Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

We’d been married less than forty-eight hours when we landed at the Cancún airport—the only airport in the world, I have to note, that has a giant Corona bottle on the air traffic control tower. The start of our honeymoon should have been one of the happiest times of our life. Except absolutely everything was going wrong.

Wicked food poisoning hit me the second we landed in Mexico, the result of a late-night pizza binge in Philadelphia the night of our wedding. I’d hardly eaten a thing during our actual reception. How’s a bride supposed to eat, with all the dancing, picture taking, hugging, champagne drinking, and remembering the names of new Wisconsin relatives? I’d needed something in my stomach, no matter how questionable, before we went to sleep.

But only an hour off the plane in Mexico, my belly began to convulse in the rental car.

“Do you need me to pull over?” Nick looked over at me in alarm. I nodded weakly as he maneuvered our cheap Mexican vehicle onto the side of the highway so his new wife could retch undigested pizza, coffee, and airplane peanuts onto the road outside the car. Nick’s back pats were reassuring but timid. Meanwhile, I hung my head between my knees and moaned that I was almost certainly about to die.

“You’re gonna be okay, Squeaky. We’ll get there soon and I’ll take care of you,” Nick said. Like my old Irish grandmother, Nick has a menagerie of nonsensical nicknames for me—Squeaky, Lovebomb, Honeypie, Chauncey, Meerkat. I can count on one hand the number of times he’s called me Jo.

I moved my head in a vertical motion to signal agreement as I stared at footprints in the gravel that included toes. Who would walk here without shoes? Inches from my face a used condom sat atop a broken beer bottle. Heat rose from the cement and I doubled over again.

Long before people admitted to having premarital sex, one of the reasons newlyweds went away on a honeymoon was to get to know each other’s bodies. Now my body was betraying me, right in front of my brand-new husband, in the worst way possible. I’d assumed marriage would free me of my anxiety about trying to look and act perfect all the time, but I still felt terrible that Nick was seeing me with my hair matted in vomit.

We continued to the village of Tulum, a slice of Mexican paradise famous for bathwater-warm, crystalline water and sand as soft and white as confectioners’ sugar. Once the purview of yogis and hippies with just enough money to catch a flight to Cancún, Tulum’s beach shacks have been replaced by hipster hotels that serve $14 margaritas and $20 avocado toast. It had changed a lot, almost too much, from the first time I’d visited on a solo trip twelve years earlier. But it remained a special place for me and I wanted to share it with Nick. I’d finished my first book here on another visit, furiously scribbling pages in a tree-house hotel overlooking the ocean that had cost me just $25 a night. Ancient myths promise that the waters surrounding Tulum and the entire Yucatán Peninsula contain something magical for the soul, and it was still one of the most romantic places I’d ever been, even though in the past I’d always visited alone.

I didn’t know that in Tulum, September is the most off part of the off-season. When we arrived, the beach stank of decaying fish and the town’s sewer system hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. It literally smelled like shit.

I couldn’t imagine being able to have sex. No one could possibly have had sex in the shape I was in. I’d always thought you were supposed to do it like monkeys on your honeymoon, but the first night we spent in Mexico, Nick snored next to me while I sweated out my illness, fended off mosquitoes, and attacked a colony of sand fleas I believed were breeding in my right foot. A tight panic began to squat in my stomach like a recalcitrant troll.

The only thing that made me feel better was remembering our wedding. Like an addict in the throes of withdrawal, I obsessively checked my social media accounts for more of our wedding posts from friends with the meticulous fervor of a heroin fiend tapping for a vein.

Too agitated for sleep, I replayed the past week in my mind.

Nick met my dad in person for the first time just a few days before we were set to walk down the aisle. John Piazza took a long look at my fiancé and announced, “I’m going to give you the number of my barber.” Nick’s hair was shaggy, nearly clearing his shoulders. My dad had married my mother almost forty years earlier with hair much longer than Nick’s, which is why he got a kick out of teasing my almost-husband. He liked Nick.

Despite the fact that my dad’s condition now made it impossible for him to even stand up, much less walk on his own, he made it to our wedding and parked his wheelchair and oxygen tank in the front row throughout the ceremony. I walked down the aisle alone to Pachelbel’s Canon played by a bluegrass band. My floor-length veil nearly tripped me twice, but it still made me feel like a Disney princess. Glynnis officiated the ceremony in a stunning vintage Halston gown while my most hilarious friend Ben emceed. Together the pair were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (or maybe Sonny and Cher) tap-dancing us into matrimony. The crowd loved them! Midway through the ceremony, they gave the floor over to my father. I clasped Nick’s hand as my dad cleared his throat and strained to speak. John Piazza was once a strong and virile guy. He was the life of the party, the guy you’d want to sit next to in a bar, a jolly mixture of Sicilian and Irish blood combining a young Frank Sinatra, Tony Soprano, and Bob Dylan—a man constantly searching for his identity, but in such an elegant way that he still seemed completely comfortable in his own skin. Everyone wanted to be friends with my dad, men and women alike. He had the ability to command a room with a single word.

