I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

—LAURA INGALLS WILDER

Boondi, a petite and shriveled woman of indeterminate age with leathery skin the color of a ripe coconut, held both of my hands inside her tiny wrinkled ones.

“When my husband died, he said to me, ‘Bye-bye. I am going. But I will come back again for you,’ ” Boondi said, grinning through lips stained orange from the betel nuts she chewed on all day long. She said “bye-bye” in a high-pitched singsong. Boondi married her husband when she was fifteen. When I met her she thought she was ninety, but she wasn’t sure.

We stood on a muddy road in Boondi’s rural village in northeastern India on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, and she wasn’t going to let go of my hand. The touch was warm and comforting. The only thing that made me nervous was that the boat I’d taken to reach this remote location would float away in less than twenty minutes. I needed that boat to eventually find my way back to New Delhi. I’d been on my way back to the boat after sightseeing at the town’s modest temple when Boondi provoked my fascination.

I’d been walking through rain, nudged every few steps by defiant cows crowding the streets, when Boondi’s laugh caught my attention. It was a laugh too large for a such a small person, and it rippled through her belly, which played peekaboo from beneath her dark violet sari. I beckoned my translator to stop walking. Boondi and her two friends, both as old and stooped as she was, immediately wanted to take a selfie with me on my phone. Everyone in India wants to take selfies with white strangers. I obliged her and promised to send the picture through Facebook to her great-grandson. Boondi was very proud of her great-grandson and his prowess on social media. She asked if I was married, if I had children, if I wanted to have children, and if my husband was in India with me. I nodded yes, no, yes, and no. Then she told me about her own marriage.

Boondi spit the betel nut out of her mouth before continuing. “My husband and I were very happy. I was very happy because my husband loved me. He loved me and we had enough food and we had many children. We never had a bad moment. If you have a husband who loves you, then you need to be thankful for that. You need thanks to make a marriage work.” Boondi was saying this through a double translation from the local Assamese language into Hindi and then into English, but I was pretty sure I was getting it right. When she smiled at me I noticed most of her teeth were missing and her gums shimmered, soft and pink like a baby’s. Wrinkles carved canyons in a face burnished with the wisdom and heartache of age.

“When he came home every day, I made sure I fed him and I gave him massage when he was sore and tired. Do you massage your husband?”

I don’t. I almost always ask Nick to rub my head or my shoulders when I’m cranky and tired. He knows exactly where to dig his thumb in between my shoulder blades to release all the tension from hunching over my laptop for hours at a time.

I made a mental note to learn how to give better shoulder massages.

“How’d you meet your husband?” I asked her.

She batted her eyelashes like it was a silly thing to ask. “My parents talked to his parents and we decided to get married.” It was simple and straightforward. But Boondi was no dummy. She had a great-grandson who was a master of the Internet. Her village had satellite dishes on nearly every roof. She knew Americans could be skeptical about arranged marriages.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I did love him very much. True love. The love of a good marriage always comes later, and I don’t care what anyone else says.”

Boondi squeezed my hand with determination. “You are young and strong and healthy. If you have a good husband and he has a good family, you should appreciate it. If you have these things, you must be thankful. To be thankful is most important. To say you are thankful and mean it. Teekay?” she asked. Teekay is the Indian equivalent of “okay” or “understand?” “Teekay,” I responded. Nick and I had plenty of things to make us happy. We had a roof over our heads and food, and we loved each other very much. We should be thankful. We should be happy.

The old woman hugged me, clasping me firmly around my waist, the bottom of her head barely grazing my shoulders. I carefully hugged her back, afraid if I squeezed too tight I’d break her delicate bones.

“My husband and I were so happy!” She looked up at me and her light eyes, the color of the muddy Brahmaputra, sparkled. “You are happy too. I know it.”

Did I need to go all the way to one of the least visited areas of India to understand how important gratitude is for my marriage? It felt kind of silly to travel thousands of miles from home, in cars, trains, planes, and boats, just to realize my life was already pretty goddamned sweet and that I should appreciate it.

It’s not that I didn’t hear about the many virtues of gratitude at home in San Francisco. I did. All the time. So often, in fact, that I was a little over the idea of gratitude. Not actual gratitude, but the unintentional abuse of the word. Sometime in the past ten years everyone in San Francisco started talking like a yoga instructor. You can hardly show up at a dinner party without the host heaving a belly sigh and announcing, “I want to begin this meal with gratitude.” The checkout clerk who sold us our organic vegetables smiled with gratitude for the radishes we’d just purchased from him and my dog walker once left me a list of five reasons he was grateful for Lady Piazza. San Francisco is also a city where people will tell you without irony that sauerkraut changed their lives, so I don’t take any of it too seriously, and after all, their hearts are in the right place. But I still wanted something that felt more genuine: showing gratitude instead of peacocking about it.

