How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  This time Julio pretended not to understand my English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And then it was over.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Me too.”

  “That was hard.”

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

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

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

  “Here?”

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

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

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

  “You just want to have honeymoon sex.”

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

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

  “I daresay I liked it, Mrs. Aster.”

  “Want to go another week?”

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

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

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

  Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

  —HENRY FORD

  “Don’t drop your wife.”

  You just don’t hear that enough. One of my drunk relatives said it to Nick in reference to carrying me over the threshold, but Uncle Jack wasn’t in a position to give anyone advice about anything after all those Johnny Walker shots at our wedding.

  It’s good advice, in any case.

  We heard it again a month after we got married, the day we signed up for the North American Wife Carrying Championship at Sunday River, Maine. The Wife Carrying Championship is like one of those Tough Mudder races, but shorter and scrappier, on a gonzo obstacle course where men carry their wives over logs and hurdles and through a pit of freezing-cold water. When we signed up over the phone, we asked the organizers of the race what we needed to do to win. They were blunt, relaying in a thick Mainer accent, “Don’t droop yah woife and remembah to wok as a team.”

  Nick knew that if he dropped me I would post it on Facebook for all his friends, and his mother and her friends, to see. I knew this was the reason he was determined not to drop me. The second part of the advice was the trickier of the two. Working as a team wasn’t something that came naturally to Nick or me, two humans who had been fiercely independent for most of their lives. But it was time to figure it out, the team thing. We were about to encounter the big-life-decision things that happen after you get back from a honeymoon. Not only were we going to compete in a wife-carrying competition, but we were about to buy our first home.

  Every reputable expert on marriage and everyone who has ever bought a home will describe property buying as one of the most stressful things a couple can do together outside of having a baby. I believe that if the government made getting married as hard as banks make getting a mortgage, more people would say, “Let’s just keep living in sin, because then I don’t have to sign my name a hundred and twenty-seven times.”

  If buying a house just a month after planning a wedding sounds quick, well, it was.

  We’d swiftly outgrown Nick’s cramped, rent-controlled studio, a place where we could see each other no matter where we were sitting, with the exception of on the toilet (if we closed the door). When I moved in, the place was neat and clean, but it still smelled like boy. The walls were a matronly shade of peach, and when I remarked on them Nick just shrugged. “They were like this when I moved in.” I’d e
xpected some feminine decorating touches from his last girlfriend, a sweet girl who was into canning pickled vegetables, but all she left were a few old mason jars that smelled like cabbage. My things migrated around the apartment with no clear place for them, stacks of books beneath the couch, underwear and socks in the desk drawer. Lady Piazza was relegated to living under the bed. That made the bedroom, which was no bigger than the queen-sized bed, smell like a zoo. Renting a bigger place in San Francisco would have cost us a fortune and, oddly, it was more cost-effective for us to try to find something to buy. The owners of Nick’s building also wanted to kick us out so they could increase the rent by 300 percent. I had a little bit of money from a book I’d sold the year before, and since I’d grown up surrounded by financial instability, buying a home represented something important, something solid. Nick didn’t need anything besides me to feel stable. Left to his own devices my husband would be living in a van with a cooler filled with cheese, beer, and bananas. He’d catch his own fish, hunt his own dinner, purify his own water, and live happily ever after. Before we met, he and his friend Charlie used to go on excursions poetically named “burrito camping,” which literally meant heading into the wilderness with a tarp, a fishing line, and a hunk of cheese. If it rained, they would roll up in the tarps…like burritos.

  “I spent six dollars on that tarp and I had it for twenty years. It’s the best investment I ever made,” Nick argued when I suggested we might throw away the tarp to make room for other things, like towels.

  Nick had told me in Bobby Klein’s office that rushing into something huge like buying a home made him nervous. It was me that wanted to make the purchase and I know he agreed because he wanted me to be happy.

  The housing market in San Francisco is typically a playground reserved for millionaires with an excess of money, time, and assistants. As working journalists, Nick and I had none of those things. Yet just a month after our wedding we stumbled onto an elegant two-bedroom condo in a prewar Edwardian building for sale in a neighborhood that real estate blogs kept saying was on the verge of being really interesting. Built in 1902, the house had survived two massive earthquakes and had a charming, if ill-kept, backyard and bay windows with narrow views of the actual bay if you looked out of them at the right angle. From our bedroom we could see the Transamerica building, and hummingbirds dancing along the fence posts. Some magical alignment of the stars placed it within our price range.