He began with “I wish I were in better shape for this,” and the whole hall had tears in their eyes.

Our wedding was perfectly imperfect, and it was the greatest party I’ve ever been to. It rained that day. People like to tell you rain on your wedding day is good luck. When I was in middle school Alanis Morissette sang that it was ironic, but that made less sense to me than the fact that she once dated the guy from Full House. In Hindu traditions rain on the wedding day foretells a strong marriage, since a wet knot is more difficult to untie than a dry one. My friend Ras, who was once a practicing Bhakti Hindi monk, explained the logic behind the allegory. “Rain on your wedding day can throw an already stressful situation into disarray. If the couple weathers the stress together, that’s a good indicator of a healthy marriage to come,” he said. “Besides, you’re preparing for a marriage, not just a wedding. Who cares about getting wet?”

Our original plan was to get married in the courtyard of the archaeology museum at the University of Pennsylvania, where I went to college. It’s one of those grand, imposing stone courtyards with beautifully manicured gardens and a giant fountain. We would hang mason jars holding very tiny candles from the maple trees, just as I had seen in a half dozen BuzzFeed lists on how to have the greatest wedding of all time. As a lazy bride, I’m not even a little ashamed that I stole every single idea from “rustic barn,” “vintage French country,” and “eclectic but sustainable” wedding boards on Pinterest.

It turned out that the rain plan was even better than mason-jar candles in the courtyard, because it included an Egyptian tomb and a three-thousand-year-old Sphinx, both inside the museum. Nick first saw the Sphinx during our rehearsal the night before the ceremony and he gasped with delight. “There had better be a thunderstorm,” he proclaimed. And there was a storm, complete with bellowing thunder and lightning and the kind of rain that soaks into your bones and melts a bride’s carefully done hair. And yet it was the best thing that could have happened. Every hipster in Brooklyn gets married outdoors with a band dressed like Mumford & Sons, rustic barn benches, and mason jars hanging from trees. We got married in front of a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian god-cat.

We picked an assortment of our favorite traditions from different cultures. In the Quaker tradition, guests can say whatever they want during the actual ceremony. We had an open bar during the ceremony, which punctuated the speeches and readings with the popping of champagne corks. I liked my friend Matt’s speech the best. Matt and I obsessively watched every episode of Friends in college. It was like comfort food during a strange time of change, uncertainty, and fear of sexually transmitted diseases. We’d stay up late and cuddle in bed together a decade before he came out of the closet. In his wedding speech Matt praised Nick for being the one to lock me down and reminisced about how he’d always dreamed of being the Ross to my Rachel. He ended his speech by saying he was pleased, in the end, to become the Will to my Grace.

Since Nick loves bikes, I’d arranged ahead of time to have thirty of the city’s bike-share bikes delivered to the museum so that we could ride, with some of our guests, the mile and a half to the boathouse where we would have our reception. The rain cleared for a brief moment and everyone, Nick and I included, hopped onto the bikes in the misty evening. I pulled up my dress, pleased that Spanx offered the same support as bike shorts, and balanced my four-inch Badgley Mischka heels on the pedals. We screamed and hooted, shaking cowbells and tambourines as we tore through the streets of Philadelphia.

In the pictures everyone is smiling sloppily, stuffing their faces with pork sliders and Rice Krispies treats. Everyone, Nick and I included, drank too much, but it was a blur of love, strangers who are now family, compliments and congratulations. It was overwhelming and wonderful all at once.

Nick and I didn’t make it to any of the after parties. (Instead we went out for that ill-fated pizza.) We hardly made it back to bed before we passed out, our wedding clothes in a crumpled heap on the floor. At 5:00 a.m., our heads pounding, we slugged water from the bathroom sink, took Advil, and consummated our marriage.

Now, on my honeymoon, I traced the moles on my new husband’s back with my index finger and began to feel a strange melancholy.

Could it be possible that I had some form of postwedding depression? Was that even a thing?

Google “unhappy” and “honeymoon” and you’re presented with a catalog of stories telling you your marriage is doomed. Google “miserable” and “honeymoon” and you learn Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were miserable on their Irish honeymoon. I took little comfort in this fact.

In 1886 the Reverend Edward John Hardy wrote a suspiciously titled treatise, How to Be Happy, Though Married (an alternate title was Still Happy, Though Married). In it he emphasized that a good start to a marriage was imperative for future marital happiness. “In matrimony, as in so many other things, a good beginning is half the battle,” Hardy wrote. He went on to note the importance of the honeymoon. “The honeymoon certainly ought to be the happiest month in our lives; but it may, like every other good thing, be spoiled by mismanagement.”