Researchers tell us gratitude—the practice of showing appreciation, saying thanks, sending a text that says, “What you did was amaze-balls”—is an integral part of any healthy relationship, especially as couples waltz further and further away from the honeymoon stage and into the slog of real life. Scientists at the University of Georgia once surveyed 468 married people and found that gratitude could consistently predict how happy someone was in their marriage. “Even if a couple is experiencing distress and difficulty in other areas, gratitude in the relationship can help promote positive marital outcomes,” said the study’s lead author, Allen Barton, a postdoctoral research associate at UGA’s Center for Family Research. In another study Dr. Amie Gordon, a psychologist from UC Berkeley, asked fifty committed couples to fill out appreciation journals. The couples who were successful in conveying ongoing appreciation were less likely to break up in the next nine months. The researchers reported that a nourishing cycle of encouragement helped to develop more trust and respect.

Dr. Gordon found the “highly appreciative” couples were ones who openly expressed their gratitude, listened to each other actively, and touched each other appreciatively. She also found that having gratitude in a relationship isn’t a static thing. It’s not something you simply have or don’t have. Gratitude is a skill that can be learned and cultivated.

Peter Pearson of the Couples Institute in Palo Alto gives his patients a thirty-day task called the Daily Double. It’s simple. Each person has to say something that makes their partner feel good or improves their partner’s life two times a day. These can be little things like “Honey, I appreciate when you take out the garbage” or “You look sexy in that gray T-shirt.” They can be expressions of thanks or admiration, and they can come in person or over e-mail, Skype, or text. I asked if a thumbs-up kissy-face emoji could suffice. Pearson reluctantly said yes.

After nearly a year of marriage, I still loved most things about Nick Aster, but as we now struggled to make ends meet and shuttled among endless doctor’s appointments, it was more and more difficult to keep that in perspective, to feel thankful on a daily basis.

The most recent doctor’s appointment before I left for India had been particularly challenging. Nick and I met with a neurologist to figure out whether the muscular dystrophy had already started degrading my muscles.

“Can you whistle?” the doctor asked me.

“No. But I’ve never been able to whistle,” I replied.

“Can you shut your eyes really tight and then open them quickly?”

“Yes.”

Determining the severity of my disease required a battery of tests that mostly involved making strange faces.

“Because this kind of muscular dystrophy affects the facial muscles, people often have a hard time smiling, and so people often think they’re unhappy,” the neurologist said. “Do people often think you are unhappy?”

“So you’re saying a symptom of this kind of muscular dystrophy is resting bitch face?” I asked. My posture collapsed, causing me to slump lower into my chair. Weren’t strangers on the street always telling me to smile more? I should have known all along that something was gravely wrong with me, but I bit the inside of my cheek to keep my sarcasm at bay. Nick could tell I was agitated and cast me a look that said, Bear with the guy and we’ll get ice cream after this. I shot him a look back that said, We’re gonna need a big spoon.

“How’s your arm strength?” the doctor asked.

“I can do a handstand. I did one in yoga yesterday, for about forty-five seconds. Okay, maybe thirty seconds,” I volunteered eagerly, wanting to provide pieces of information that would make him jump up and exclaim, “By God, how could we all have been so wrong? If this woman can do a handstand for thirty seconds, then there’s no way she has muscular dystrophy!”

The doctor scribbled silently on a notepad.

“But I suck at push-ups,” I added. “Is that a symptom?” The night before I had dug out a twenty-pound weight from behind piles of boxes in our basement, gripped it with both hands, and lifted it over my head for twenty repetitions, grunting with the intensity of an MMA fighter. I made a mental pact with myself to do this every day. The day when I couldn’t do it anymore, when lifting twenty pounds over my head twenty times was too much, would be the day I started to worry.

In the doctor’s office Nick squeezed my leg, causing me to look down at my pants. Nick called them my backpacker pants. They were a thin cotton with intricate blue and white elephants on them, the kind that travelers pick up from run-down stalls in Thailand and India. We’d bought these in Africa, but they were probably made in China. Why had I decided to wear something that looked like pajamas to this important appointment? All of a sudden I felt very small and childish. I pinched my thigh above the knee…hard, my nails curling into my skin. I needed to feel it.

