How to Be Married
Page 6
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, Nic
k 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.
“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?”