Shit.

That night, in the midst of my panic, I e-mailed an actual authority on marital neuroses, clinical psychologist and marriage counselor Laurie Sanford, the mother-in-law of Nick’s best friend and the only person I didn’t feel weird asking about how weird I felt.

“I’m so fucked…,” I started to write in my e-mail, then deleted it. Don’t start with something negative. Just ask if what is happening is normal. I half expected Laurie to write back and tell me I was indeed fucked. She didn’t.

“Of course there is such a thing as postwedding blues, honey,” Sanford wrote back right away. She lives in Hawaii, so the time difference was in my favor. “There’s a letdown after all the buildup, after all the expectations, focused effort, work, excitement, and stress. It’s kind of like the way ocean waves work. The bigger the wave, the flatter the water is after the wave passes. There has to be a flattening out after such a huge buildup of emotion. This occurs despite the happiness you know you should feel. It’s the way emotions work. It’s normal to feel a depression, a sense of fatigue on the honeymoon. It’s a natural emotional slump.”

Phew.

So even though I was itching and sweating and puking and crying, what I felt was normal (well, not the food poisoning). Postwedding depression is a thing, and no one talks about it because no one wants to seem like an ungrateful twit right after everyone just shelled out a lot of money for those rustic barn benches no one got to sit on because of a thunderstorm. Research has even shown that one in ten spouses experiences what experts now refer to as “postwedding depression.”

Maybe having the perfect honeymoon was too much to live up to. What are modern honeymoons anyway, besides the creation of clever marketing by resorts, cruise lines, and countries with beautiful beaches? It wasn’t until relatively recently that the honeymoon was upheld as the most romantic, most perfect, and most Instagrammable vacation of all time.

The word “honeymoon” was first used in the sixteenth century when the poet Richard Huloet compared the first weeks of a marriage to the waning phases of the moon.

“Hony mone, a term proverbially applied to such as be newly married, which will not fall out at the first, but th’one loveth the other at the beginning exceedingly, the likelihood of their exceadinge love appearing to aswage, ye which time the vulgar people call the hony mone,” Huloet wrote.

What he meant, I think, is that love was only going to wane, to grow less and less, after the actual wedding night. Through the 1700s, the “honey” part of “honeymoon” also referred to honey beer, which European couples drank for about a month after the wedding as they spent time getting intimately acquainted with each other’s bodies for the first time. The intention was to make you good and loose the first time you attempted intercourse, like after the high school prom. Starting in the nineteenth century, fancy couples began embarking on what they called the “bridal tour,” during which they visited family and friends who couldn’t attend the actual wedding. Afterward the couple would take time for themselves, usually on the French Riviera or in the Tuscan countryside, to rest, recoup, and try to make a baby. From there the honeymoon became one of the first institutionalized forms of mass tourism. By the turn of the twentieth century, even the lower classes were starting to take a mini break after they got hitched.

Right before we got married I found a dusty old hardcover in a used-book store called The Happy Family. It was a prescriptive book written by medical doctor John Levy and his wife, Ruth, a psychologist, about how to create a happy marriage and family unit in 1938. Even though it was written during a time when most women weren’t allowed to pursue higher education and most men didn’t know how to find a clitoris, lots of things in The Happy Family are weirdly progressive. One bit I kept returning to was the chapter on the chimpanzee experiment.

The chimpanzee in said experiment is a perfectly happy primate who has a healthy, if boring, diet of lettuce. He likes lettuce, eats it all the time. He thinks lettuce is a good thing. One day the chimpanzee is sitting there scratching his bum and he sees the researcher place a banana under the box in front of him. This is new and exciting and different from lettuce. The chimpanzee is then led away and the banana is secretly replaced by lettuce. When the chimp returns and lifts up the box, he is furious. He expected that banana. He tears the lettuce into little pieces, throws it on the ground, and stomps on it to make his point clear. He was promised bananas and will not settle for lettuce!

According to the authors of The Happy Family, this has a lot to do with marriage. Married people “reject the good marriage we have because it is not the perfect marriage which, consciously or unconsciously, we are told we could be having. Our unconscious expectations are more dangerous than the naïve idealism we express….The first step, then, toward permanent and satisfying marriage is disillusionment, the willingness to accept one’s self and one’s partner on the level of everyday living, to take the worse along with the better.”

A better interpretation is that you should always expect lettuce and then you will be extra delighted when your marriage, or your honeymoon, gives you a banana. It also explains why looking at other people’s happy-seeming marriages on social media can make some people feel so anxious and confused. I expected my honeymoon to be all banana and was depressed when there was a little bit of wilted lettuce. In his twilight years the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it well when he said, “Love is something ideal. Marriage is something real; and never with impunity do we exchange the ideal for the real.” It doesn’t get more real than vomiting for two days straight while your new husband holds back your hair.