“I think that’s a symptom of being a thirty-five-year-old woman who hates push-ups,” Nick whispered to try to make me smile, but I could see the concern causing the skin around his eyes to wrinkle.

I pretended not to hear him. “Is there any concrete way of telling when the real symptoms will start affecting me?” I asked, needing tangible answers. “Will I be able to walk? Will I need a wheelchair? When will that happen? Will there be a lot of pain? Is there any way of knowing anything?”

“No,” the doctor said. He had a strange look on his face. No one had ever looked at me this way before. The look was pity.

Frustrated with his inability to tell me anything definite about my disease, I clammed up.

“You’re showing very early symptoms, but the best we can tell you is that you will experience most of the effects later in life, the way your dad did. And you’re healthy now,” the doctor continued. “We don’t know anything else.”

“What about our kids?”

“They have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it too. You can’t screen for it in an embryo, so IVF is out of the question. You can test a fetus, but not until about twelve weeks, and then you have the option of terminating the pregnancy.” The words “terminating the pregnancy” hung in the air like a violet storm cloud ready to burst any second.

On the New Year’s Eve after we were married, Nick and I attended a grown-up dinner party, the kind where kids run loose, and parents get drunk before 8:00 p.m. We celebrated the New Year when the clock hit midnight in Canada’s Maritime provinces so everyone could be in bed before ten. Each person went around the table and made predictions for the year ahead. Some were funny (Justin Bieber will end up in prison) and some were serious (Karen will quit her job to pursue her passions). Nick and I both threw out our own predictions that seemed unthinkable at the time (Trump will be president; we’ll get a goat), but when we went to sleep that night, he whispered in my ear, “This year we’ll have a baby. I just didn’t want to say it in front of everyone else.”

Something changed in me once we got married. Friends of my mom’s and my really old aunts called it “baby fever,” but it was more subtle than that. For most of my adult life children had been something I tried to avoid—both making them and spending time with them. But things were different now. I didn’t hate crying babies on planes anymore. I wanted to stroke them and comfort them and cuddle them and smell their baby heads and put their baby feet in my mouth. I felt an intense heightening of all of my senses around them. I’d never pictured my own children until I met Nick, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I began conjuring a little girl with Nick’s curiosity and mischievous eyes chasing Lady Piazza around our backyard with her face covered in dirt. She’d climb trees and sing loudly but off-key. I’d read her all of the original Nancy Drews and everything Laura Ingalls Wilder ever wrote. But recently the image of that little girl had grown blurry. I had a dream where she waved to me, but I didn’t know if she was saying hello or good-bye.

Nick did everything he could to cheer me up, but I was exhausted by the uncertainty, and it made me snappy and irritable. I knew I should be grateful for the wonderful things I did have in my life—I was currently healthy and I had a wonderful husband—but I couldn’t get there. Some days it was hard to muster even a thumbs-up kissy-face emoji.

Later that week I hunted for my passport in a shoe box shoved under Nick’s side of the bed and came across a pair of small blue notebooks embossed with curly gold lettering: Reasons I Want to Marry You. I’d bought them at the BHLDN wedding dress shop when I picked up my wedding dress the previous summer. In the months before we got married, Nick and I wrote in those books every single night, no matter where we were in the world. Both of the books were completely filled, front and back.

I grabbed a bar of dark chocolate and poured a generous glass of red wine as I cracked open the pages.

MINE:

Because you make me believe we can do anything if we are together.

Because you cook me burritos when I am busy with work.

Because you are trying so hard to love Lady Piazza even though she is a bad dog.

Because staying home and making dinner with you is better than doing anything with anyone else.

Because you invent silly songs to make me laugh.

Because I am not afraid to cry in front of you.

By now I was in tears.

NICK’S:

Because we accomplish incredible things together.

Because you have a cute little belly button.

Because you took a bite out of the cheese and put it back in the fridge when you were drunk.

Because you humor me when I speak Spanish at the taqueria.

Because you snort when you laugh.

Because you have seemingly boundless energy.

Because you open my mind to new things.

Because even in the nitty gritty of life you calm me.

Because the little details of life are little and together we are learning to figure them out.

