How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  We retired to the dark wood-paneled bar and drank several of them, along with a glass of the local vino tinto, while enjoying a Swiss-style fondue. We struck up a conversation with an older gentleman named Keith from Minnesota who had been married for nearly fifty years. Keith was exactly the kind of guy I wanted to talk to. Fifty years! How do you stay married to the same person for five decades?

  “So, Keith, tell me your advice for a happy marriage,” I said, motioning to the waitress to bring another round, on us.

  He considered it and looked at Nick. “Always say, ‘Yes, dear,’ to your wife.” He chuckled in a way that made me question the sentiment, his jowly cheeks growing red from the pisco.

  The candlelight at the table played on Nick’s face as he grinned. “I’m starting to get my ‘Yes, dear’ down pat. Right, baby? I’ve been practicing it in Spanish, though: Sí, cariño.”

  “He’s doing okay. There’s always room for improvement,” I said.

  This kind of advice is a favorite among older gentlemen who’ve been married for a long time. The problem with it is I can never tell if they mean it. Do they genuinely allow their wives to make all the decisions, in a way of submitting to them or, is it a way of ignoring and placating them? Maybe it’s something that elderly men think makes them seem endearing to women half their age? It wasn’t Keith’s only advice. “When my son told me he was getting married, I asked him two questions: Does she ski and is she a Republican? Those are the things that really matter.”

  With the basics of salsa in place, we left Portillo and flew to the northern Chilean desert plateaus known as the Atacama. Our base was San Pedro, a tiny town of about four thousand people with a distinct hippie vibe. To get there we flew over broad, silvery swaths of alpine salt flats that Nick informed me were called salares in Spanish.

  “That’s where the flamingos typically congregate,” he told me. The salares were so white the flamingos looked even more pink on top of them, creating the illusion of a vanilla cake dotted with strawberry frosting. “In the rocks there we might get to see a viscacha. It’s a rodent that looks like a rabbit with a long tail. It’s ridiculous. We’ll find some.” Having dispensed this information, Nick returned to reading the in-flight emergency instruction manual in search of new Spanish words.

  “Did you know the word for ‘flotation slide’ in Spanish is tobagano?”

  We landed in the mining town of Calama and drove sixty miles west through an alien red dirt landscape. The road goes straight forever into a vast emptiness that vaguely resembles the American Southwest but is also truly unlike anything else on earth. A sign announced our location as “Patience Plain” as we crossed a vast expanse where the color of the sand slowly shifted from brown into yellow, then orange, then red, and finally a deep violet before rising into the snowy peaks of Andean volcanoes.

  “This is a pretty place to reflect on patience,” I said. Patience is derived from the Latin patientia, meaning “bearing, supporting, suffering, enduring, permitting.” Was patience what I’d need to both dance with and wed my life to another person?

  The desert has a different personality for each season. Some sections haven’t had rain for more than four centuries, making them among the driest spots on the planet. Others remain dry and salty for most of the year before blossoming for a brief month into a floriated paradise where more than four hundred types of flowers of all shapes, colors, and sizes blanket the desert floor.

  The terrace in the backyard of our hotel overlooked the Licancábur volcano, a somnolent giant waiting to be disturbed on the border with Bolivia, and our open-air shower allowed a view of the Milky Way, a sparkly curtain drawn across the sky, as I conditioned my hair. It reminded me of the top deck of that boat in the Galápagos where Nick and I had met. On the last night on that boat Nick and I stayed up much later than the rest of the passengers, stretching out on adjacent chaise longues and drinking warm Ecuadoran lager, trading life stories, each of us gathering the courage to make a first move. By strange coincidence we talked about Chile that night for at least an hour. Nick had once backpacked from Lima around Peru and all the way to the tip of Chile for six months in his twenties. During that trip he had come here to the Atacama, where he had been stranded overnight and lost in the Valle de la Luna with a bossy Israeli backpacker girl he’d met in a hostel. He hadn’t even kissed me yet, and I was jealous of a girl who got to be marooned in a desert with this handsome near stranger. Maybe that’s what compelled me to finally lean in close enough for him to kiss me for the very first time. I initiated the first move, and he closed the deal. It was a pretty equal division of labor.