A few hours of sleep did nothing to improve the situation. Clearly nervous his new wife was about to take her last breath in the Mexican jungle, Nick did his very best to nurse me back to health the next morning: He mopped the sweat off my forehead, force-fed me tortilla chips, and made me drink as much bottled fizzy water as my body could handle.

“If I die, will you take care of Lady Piazza?” I asked weakly. Lady Piazza is 110 pounds and suffers from an anxiety disorder. She was salvaged from a Brooklyn trash can when she was four weeks old, to which I attribute her sharing my attachment issues. She’s been a patient of the top veterinary psychiatrists in New York and was at one point prescribed Xanax, Zoloft, and Valium.

Nick nodded without conviction. Lady Piazza also smells funny and sheds, and sometimes she bites. Nick isn’t a dog person. Having Lady Piazza in his life was a bigger adjustment for him than having a wife.

“I’m serious. I’ll be dead and you’ll be this sexy widower with a full head of hair and a very sad story about how the love of your life perished in Mexico, the best years of her life ahead of her. The least you can do is take care of my sometimes-unfriendly large dog.”

“Of course I will, Squeak.”

By the third day of the honeymoon I’d morphed back into a full-fledged human. I knew this was true because I suddenly had a hankering for margaritas. Still, a piece of my depression and anxiety lingered. I kept trying to put it out of my head because we had an appointment with Bobby Klein, the greatest marriage therapist of all time, the man who was going to teach us the art of marital communication.

The advice we’d gotten from Danielo, our rugged Atacaman Indiana Jones, continued to rattle around in my head when we returned from Chile: Good communication is the key to any healthy relationship, particularly a marriage.

Before our wedding, a very well-off friend who made a career of traveling the globe to find “healers,” “therapists,” “shamans,” and “gurus” told me we had to pay a visit at some point during the first year of our marriage to one Bobby Klein, a healer/therapist/shaman/guru based in the jungles of the Yucatán.

“He can make any couple communicate better.” Her rose quartz crystals jangled against her collarbone. “Even couples who probably shouldn’t be together. He saved my marriage. Also, don’t forget to ask him about Jack Nicholson.” With that she flounced off to text her psychic.

Bobby Klein is the most interesting man in the world. Devotees of the guru travel thousands of miles and pay $300 to speak to him for a single hour. Back in the sixties Bobby was a rock photographer who took some of the first publicity stills of the Doors, including heaps of pictures where Jim Morrison is staring directly into the camera like he wants to have sex with you. Next Bobby landed in the restaurant business with Jack Nicholson and opened the Black Rabbit Inn in West Hollywood, a natural-food restaurant during a time when most people were discovering TV dinners.

Then Bobby became one of the first acupuncturists in the United States and threw himself into traditional Chinese medicine and Eastern philosophy. That’s when he realized he had intuitive abilities in medicine and healing, which led him to get a doctorate in clinical psychology and embark on a forty-year practice as a counselor and energy worker.

He’s expensive, but then, so is divorce. This is what Bobby promises couples will get out of meeting with him for just an hour: “Couples are made to feel safe and are given the practical tools and processes that will bring truth and clarity to the forefront of their relationship. No matter the length of your union, clear communication is the key to achieving a healthy vibrant and loving bond. In these sessions both partners will be empowered as they recognize where and why obstacles may exist that cause misunderstanding and disconnect.”

Everyone in Tulum knows Bobby. You don’t even have to say his last name. “Where can I find Bobby?” you can holler at any of the boutique hotels or organic taquerias along the beachfront road. Everyone pointed us to his fancy Yaan wellness center in the middle of the jungle.

We were greeted there by a pretty young woman in a tight white tank top and equally snug striped miniskirt.

“We’re here to see Bobby?” I said nervously.

“You have already paid?” she asked. I shook my head. Not knowing about the astronomical fee, Nick delivered her a goofy lopsided grin. She sized up the two of us, decided we probably wouldn’t steal anything if she left us in the lobby on our own, and strode away to let Bobby know we’d arrived.

The unbearably cool lobby of Yaan sold all manner of unbearably cool things, like linen caftans for $250, artisanal aphrodisiac spray made in Brooklyn, and handcrafted leather man purses. I sat down to thumb through the spa menu as we waited.

“Oooh, they do a special kind of colonic here,” I said to Nick.

“What does that do again? Clean out your ass?” Nick said.

I nodded. “I think so.”

The pretty girl returned and looked at us, pitying two humans who had never enjoyed the pleasure of a proper colonic.