They were wonderful. I read them both cover to cover. It was like hitting rewind and watching the beginning of our relationship again in slow motion. Even though life seemed so perfect in the pages of these books, I knew that at the time we had thought things were difficult as we planned the wedding and I moved my entire life across the country. But the only thing that came across in those pages was how happy we were and how grateful we were to have found each other. I loved these books. I wanted to find a way to keep expressing how thankful we were for the rest of our marriage.

Gratitude may be trendy in San Francisco, but in India it’s a way of life. The concept of gratitude weaves its way into almost every facet of Indian culture and relationships. This doesn’t mean that Indians go around thanking everyone for everything all the time. Rather, the concept of gratitude, in many Indian traditions, is about giving earnest thanks, expressing humility, and letting go of your own ego in order to cultivate more bliss and joy for yourself and for others. It’s about feeling grateful instead of talking about it.

When it comes to gratitude in a marriage, I think the Hindu monk Radhanath Swami put it best when he said: “I’ve seen small things like a thank-you save a marriage from total collapse…if it’s consistent. It’s a small thing but it makes a bigger difference than all the big things you’ve been working for.”

Nick and I had both been invited by the Ministry of Tourism of India to visit the country as journalists, but a work emergency made Nick bail on the trip just three weeks before we were scheduled to leave.

“That means we’ll be apart on your birthday. Your forty-second birthday!” I lamented after he called the airline to cancel his ticket. Nick’s birthday was also the anniversary of our engagement.

Nick looked properly chastened. “I know, Honeypot. I’m bummed too. But it’s too stressful and we’ll celebrate my birthday and our engagement-versary in May. And can you please stop reminding me I’m forty-two.”

I set off without him for three weeks, the longest time we’d been apart since we got married. Friends warned me that “India is different. Travelers either love it or hate it. There’s no in-between.” I was worried I’d hate it before I even left. The process of applying for an Indian visa is long and labyrinthine and practically requires you promise them your firstborn baby, along with a blood sample and a list of everyone you’ve ever slept with. I watched a grown man burst into tears and flee the visa office in San Francisco.

“I can’t take it,” he screamed as he stormed out the door. “Screw India. I’m not going.”

Once I’d endured the dozens of forms and questions from bureaucrats and flown the sixteen hours from San Francisco to New Delhi, where the temperatures topped 114 degrees, another two hours to Kolkata, and one more to the smaller village of Jorhat, I’d been prepared to feel as broken as the man who bawled in the visa office, but I didn’t. As soon as I landed, I immediately fell in love with India’s riot of colors and smells and her warm and welcoming people. Everything was brighter and more intense. It was hot and dirty and beautiful and exotic all at once.

I didn’t have to look for it; talk about marriage was everywhere in India.

The Indian man next to me on my flight looked at my wedding ring and asked why I was traveling alone. “My husband is at home in the States.” He looked at me sadly, as if to say, What kind of man lets his woman travel so far by herself?

“The difference between American marriage and Indian marriage is heaven and hell,” he informed me (I hadn’t asked). “In the U.S. the sex is free. In the U.S. you believe in divorce. Divorce for us is a big deal. You might think us primitive, but we have one man and one wife. That matters to us. We protect our marriage.”

“So do we,” I replied politely and unfolded my copy of the Times of India to conclude the conversation. What did he mean by that? We protect our marriage. Didn’t we also believe that marriage was sacred, a big deal? My eye landed on the marriage advertisements in the newspaper. Indian mothers and fathers still regularly place traditional classified ads in the hopes of finding their adult child a suitable spouse. They’re wildly specific, with requests broken down by caste, profession, religion, and language.

Very b’ful & qlfd MBA 32/5’7” girls family seeks alliance from well settled business professional background.

Established business family from Bhopal seeks alliance for their only son (MBA London). Smart. Handsome. Issueless. Divorcee. 5’10” 25 ½ associated in well established family business looking for beautiful well-educated girl (suitable height).

The best marriage classified ad I’ve ever seen from India was specific and honest and perfect in a way you’d never see on a Match.com or OkCupid profile.

27/6’1” MBA/Engineering graduate with a good job based in Mumbai looking for a Tamil Brahmin bride. Had epileptic seizures 5 years back. Lost one testicle in accident. Doctors certify above conditions normal now and will not impact marriage.