  I got my own chance to explore the Valle de la Luna with Nick the very next day during a horse trek through the jigsawed landscapes of red rocks and sand. As we galloped up precarious red sand dunes and bellowed into the canyons to hear our voices bounce back at us, I pried information about the country’s low divorce rate, which still hovers around 3 percent, from our guide, Danielo, a sturdy thirty-seven-year-old who had come to the Atacama from Santiago on vacation fifteen years earlier and never left.

  I explained to Danielo that we were in Chile researching a book about marriage and trying to learn how to dance properly together.

  “We do have one of the lowest rates of divorce in the entire world,” Danielo said with a shrug as if he were ticking off baseball statistics. “It’s not something to be proud of.”

  Huh? I was confused.

  He went on to explain that the actual rate didn’t mean anything. For the past hundred years Chileans who had wanted to end their marriage had found ways to live apart from their spouse despite remaining legally married. And a lot of couples had just stayed in unhappy marriages. When divorce finally did become legal, the courts expected a rush for divorces, but that didn’t happen. The couples who didn’t want to stay together had already found a way around the law. The divorce rate is now ticking up higher and higher each year, but not with great intensity. The stigma around the concept of divorce will probably stick around for another generation. But something interesting is also happening. Civil unions, which were made legal in 2015 and allow for many of the same rights as marriage but are easier to legally dissolve, are increasingly popular among young Chileans, both hetero- and homosexual.

  “More young people look at that as a better alternative to marriage,” Danielo explained. “Like a contract they can renew if they continue to agree to the terms.”

  That was good. I liked that. There was something appealing about actively choosing your partner again and again.

  Danielo paused for a moment before telling us that he was divorced. “And it was awful. I did get the PlayStation.” As an afterthought he added, “And the kids.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He didn’t pause this time.

  “My wife and I were great dancers. That was the good part of our marriage, but it wasn’t enough. You don’t need to learn to dance. You need to learn to talk. Never stop communicating. The second anything feels weird, you talk about it. That’s what went wrong with my marriage. We stopped talking. We stopped communicating. You need to talk about everything. You share a bed. You need to share everything else.” This was progressive advice compared to “Yes, dear” and “Let the man lead.” And even though it had nothing to do with learning to dance and it came from a divorcé, it was the best advice we’d gotten in Chile about how to make an actual marriage work.

  Nick and I had only shared a bed full-time for two weeks. At night we still stayed up late asking each other questions, determined to make up for our abbreviated courtship. We discussed our hopes and goals, values and morals. We nattered on about how we’d raise our kids and what would happen if we needed to take care of a sick parent. We talked about religion and debt and about all of our ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. We asked the big question: How are you crazy? Because every person is crazy and broken in their own way.

  But, maybe we needed to dig even deeper about the everyday thi
ngs. For example, I hadn’t yet told Nick how scared I was to be living in a strange new city where he was my only friend. I hadn’t wanted to put a damper on the delight of moving in together and our approaching wedding. It was definitely something that made me feel strange. It was definitely something we should be talking about.

  We rode on through the Martian landscape, up and over another sand dune, the wind kicking up and sprinkling the fine dust into my face and hair. That dust would find its way into every bodily crevice and our luggage and eventually travel with us around the world for the next year in our bags. Danielo’s Chilean street dog named Pirate led the way, nipping our horses’ heels when they moved too slow.

  “My brother has a wonderful marriage,” our guide continued without prompting. “He and his wife have a tradition. You two should do this. They go away on vacation alone for two weeks every year. She goes away with her friends and he goes on a real macho trip with his friends. Then they take a two-week vacation just the two of them, no kids. They’re so in love. They say two weeks apart makes them miss one another…makes them long for one another.”