Nick looked over my shoulder at the menu of services.

“I hope all of these people are well paid,” he said. “The prices here are as high as San Francisco prices, if not higher. I’ll bet they pay next to nothing for rent, so I hope their employees are paid significantly higher than average.”

“You’re such a communist.”

I could tell Nick wanted to inform me, as he had dozens of times, that I was confusing the meanings of “communism” and “socialism.”

I’d tried to explain to Nick about Bobby Klein’s crazy mixed-up path to becoming a healer, communication expert, and couples counselor in the jungle, but he had no idea what we were getting into until we were inside the guru’s cozy hippie-chic office.

Wearing a loose-fitting orange shirt and linen pants and peppering his remarks with a refrain of “That’s beautiful,” Bobby looks and sounds more like a well-dressed Grateful Dead roadie than a healer or a marriage counselor. He walks with a slight swagger and his face has a healthy glow that makes him seem much younger than he is. Nick has the same youthful exuberance, and people are often surprised that he’s seven years older than I am, which leads me to believe I should spend more time talking about Botox with my dermatologist. Bobby encouraged the two of us to sit back on his wide couch, take our shoes off, and get comfortable. He asked us to tell him an abbreviated version of our story—how we met, when we got married, etc.

Then he stared at the two of us in disconcerting silence for longer than a minute.

“This is a powerful time,” he finally said. “The time right after you get married. I don’t want to call it an exciting time. I would rather say it is a powerful time for a marriage.”

We nodded, unsure if we were supposed to respond. Then Bobby cut right to the chase.

“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.”

This made me think about the fact that Nick and I were currently sharing the same electric toothbrush at home, and I made a mental note to order a second electric toothbrush.

From memory Bobby quoted the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you…

And stand together, yet not too near together…

Most of the advice we’d been given up to this point, particularly in Chile, had been about how to successfully meld our lives into each other. I already felt like I was melting into Nick’s life. Hadn’t I moved across the country, far away from my family and friends, my professional contacts, and the city that I knew and loved? I depended on Nick so much more in San Francisco just to help me figure out how to get on the right bus, one that wouldn’t take me across the Golden Gate Bridge. I made a silent vow to focus on building my own life in San Francisco, in addition to the one I’d build with Nick.

“Be a witness to each other’s solitude, man,” Bobby concluded in his best spiritual-adviser voice. “You each need to live your own lives. And you need to be able to communicate about that life to your partner.”

And then Bobby told us about “Five Minutes”—or what I like to call the greatest thing to happen to our new marriage.

Every day for the next forty-five days, Bobby instructed us to try a ten-minute exercise during which we would each speak, uninterrupted by the other, for five consecutive minutes. These are the rules:

1. The other partner is not allowed to react or speak during the five minutes.

2. Whatever is mentioned in the five minutes can’t become a source of contention later.

3. You can never bring something up that is more than three weeks old. Bobby told us we should never be fighting about anything that is more than three weeks old. The point of the five minutes is to resolve issues before they get old and begin to rot the base of our marriage.

“It’s important to listen without trying to fix or comment. This way you will learn never to give your partner advice unless they ask you for it. That’s the easiest way to breed resentment. Only tell the truth; don’t lie about anything. You don’t accomplish anything if you lie.”

It reminded me of something the writer Erica Jong had told me the last time I’d interviewed her. I asked her specifically about why her last marriage ended up being her most successful.

“We have always been outspoken,” she said. “We don’t hold grudges or grievances. You have to speak up in a marriage about the things that bother you. Both members of the marriage have to do it, and it’s hard!”

It was so simple, really. Too often we expect our partners to be mind readers, knowing what’s happening in our brains without our telling them. That’s insane, right? Of course the only way to know what another person is thinking is for them to actually tell us.

Bobby left us alone to give it a shot, closing the heavy wooden door behind him with a thud.

Nick and I both giggled at first. We understood the intention of Five Minutes, but it still felt like the kinds of icebreaker activities you’re told to do on the first day of summer camp or confusing corporate retreats with your crazy coworkers.

“I’ll start,” I said. “I feel silly doing this, since I talk to you about all things all the time. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to be good at this. I don’t want to be like my parents. I’m insecure as hell about a lot of things. Sometimes I don’t know why you love me so much.”

I sucked in a breath and looked toward the door. Why not say it? Say the thing I was afraid to admit. If there was any time to be vulnerable, wasn’t it here, on our honeymoon, in the office of a rock-and-roll-photographer-turned-guru in the middle of the jungle? As Bobby said, the things we leave unsaid in a marriage are the things that rot away at us. In all relationships there are things you never say. What I was about to say could have been one of them.