It’s always wedding season in India, and since weddings stretch over many days, you can stumble onto a wedding celebration any night of the week. Later that evening, as I checked into my hotel, I admired the intricate henna designs on the hands of a woman in the lobby. She informed me, in perfect English, that she’d just come from the mehndi ceremony of her cousin. The mehndi is one of a multitude of rituals that happen during the weeklong Indian wedding festivities. During the mehndi the women, sometimes hundreds at a time, gather with the bride to have their hands and feet painted with henna mud. Some believe that the darker the color the mehndi stains the hands of the bride, the more she will be loved by her husband and mother-in-law. Others believe the longer the mehndi remains on the hands, the longer the couple is allowed to enjoy the honeymoon period after their wedding ceremony. Traditional healers in India told me the herbs in the mehndi sink into the nerve endings of the hands and feet, helping to calm the bride’s prewedding jitters.

Who would have expected my offhand compliment to turn into an invitation to the wedding? But this was India! The cousins and aunties of the bride insisted I join them for the mehndi and wanted me to cancel my plans for the next week so that I could attend the entire wedding. “It’s fine. What do you have to do?” the sister of the groom asked me plaintively. “You’ll stay as our guest. You’ll come.” This isn’t so out of the ordinary. Indian families of all socioeconomic levels will often invite their entire village to a wedding celebration, sometimes up to a thousand people.

I smiled at her nervously. “Let’s start with the mehndi,” I said. She led me to the conference room of the hotel. The chairs and tables had been pushed off to the side, and the space was filled with women sitting cross-legged on the floor, their arms outstretched on pillows while artists illustrated intricate flowers, suns, peacocks, and butterflies on their hands and feet. Because it takes several hours for the mehndi to dry, the event brings female family members from both sides together for long talks, teasing, and advice for the wife-to-be.

I was introduced to the bride as I waited for my own mehndi to dry. “Are you excited?” I asked her.

She nodded but whispered, “I have some prewedding jitters.”

I smiled back. “So normal,” I assured her. “I had to have two, maybe two and a half, glasses of champagne just to get down the aisle. Just breathe and enjoy it. And don’t let your mother-in-law boss you around too much on the big day.” She let loose a girlish giggle. Some things were universal.

All the women in the room wanted to know everything about me. After we took many selfies, I explained I was recently married. An older woman in an intricately beaded Pepto pink sari insisted I call her Auntie and pinched my hip fat, her bangles jingling against my side, and shook her head. “Too skinny.” The older generations in India believe a fat bride is a happy bride. God bless them. “Do you feed your husband?” she asked in a mixture of English and Hindi, reminding me of the old Israeli women on the shore of the Dead Sea.

I nodded. “Too much,” and I made the motion of a circle extending from my belly region. “I’m making him fat.” This pleased them. “Do you have a good biryani recipe? I can give you one. Make sure your husband is happy and fat and strong,” they told me. “Make your home pleasant.”

“Our home looks rad. Throw pillows everywhere! The Danes helped with that,” I said to confused stares.

At most of these suggestions the younger women rolled their eyes. Marriage is undergoing a sea change in India. The Indian subcontinent has long been a universe where women were subservient to their fathers and their husbands. Both female infanticide (the killing of girl children in favor of boys) and bride burning (disfiguring a woman in order to obtain a new wife with a higher dowry) have been realities for centuries. Until as recently as 1988, distraught widows would hurl themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres in a suicide mission called sati, which translates in ancient Hindu texts to “good wife.” The rationale behind this is that the life of a woman without a husband is not worth living, so she may as well die with him. The practice is outlawed, but some of that sentiment remains: that a woman cannot be truly fulfilled unless she has a husband.

Almost all of the older aunties in the room had had arranged marriages. India maintains one of the lowest divorce rates in the world, and studies have shown that Indian arranged marriages based on community ties, caste, education, business connections, and potential compatibility often receive high marks in the satisfaction department in the long run.

“It’s better when the family is involved,” one of the aunties told me.

“We’re looking out for your best interests,” another chimed in.

“You young people focus too much on love. Love is not rational. When your family chooses a husband, we choose him based on his character,” the first said.

But what if you don’t want to have sex with his character? I thought, though I bit my tongue to keep from saying it out loud. My expression must have given me away, because all of the older women laughed in unison.

“The parents work hard to find someone you’ll enjoy being with,” one of them told me. It was similar to what I’d heard from the Maasai. An arranged marriage was a partnership between two families where the bride and groom were assigned the roles of husband and wife. In searching for partners, the elders took into consideration character, family bonds, education, and compatibility, things that are often overlooked in the throes of early romantic love. This careful consideration, the older generation assured me, was what made so many arranged marriages stick. It may also have something to do with expectations and choice. There’s plenty of research on consumer behavior (and in Western cultures finding a partner is often like shopping for a new car) that claims having too many options can lead to dissatisfaction with the final decision, even if someone has made a good choice. “Psychologists and business academics alike have largely ignored another outcome of choice: More of it requires increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don’t work out,” writes Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It goes back to the lettuce experiment. When expectations are lower, as they often are with an arranged marriage, satisfaction is often higher.