  Ovid, the Roman poet who lived during the time of Jesus and had three different wives, wrote something similar: “What makes men indifferent to their wives is that they can see them when they please. So shut your door and let your surly porter growl, ‘There’s no admittance here!’ This will renew the slumbering fires of love.” There was something to that. Since we’d met, I’d wondered whether Nick and I were infatuated with each other due to the long breaks forced on us by living on opposite coasts. I smiled back at Nick, who unsteadily bounced up and down in his saddle. He doesn’t love riding horses. He does it because I love it.

  “Will you get married again?” I asked Danielo as we trotted back to the stables.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know if I believe in marriage.” He paused. “I do believe in love. I love love.”

  Back in town that night, we asked everyone we met to teach us to dance cueca, but they all refused. The folks at the hotel said no. The bartenders said no. No one would teach us this damn dance.

  Even though most everyone in Chile knows about the cueca, has learned it, and has likely danced it, quite possibly at their own weddings, they’re loath to teach it to a couple of gringos only down in their country for a week. One of the reasons is that the dance has a mixed history. It’s believed to have local Indian and perhaps even African origins and dates back at least two hundred years. But when the dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973, he attempted to co-opt the cueca for his nationalist movement, demanding it be performed as the Chilean independence dance. In response, women began performing the dance alone, as a symbol of the men who disappeared during Pinochet’s reign. Today the cueca has evolved. There’s still the traditional cueca, which is often performed at weddings, but there’s also the new cueca brava, the original dance mixed with street dancing. It remains an integral part of Chilean culture, but one that isn’t readily shared with outsiders.

  “We can teach ourselves this dance,” Nick said over dinner. He was on his third glass of a Chilean cabernet he’d become quite fond of during this journey. “It’s all on YouTube. Baby, we can do this.”

  Everyone should watch videos of the cueca on the Internet. There are hundreds, maybe thousands. There are instructional videos and competition videos, most of which consist of teenagers trying to win large cash prizes. The juvenile cueca competition in Chile is like Dancing with the Stars, but for indigenous towns and villages in South America. They’re deadly serious about it, and the champions from each town are as famous as reality television stars. One video, “Campeones de la Cueca,” has more than a half million views.

  We watched a half dozen of the performances and read a detailed list of cueca instructions. It’s a dance of flirtation, courtship, submission, and union condensed into seven minutes. All together there are eight steps. The first is referred to as “the invitation,” during which the man offers his arm to the woman. Next he positions her in the middle of the dance floor and then moves a few meters opposite her. He claps with a mighty vigor and the dance begins. The dancers complete a full circle around the room, waving napkin-sized handkerchiefs in circles in the air. Next up is the pursuit. The man’s steps become more aggressive as he dances closer to the woman. She retreats, barely escaping him each time he draws near. Suddenly the dancers move to opposite sides of the room. They each appear to “sweep” the floor with their feet in a metaphorical clearing of the past. Both of them stomp on the floor, the man forcefully and the woman ever so daintily. He reaches for her again. This time she accepts his arm. They finish the dance, locked together in an embrace.

  After watching several videos, Nick felt confident. “Boom!! I’ve got this.” He took a slug of his wine and grabbed two full-sized bath towels from inside the shower to use as handkerchiefs.

  “Go into the bathroom,” Nick said. “That way I can invite you to join me.” He turned on cueca music we had also handily found on the Internet.

  I stepped tentatively into the doorway of the bathroom. Nick gallantly bowed in my direction before prancing to the center of the room, waving his bath towel wildly.

  I laughed with a snort before remembering this was a dance of flirtation. I raised my towel above my head as we circled each other. Nick attempted to lasso me with his towel.