“Sometimes I think you’re too damn good for me.” The second it came out of my mouth I realized how ridiculous it sounded. It had been one of those clinging doubts that stuck around after our first few dates, particularly after I met the army of Nick’s ex-girlfriends. I’ve had ex-boyfriends describe me, in no particular order, as the love of their lives, a psychotic bitch, the one who got away, that chick I was fucking, and the kind of girl you date but don’t marry. Nick’s ex-girlfriends universally adore him and still cling to him like grapes on a vine, constantly emailing him for directions, life advice, and help with their frequent flier miles. They were fine, sweet even, except for their insistence that they knew Nick long before I did and perhaps better. I should have been happy that I’d married someone who inspired such loyalty in the women he’d broken up with, but it only served to remind me that Nick Aster is a very good person.

He’s gracious and kind and wears his heart on his sleeve. He really can fix your garbage disposal with his bare hands and he will do it with glee. He’s built a business on the premise that good people can change the world. He’s genuinely nicer, kinder, more empathetic, and patient than I’ll ever be. He would never tell someone they were a liar for bringing a fake service dog on a plane or yell at an Uber driver for blasting Megadeth all the way to the airport. These were among the many reasons I loved him.

And yet his goodness made me feel like I needed to work very hard to be a better person. I’d dated so many jerks in the past that the moral high ground came naturally to me. I reveled in being the “good one,” the one who made all the plans, who didn’t cheat, who had a job. With the tables turned I felt unmoored, like an egg balanced on it’s skinny face, certain I’d topple, certain I’d crack.

“Sometimes I’m worried you’ll run off with the kind of girl I think you should be with—one who likes roughing it outdoors with just a fishing pole and tarp, one who’s single-handedly solving the world’s water problem, one who’s very calm and chill and likes jam bands and would never scream at an Uber driver.” The words surprised me. Out loud they sounded silly, almost juvenile. I cribbed a line from Jack Nicholson from the movie As Good as It Gets. “But I think it’s okay, because you make me want to be a better woman.”

I went on like this for five straight minutes; my anxieties and tensions and neuroses poured out of my mouth. If I were still Catholic, I’d call it confession, a spilling of the soul without interruption.

Then it was Nick’s turn.

“Oh, baby girl. How can you think you’re not a good person? No one else would keep Lady Piazza. She’s a bad, bad dog. But you love her so much! And that’s just one of ten thousand and nine examples I could give you. I’m as scared as you are. If I hadn’t met you, there was a very real possibility I’d end up a creepy single old man with a beard talking to himself on the streets of San Francisco.

“I fear that I’ll fail you in some way or fail myself. I worry about not being good enough too. I worry you’ll leave me for some corporate lawyer who makes piles of money. You’re the most dynamic and driven person I’ve ever met. You push me and challenge me. I worry that I don’t challenge you. What if I can’t make you happy?”

Nick kept talking. He said he was generally nervous about not being the only one in control of his own life. He was scared about making the next big steps, buying a house and having kids. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about was the fact that he’d said he thought he wasn’t good enough for me. That thing that I didn’t want to talk about, that I was scared to say out loud? My husband felt that thing too. Now that we’d both said it, it felt like a much smaller thing. Communication for the win.

Nick later told me that he appreciated the challenge of learning to simply listen and not react. He found it relaxing and refreshing to just say whatever came to mind. I agreed. The willingness to listen really shows the other person that you’re trying to understand them better. It also allows time to work things out when you’re cool and calm, before things get heated and your minds begin to race.

The honeymoon was supposed to be a time when we got better acquainted with each other’s bodies, but we were spending just as much time getting intimate with the inner workings of the other person’s mind.

You’ll probably be as surprised as I was to learn that one of the most poignant quotes about the importance of maintaining conversation in your marriage comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, the prolific German philosopher and maybe father of fascism. In one of his earlier works, Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche emphasized the importance of husbands and wives talking to each other: “Marriage is a long conversation,” Nietzsche said. “When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”

Our gray-haired guru was knocking on the door before we knew it. Bobby Klein placed his hands on our shoulders and I thought for a brief moment that he might try to kiss us on the mouth, but he just imparted one last nugget of wisdom before we left to pay our bill.

“Let go of all your crap. Get rid of what happened before. Enjoy each other. Talk to each other. Listen. Really listen. Don’t just pretend to listen. Embrace your life together. It’s beautiful.”

Bobby said to let go of our crap. That was how I convinced Nick that in the midst of our Mexican honeymoon we should try a traditional Mayan temazcal ceremony, a kind of sweat lodge that would cleanse us and purify us for our new marriage.

“What crap do you need to get rid of?” Nick asked me. “Didn’t we talk about all the crap? There’s more?”

I delivered the knowing gaze I’d perfected by watching Mariska Hargitay talk to victims on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. “There’s always more.”