Still, I didn’t meet a single woman my age who was having an arranged marriage. That didn’t mean their parents weren’t trying. I heard one tale of a single woman whose mother and local priest were desperate to find her a match. She gave them the benefit of the doubt when they found a college-educated man from Mumbai now working abroad. He claimed to be a Secret Service agent for President Obama here in the United States. The pair corresponded over e-mail for three months before she learned that it was all a lie. He was an ordinary IT consultant who’d only ever seen Obama on CNN. The cover story was created by the suitor and his mother to make him seem more attractive to Indian women back home.

“Women are more independent now,” my friend Narayani, an editor for the Times of India newspaper in New Delhi, told me. Narayani has raised two daughters. She’s divorced and happily travels the world with her own two sisters. “The deterrent for divorce here hasn’t just been the cultural stigma. It’s been financial insecurity. Now more women are working, and that means they don’t have to stay in an unhappy marriage. It means they can postpone marriage. They can choose a love match or even choose not to marry at all.”

My other friend Sunitta Hedau, who met up with me in India for this trip, is the perfect embodiment of the evolution of marriage for young Indian women. Sunitta is sassy and Bollywood beautiful, with dark hair reaching halfway down her back and the longest eyelashes you’ve seen on a human being. She was born in Mumbai, the youngest of four girls in a conservative family. Longing to travel and see the world, she moved to London and then the United States as a successful luxury travel adviser and finally started her own business, Kora Journeys. For years her conservative mother tried to set her up with a nice Indian boy back home, parading eligible but unsatisfactory bachelors in front of her when she returned to Mumbai for the holidays.

“At first she wanted me to marry a boy from the same caste. Then she relented and said to marry a nice boy born in India. A few years later she said I could marry an American as long as he was also Indian. Now she’s given up and just told me to marry whoever makes me happy,” Sunitta told me and tasked me with helping to find her a suitable love match.

Diana Hayden, a former Miss India, recently had a baby from a frozen egg at age forty-two. “A career woman need not think about her biological clock and get pressured into getting married earlier than she wants to or have a baby when she isn’t ready,” Hayden said after she gave birth.

And during my visit to the subcontinent, everyone was buzzing about a new Bollywood movie, Ki & Ka, where the main female protagonist has a successful career while her husband stays at home and attends to the housework. All over the cities you see billboards marketing big-ticket items to women—cars, motorbikes, and even houses. One advertisement even targets women for home loans: “Home loans for the ones who make the HOME.”

At first I assumed this liberation from the traditional marriage system would be confined to the modern urban centers in Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata, the places most influenced by Western media, where newly engaged women wear diamond engagement rings and trade their brightly colored wedding saris for white wedding dresses. I began to wonder what I would find if I left the cities for the rural villages and tribal areas.

And so later that week (I was sorry to skip the rest of the wedding festivities), I traveled to the state of Assam in the northeast, one of the wildest, unspoiled, and least visited parts of the country, to find out.

Sunitta and I were welcomed into a traditional home of a woman who belonged to the Mishing tribe, an Assamese farming and fishing village where the houses stood on tall stilts to keep them safe from the frequent floods. It’s not uncommon for entire towns on the banks of the river to be completely washed away during monsoon season. This was a place where women depended on having a husband to survive the harsh realities of monsoons, fires, animal attacks, and famine. The privilege of independence was not an option. The men farmed and fished and went off in search of odd jobs in neighboring towns while the women often stayed home taking care of the animals and the children.

Hens and pigs made their homes beneath the huts, and when I arrived piglets scurried to meet me with squeals of delight. The children were more reserved, hiding behind their mothers’ legs. One little boy in particular caught my eye. He was missing his two front teeth and wore a T-shirt, clearly a donation from somewhere in the West, that proclaimed: “Be a good person, but don’t try to prove it.”

I stumbled, trying to climb the narrow ladder that led into the raised hut, using a long bamboo rod for balance. The simple room was meticulously neat, saris carefully folded on a shelf over the bed, pots and pans precisely stacked in the corner. There was no clutter, no mess. This single room was home to six people. Like the Maasai and Samburu, this was a tribe of women who took care of the other women. All of the jewelry and silks in the village are community property and there’s no concept of ownership. They pass the pretty things along to whoever is celebrating a wedding or special occasion.

