It still hadn’t hit me in July, three months later, when I packed my yellow Fiat, no bigger than a golf cart, with all of the detritus of my single life. I was leaving New York, my home of thirteen years, the only place I’d ever lived as an adult, for San Francisco to live with Nick before our wedding. No matter how difficult life could be in New York, it was complicated and strange in a way that I understood and had grown used to, like Buddhism or New Yorker cartoons. Leaving terrified me.
Nick couldn’t get out of work for the week, so my friend Glynnis drove the 2,906 miles with me and my giant dog, Lady Piazza. Our journey would take seven ten-hour days. We’d be like Thelma and Louise without the sex with Brad Pitt, the murder, or the drive off the cliff, but with the red lipstick. There was something incredibly empowering about telling your almost-husband that you didn’t need him to drive with you across the country. I liked being able to say: I’ve got this.
I patted Lady Piazza on the head as I took a final look around my city and swiped at the sweat trickling down the back of my neck. I wouldn’t miss the smell of Manhattan during a hundred-degree day, that was for sure.
“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 what 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.