He agreed to do the temazcal ceremony if I would agree to go visit the Chichén Itzá ruins the following day. Marriage, I was learning, is about compromise.

Temazcal translates loosely into English as “medicine house.” It could just as easily translate into “really hot hut.” Mexican Aztecs, Mayans, and some native North American tribes have used these sweat lodges in a variety of ways for centuries, but often to purify a couple right before or after their marriage ceremony.

Most of the high-end resorts along the Riviera Maya offer some tourist version of the temazcal ceremony for visitors, gouging outsiders for as much as $1,000 for a private couple’s ceremony. We laughed at the idea of paying a good portion of our monthly rent to sweat in a tent, but serendipity intervened during a stop at an organic juice shop, where the barista promised that for just $100 total she could score us a sweat lodge session that included a shaman named Julio and two shots of locally made artisanal tequila.

I have no idea how to tell if someone is truly a shaman or if tequila is artisanal, except to take the word of an organic juice barista.

Just past sundown we met our shaman in the dense jungle behind the juice store. He was fairly obvious, the guy mixing up a pot of herbs and wearing a loincloth who reminded me of the dude my friends bought weed from back in high school. He had a lady friend with him, a bright-eyed and beautiful Argentinean girl named Gisele who smiled at us and wiggled her fingers in a trifling wave, her twentysomething skin glistening with sweat, sand, and seawater.

“She’s here to balance the masculine and feminine energy in the ceremony,” Julio said.

All I could think was She’d better not take her top off in the temazcal.

I asked Julio how long we’d be in the sweat tent. He gazed past me into the fire and muttered in a thick Mexican accent, “Who can tell? Only the rocks will know.” Was he on drugs?

“Do the rocks think we’ll be out in time to grab a late dinner or maybe just nachos before bed?”

This time Julio pretended not to understand my English.

The temazcal ritual usually involves spending five hours in a very hot tent or stone hut while a shaman or other religious practitioner uses scorching volcanic rocks doused with healing waters to bring the temperature inside above 170 degrees. The shaman leads the group in chanting ancient prayers that are supposed to unveil traumas, fears, and emotional stress trapped within the body and mind—all of the crap. The ancient Mayans believed that spending time in the temazcal represented a return to the womb, a place where you can be freed of past troubles and worries.

“The process is hard. It takes patience,” Julio explained. “You’re forced to suffer together.” I remembered that the word “patience” was born of the word for “suffering.” “And afterwards you’re reborn as a pair of warriors, bonded for life. You will be on the same team…like the New York Giants.”

The ceremony began simply enough. Julio’s shaman assistant, Miguel, shoveled the volcanic rocks into a claustrophobic hut constructed of sticks and blankets. I likened it to a yurt, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what a yurt should look like. Nick would know what a yurt looked like, but I didn’t want to ask about it, for fear of compromising the illusion of my confidence in the ceremony.

The stones sparkled like pretty little stars as they came out of the fire.

“Meteoritos,” Julio said, his smile revealing a row of crooked and tobacco-stained bottom teeth. Meteorites. The stones did glow like something from another planet. We crawled in the dirt on our hands and knees through the hut’s tiny door. Inside we formed a circle around the fire as the temperature rose. Julio pounded on an oblong calfskin drum and chanted, encouraging us to repeat the half-Spanish, half-Mayan phrases. Nick’s deep baritone singing voice surprised me.

It wasn’t that I’d never heard my husband sing before. Nick sings all the time. He makes up silly little songs about everything from applying shampoo and conditioner to whether Lady Piazza needs a bath. He captivates neighborhood children with a three-chord guitar rhapsody about cheese puffs. But I’d never heard him seriously sing anything, and I was in love with his voice.

Before we knew what was happening, it got hot…really, really hot.

Sweat dripped over my eyelashes. Of course Gisele took off her bikini to reveal her Victoria Secret model perfect boobs. It was 150 degrees inside a hut that smelled like feet, and a sexy Argentinean woman had just taken off her top in front of my new husband. I had no idea how this would purify our marriage.

Time became completely irrelevant in the temazcal. Minutes could have been hours and hours could have been days. There was only the singing and the drums and the heat. Oh my God, that heat. Sometimes I felt closer to Nick than ever before as I wound my fingers through his and listened to his singing. Other times I hardly even knew he was there.

“Shed your fears, shed your anxiety. Give them up to the fire. Burn them away,” Julio chanted in Mayan and then in broken English. He looked directly at me, the smoke blurring his face around the edges. “You don’t trust happiness. You find comfort in the pain and fear you’ve known for so long. Embrace these good new things.”