Lae, a forty-five-year-old woman with small eyes and a broad face, offered me tea. A group of women introduced themselves to Sunitta and me. We laughed and clapped as we learned the youngest of the women present was also named Sunitta. The pair of Sunittas immediately hugged and took a selfie together.

Sunitta was twenty and had left the Mishing village to attend college. She had just gotten married two months earlier to a boy she had chosen.

“I found him and I brought him home to my parents and I said this is the boy I want to marry,” she told me. “My mother was angry. She beat me.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and then beamed with pride at her daughter’s boldness. “It was not so bad. I got used to the idea. I’m happy for her. I want her to be happy.”

“But what does it mean to be happily married?” I pressed.

Lae squinted at me. “You Westerners make marriage too complicated. Be happy for the things marriage gives you. We have our husbands. I trust my husband. We have our pigs and our goats. We have our children. We are happy. You want too much. Be thankful, because you never know what tomorrow will bring.” Those were strong words coming from a woman living on the banks of a river that regularly sweeps away entire villages in the blink of an eye.

I flashed my friend Sunitta a sheepish smile and thought about all of the things we expect our marriages to give us—great sex, perfect companionship, best friendship.

We enter marriage thinking our spouse is going to solve all our problems and fill all our voids. We too often take all of our unmet needs and desires and gift wrap them in a pretty dress and tuxedo and present them to our spouse at the altar.

Not only do we want someone who can guess our feelings before we know them ourselves, but we also need that person to replace the empty toilet paper roll. We want them to be selfless, nurturing, and endlessly entertaining while they tell us we look beautiful in our skinny jeans.

The women in the Mishing village had simple expectations for marriage, unsullied by a lifetime of movies starring Meg Ryan and women’s magazine articles, the ones that provide a litany of things we “deserve” from a relationship. The role of the husband in this village was not the role of savior, life coach, cheerleader, or best friend. It was husband, plain and simple.

Maybe we do ask for too much.

Americanized Sunitta was fired up. “It’s so true, don’t you think? We’re such brats! In America we cry over the things we don’t have rather than cherishing the things we do have in our relationships.”

I thought about my friend Raakhee then. For as long as she could remember, Raakhee had envisioned her family in a very certain way: a husband, three kids, a life filled with laughter and travel and a summer beach house. Then when her first daughter, Satya, was just ten months old, she was diagnosed with stage 1 neuroblastoma, cancer. It required two surgeries and months filled with hospital stays and uncertainty. It was a nightmare, but Satya came out of it a healthy, happy, badass toddler who adores leopard print pants. Raakhee later said that the nightmare became an opportunity to think about everything they had to be grateful for. “It’s not just that we appreciate what we have together—although, trust me, it’s hard to get pissed about potty training or being on a school wait list when your kid’s résumé already includes ‘cancer survivor.’ Getting through cancer was like obtaining a master’s degree in gratitude. Agan and I are grateful for her life; we are grateful for our life together….I want, finally, to slow things down. Savor them. Take stock of what we have rather than continue to visualize what we want.”

And, on the advice of a friend, Raakhee keeps a gratitude journal of three things she’s grateful for each day. “The first entry, every single day, is Satya’s health. It seems cliché and simple, but I need to remember never to take it for granted.” Now, I’ve known Raakhee for a long time, and she isn’t the kind of person who throws “gratitude” around lightly. She gets that it’s hard to be grateful. But she promised me that it helped her marriage. “Marriage can be annoying, overwhelming, and stifling. But like with most difficult situations, those feelings are often fleeting. Mostly marriage is lovely, a guarantee that you always have someone in your corner. Someone who doesn’t just love you but will face the world and all of its bullshit with you. So gratitude is important to work through the little annoying shit so it doesn’t fester, grow, and start to infect all the good stuff. It helps me to see Agan for the man that he is to me, to the world, and to Satya, as opposed to the asshole who didn’t empty the dishwasher,” Raakhee told me.

Raakhee’s story reminded me that I should find ways to be grateful, to never take my life with Nick for granted, even as we faced a situation we didn’t plan for.

“How do I show I’m thankful?” I asked Lae back in the Mishing village.

She looked at me as though she didn’t understand the question, and I repeated it for the translator. Lae gave a small shake of her head. “You just feel it.”

