How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  Nick didn’t have a bachelor party, not really. The weekend I went away to my bachelorette party in Charleston with the goal of eating all of the food, Nick went out to the Russian River in Sonoma County with two of his buddies to drink beer and float on inner tubes down the river. Little did he know it was Lazy Bear Weekend, a gay party weekend frequented by chubby men with beards. The river was filled with large, hairy homosexuals drinking rosé, instead of escorts and midget strippers.

  But many American men are still sent into marriage with a party filled with copious amounts of alcohol and sex workers. In the days before they walk down the aisle they use expressions like “the beginning of the end,” “tied down,” and “taking on the old ball and chain.” There’s no other event in a man’s life that has so much negative bias attached to it before it even happens. It’s no wonder most men don’t want to wear a ring until the very last minute.

  It didn’t matter to me that our wedding was just weeks away. I liked the symbolism of Nick wearing his own engagement ring. It put the two of us on equal ground before we said our vows.

  The next night, as Nick and I strolled down the main drag of San Pedro, dodging ebullient street dogs and backpackers with elaborate dreadlocks, I spied a shop with men’s copper rings in the window.

  While Nick picked out a llama wool scarf for his mother, I wandered alone into the warm jewelry shop carved out of an adobe row house. The ring I had my eye on was cool. Really cool. It was silver with three intricate braids of copper on the inside. I imagined all manner of scenarios for how I would propose. I could drop it into Nick’s wineglass or hide it in a molten chocolate cake. I could wait until the sun began to rise over the volcano and drop to one knee on our terrace wearing very tiny underwear. For a moment I wondered if he could possibly say no, if my proposal would give him an “out” right before our wedding. I had been reading about a tribe called the Garos on the border of Tibet and Burma. In their society the groom is expected to run away, to actually flee from a bride’s proposal of marriage. The bride’s family then chases him down and drags him kicking and screaming back to their daughter. There was a very small chance that Nick could flee into the desert and I would never see him again. This foray into the unknown terrified and excited me. I bought the ring and slipped it into an innocuous paper bag.

  A bitter chill had settled in the desert air and I shivered in my tank top and the pair of Nick’s plaid boxer shorts I’d worn to jog into town. Nick wanted to walk back to the hotel because he thought it was silly to take a cab just a mile. He was certain he could navigate his way back to the hotel through the dark and unsafe streets. Let him lead, I thought. You don’t have to be in control all of the time. Being able to get me home safely, powered only by his memory and our bodies, was clearly important to Nick.

  We set out down an ominous dirt road back to the resort. Even if it hadn’t been dark, there wouldn’t have been much to see—a few grubby hostels, corrugated iron shacks, and crumbling adobe walls. Eight minutes into the walk I was chattering away about looking for meteorites in the desert when Nick paused in the center of the road.

  “We’re lost.” He was clearly upset that his usually eerily accurate internal GPS had failed him.

  “It’s okay,” I said, shivering. “If we turn right we’ll hit the hotel.” I hoped I was right.

  We looked around. “Maybe we can cut across this field,” Nick said, heading into a pasture of cows. An angry German shepherd leapt out at us, snarling and baring his teeth. We sprinted a quarter mile down the road getting even more lost. I needed to have faith that Nick would lead us to safety…eventually. It wasn’t about being submissive. This was about learning to trust my partner. I had trusted Nick to lead when we danced and now I trusted him to rescue me from a rabid dog and death by freezing in the desert. He trusted me to tell him when he was wrong and maybe a little stubborn. We’d both need to figure out when to cede and when to take control. We hadn’t known each other long enough to know all our strengths and weaknesses.

  When we had been on our grand road trip to the West, Glynnis had astutely compared marriage itself to a kind of road trip. “Sometimes you’re in the driver’s seat, you know? And then, when you get tired, you need to let Nick switch and take over. That’s not submission. It’s an equal sharing of the road. I suspect the best marriages are when you’re both submitting to each other and allowing the other person to feel safest during their most vulnerable moments, and shine at their best.”

  Shaken from the near dog attack, I stretched my arms wide and folded them around my shoulders in a pinched hug. In the past, with any other boyfriend, this would have been the moment I would have said, “I told you we should have taken a cab,” and stomped back to town to hail my own taxi.

  Instead I dropped down on one knee in the gnarly bushes, the rocks scratching my skin, dust billowing into my nose, exposed and cold.

  Nick looked down, confusion flickering across his face.

  “I hate getting lost,” I said. “I hate it. It makes me nervous and angry and I’m freezing right now.” I pulled more air into my lungs. “But I don’t mind getting lost with you.” My voice quavered. I finally understood why men get nervous when they propose. “I don’t care that we suck at dancing together; I just like being the person you dance with. I don’t even mind now when you take the lead. In fact, it’s nice sometimes. I love you and I am going to love you for a hundred thousand years. Will you marry me?”

  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.