“I peed my pants,” Nick whispered, breaking Julio’s spell over me. He wasn’t kidding. My husband, who has a very small bladder and who had drunk a gallon of water in anticipation of sweating for five hours, peed his pants in the Mayan hell yurt. What had I gotten us into? Why were we boiling in a hot box with a maybe shaman who came highly recommended by a girl who made juice, and his girlfriend with the tits of a porn star? I plotted escape routes. Nick curled into the fetal position. He might have passed out. I burrowed a hole through the sand and underneath the tent to stick my head outside to escape the smells of the tent saturated with pee, sweat, and body odor, desperate for a single breath of wonderfully cool, clean air.

“Give it all away!” Julio boomed as I brought my head back inside. “Sometimes you need to scream once in a while. Scream it all out. If you keep everything inside, you’ll explode.”

What did I want to give away? At this very moment I wanted to give away the few items of clothing still clinging to my body. I stripped my shirt off, dropping the sweat-drenched tank top into the fire.

I wanted to let go of my anger at my parents for not being better marital role models. I had to give away my insecurities about not being pretty enough or good enough or lovable enough. I wanted to be less selfish. I wanted to be better at considering Nick’s needs before my own. I screamed these things into the fire. I yelled louder than I’d ever yelled before. I yelled until the back of my throat got tight and began to hurt. I saw myself rubbed raw.

Julio spit into the dirt, the moisture sizzling around his ankles. He shook a pole that sounded like the rain stick my kindergarten teacher at Greenwood Elementary used to make the kids be quiet and lie on their mats for nap time. “And now the newlyweds touch and be close,” Julio said. “For the last of the rocks. The most powerful of the rocks. You shall seal your bond. You express your love and your gratitude.”

Julio opened the hut’s flap one last time to shovel more fiery rocks into the middle of our circle.

“No more,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.

We were spent. I lay down in front of Nick and pressed my body into his. Realizing I was too close to the heat rising off the rocks, he wordlessly moved in front of me to try to block me from the flames. I felt the air in front of me cool several degrees, like walking into a shadow on the street.

“Express your love for one another. Express your vows.” I couldn’t believe Julio was still talking.

In our handwritten wedding vows I’d vowed to love him, to nurture him, and to inspire him. He had vowed to support me, cherish me, give me back rubs, and strive to make me happy every day for the rest of our lives. We grasped hands and said these things to each other again in the yurt tent. But we also said other things. Nick promised to help calm my anxieties and insecurities, and I promised to let my guard down more often. He promised to be strong when I couldn’t be, and I promised to be patient and supportive. This time the vows felt more real than when we said them in front of the Sphinx. This time we were saying them just for each other instead of for a crowd of people.

I rolled onto my belly and buried my face in the sand to cool it off.

“You will suffer,” Julio said. “In a marriage you will suffer together. But together you will be warriors!”

My body went limp. I fell into a fugue state. Time passed.

And then it was over.

We crept out of the temazcal like weakened lambs who’d somehow escaped slaughter.

“Now we will cleanse in the healing waters of the sea.”

Julio led us, barefoot, across the pockmarked street and onto the grounds of a nearby resort, paying no mind to signs that warned against trespassing. We weaved through a labyrinth of palm trees and chaise longues until we came upon the ocean.

In the sea Nick held me above the waves, my head tipped back to stare at the sky. “How do you feel?” he asked, his voice hoarse from bellowing into the fire.

“Lighter?” I said, more of a question than a statement. “I don’t need to throw up anymore. I thought I was going to throw up most of the time we were in the hut. But now I feel good. Surprisingly good.”

“Me too.”

“That was hard.”

Nick nodded. “Did you get rid of your crap?”

“I feel nice.” I didn’t know what to say except for that. I buried my nose into Nick’s wet shoulder and inhaled his distinctive musky smell, a mix of sweat, heavier than usual tonight, and something vaguely sweet.

“Should we do Five Minutes?” Nick said, half teasing me.

“Here?”

“Why not? Here is as good a place as any.”

“Okay. I’ll start. Thank you for indulging me in trying all of these madcap rituals and ceremonies. Thank you for accepting me as I really am, even the parts of me that are broken and not perfect and sometimes strange. You make me happier than I ever could have imagined.” I went on for the remaining four minutes and thirty seconds, expressing my gratitude and happiness.

Then Nick went, beginning with “You know that I think you are stronger and braver than you think you are.” I stuck my tongue out at him.

“You just want to have honeymoon sex.”

Nick began to laugh as we treaded water. “We’ve been married a week.”

“What a one-week anniversary, Mr. Aster!”

“I daresay I liked it, Mrs. Aster.”

“Want to go another week?”

“Yeah. Then we’ll check in and see if we want to renew the contract for another.”

“Do you feel like we’re on the same team now?” I asked Nick as we walked down the starlit beach back to our palapa. “Like the New York Giants?”

He took so long considering it that I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. I nudged him and he nodded slowly. “We’re getting there.”