  Halfway into the dance my almost-husband grew more serious and began staring at me in a way that made me believe he was actually trying to seduce me. We each began to use the salsa steps we’d learned in the Portillo gymnasium, moving within inches of each other before backing away. I caught our reflections in the mirror. We began this dance looking ridiculous, but now we didn’t look half bad. We wouldn’t win even a juvenile Chilean cueca championship, but we looked like a couple who could dance with each other.

  We finally touched as the dance came to an end. I twirled into Nick’s arms and performed a giro that didn’t end with my stepping on his toes, and when he dipped me, no one fell down.

  “Do you think we’re ready to dance at our wedding?” I asked as we fell back on our bed.

  He leaned over to whisper in my ear, his breath warm on my neck. “Do you trust me enough to lead?” he asked.

  I considered it for a moment.

  “Sometimes.”

  Still, I tossed and turned that night mulling the question of whether anyone should “lead” in a relationship. Isn’t equality between the two partners what we should strive for? Did equality have to mean that no one led in a relationship? Wasn’t that a recipe for anarchy and chaos? Or could it mean taking turns, with each person leading in the things they were good at?

  Unable to sleep, I walked out onto our patio to admire the giant moon, stretching my arms high up into the air, thinking back to the tragic cries of the Inca princess Kora-Illé mourning her lost love during the full moon. When I brought my arms back to waist level, my eye caught the light glinting off the gold of my engagement ring.

  It’s no secret that engagement rings have long been a way for men to mark their territory before marriage. Some historians believe a pagan caveman would bind his mate’s ankles and wrists with braided grass to signify his control of her before they consecrated a relationship. Mythology claims the first engagement rings were used by the ancient Romans, rings with tiny keys attached to them that denoted a husband’s ownership of his wife. In the Middle Ages a betrothal ring was often considered to be an insurance policy for the bride’s virginity leading up to the wedding. Once diamonds were discovered en masse in South Africa, Tiffany & Co. introduced the classic six-prong ring setting in 1886. In 1947 De Beers, which controlled the majority of the world’s diamond mines, introduced the greatest and perhaps most important marketing slogan of all time: “A diamond is forever.” From then on it was the fate of American men to spend between one and three months’ salary on a single piece of jewelry. These days engagement rings get even more attention as brides-to-be give them their very own Faceb
ook posts, tacitly telling the world, I’m taken.

  I’d surrendered my independence during the dance, but there was another way I could assert myself here in Chile to maintain a kind of cosmic balance. I could buy Nick his own engagement ring.

  It isn’t uncommon for a man in South America to wear a ring after he gets engaged. In Brazil and in Chile both the groom- and the bride-to-be wear a plain metal wedding band on their right ring fingers to mark their betrothal. Following the wedding, the band is moved to the left hand.

  The tradition has made vague inroads in the United States. The Atlantic even published a story called “The Rise of the Man-gagement Ring,” which claimed 5 percent of engaged American males now wear one. I don’t personally know any. Naturally, American jewelry companies have done their damnedest to capture the male market in the same way that De Beers made a huge diamond engagement ring a must-have for women after World War II. In 1926 the department store Bamberger’s, which would eventually become Macy’s, tried to market a male engagement ring with over-the-top macho names like “The Pilot,” “The Stag,” and “The Master.” Imagine walking up to the jewelry counter in a place with a name like Bamberger’s and having the saleswoman ask you, “Is your husband more a Stag or a Master?”

  The main reasons the man-gagement ring hasn’t taken off in the United States are that American men are squeamish about jewelry in general and that we live in a culture that still promotes bachelorhood as continuing up until the wedding day itself. When we talk about bachelor parties, we still refer to them as the man’s last stand, as if proposing marriage weren’t an actual commitment. The Playboy Guide to Bachelor Parties has helpful sections like “How to Choose an Escort,” “Strippers and Belly Dancers or Midgets and Fat Ladies?” and “To Lie or Not to Lie—What to Tell the Bride Afterward.”