The women I met in Assam kept telling me I had to seek a blessing for my new marriage and offer thanks for my husband at the Kamakhya Devi temple in Guwahati, a sacred place of pilgrimage for India’s 830 million Hindus, particularly for women. One of its more playful nicknames, one never used around men, is the Temple of Menstruation. In Hindu mythology Lord Shiva, the god of transformation, was so distraught when his wife Sati, also known as Parvati, committed suicide that he distributed 108 parts of her body around the world to be worshipped in different temples. Kamakhya is the place where her yoni, or vagina, fell, and some Hindus believe the temple actually bleeds. It’s one of the few temples in India where animal sacrifice is still allowed. Men, women, and entire families visit the temple to seek blessings, but I’m told that many Hindu women come here specifically to ask for a long and successful marriage and fertility. In return for asking for these blessings they also give thanks for their husbands and for their families. It was early in the morning when Sunitta and I began our walk to the temple, perched high on a hill. We passed women in brightly colored saris walking to work, beggars lying prone and naked in the streets, and boys playing cricket in the gutter with a stick and deflated tennis ball. Street dogs with peculiar poise and confidence pushed their way past us as if they had somewhere very important to be, and everywhere the holy cows took up as much space as possible, batting their beautiful eyelashes at passersby. An astrologer with Hindi tarot cards squatted shirtless on the ground next to three green parakeets chirping from their cage. Closer to the temple pilgrims grasped live white pigeons by their wings and new brides with beautifully mehndied hands and arms led scruffy black goats covered in garlands of marigolds up the formidable stairs. The sacrificial goats pranced delicately up each new step, oblivious to the fate that awaited them past the temple gates.

Priests at Kamakhya wear red robes instead of the usual white or saffron to represent the blood of the temple. Crimson handprints and fingerprints cover every available surface, part vermilion powder, part blood. No shoes are allowed in the temple, and the bottoms of my feet would be stained red until long after I returned home to America.

Hindus bring presents to offer the gods and goddesses when they visit a temple. Because I was praying to Parvati, a female goddess, I was told to purchase pieces of gold and red fabric for her sari, kohl for her eye makeup, betel nuts for her lipstick, and plenty of bangle bracelets. Bangles, more than a ring, show that a woman is married in India, and only married women are allowed to offer the bracelets to the goddess.

I asked one of the temple priests, Nilambar, a bald, spectacled man with a calming demeanor, what most women asked the goddess for. Were they very specific? Did they ask for a bigger house, a better job, a smaller waist, a more attentive husband, a vacation somewhere warm and sandy?

“You can ask the goddess for whatever you want,” he said with a wide smile, stooping to pat a doomed baby goat on the head. “Most ask for a long and prosperous marriage.”

“That’s it?”

He laughed. “What else do you need?”

To make my blessing I was also given two small terra-cotta pots with candles in them and two sticks of incense. It was imperative, the priest told me, that I light two candles, one for Nick and one for myself. The sickly sweet smell of animal blood and smoke overwhelmed me. It was so dark inside the temple that I needed to use my bare toes to grasp the edge of the next stair to keep from falling. I didn’t realize until that moment that my hands had begun to shake. I wanted to get this right. I wanted to truly give thanks for all of the wonderful things in my life. I wanted to mean it. I felt a tugging in my stomach and a stinging behind my eyes as though I’d burst into tears at any moment. A baby goat nuzzled at my foot; I stumbled and dropped one of my candles, watching as the terra-cotta shattered onto the hard stone floor. A woman behind me clapped her hand on my shoulder and stuttered in broken English. “No. You cannot use that. No. Bad.” I didn’t know what to do. “I just doomed my marriage,” I whispered to Sunitta. She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She looked behind her. “The gods are pretty forgiving. They’re cool. I promise.” I squinted through the darkness and the smoke at the priest, who appeared to be suppressing a laugh. “Light one and think of two,” he whispered.

Closing my eyes, I steadied myself. Light one and think of two. Light one and think of two. Light one and think of two. I thought about all of the times Nick had taken off work to come with me to my doctor appointments. I thought about the long nights when he had held me as I cried, scared about how long I’d stay healthy. Sometimes things don’t turn out as you imagined them, and no marriage is without its flaws, but in the grand scheme of things mine was pretty good.

As I moved the single flame closer to the inner sanctum, the hairs on my arms stood on end and the single wick broke apart. It became two tiny flames flickering around each other.