How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  Few things teach you the necessity of teamwork and compromise in a marriage more than buying your first home together. Case in point: When the seller rejected our initial offer, I unilaterally told our real estate agent to increase our bid by $10,000 without even glancing at my new husband. We didn’t exactly have thousands of dollars to spare, but it didn’t feel like a big deal to me. When you’re dealing with figures so astronomically high, it all feels like Monopoly money.

  “Do it!” I yelled into the phone like James Cramer on CNBC.

  I blame this knee-jerk reaction on the fact that when I was single I made all of the decisions about my life, from negotiating the price of my car to the terms of my leases and my salaries. But as soon as I said it, I knew I’d done something wrong.

  Nick stood and walked the two steps from our couch to the kitchen sink to do the dishes. He tidies when he is upset, which is a sweet habit for a husband to have.

  I followed him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  He grabbed the broom and swept the dog hair off the living room floor. As he picked up a tuft of Lady Piazza’s fur the size of a Chihuahua, he said simply and calmly, “I would’ve liked to be consulted. I would’ve liked you to at least say something to me before you spent ten thousand dollars more on the house.” He wasn’t wrong. And I felt dreadful that consulting him hadn’t even occurred to me. There are all these bits of teamwork that you don’t think about until you’re part of a two-person team created both by choice and a legally binding vow.

  There are other things too. For instance, if you’re a team, you shouldn’t open all of your wedding presents when your new spouse is away on a business trip.

  Nick learned that one the hard way. “I really didn’t think you gave a shit,” he said when I informed him it would have been nice if he’d waited.

  A good team member doesn’t let the dog sleep in the bed, even when her husband is out of town, because he hates it and believes dogs should not sleep in beds.

  Being a team means not eating all of the delicious chocolate the two of you bought on your honeymoon on your own in one go, even though you have your period and chocolate is the only thing that will stop you from wanting to kill someone.

  It’s about the big things as well. It’s about sorting through the byzantine mortgage application process, applying for three new joint bank accounts to manage that application process, digging up years and years of personal finance history in order to send that history by fax to a mortgage broker who clearly still lived in 1998. Teamwork is telling your spouse that it’s their turn to find a goddamn fax machine.

  We’d been told time and again that acting together as a team is one of the most important things for new couples to learn. “It’s not just important; teamwork is an imperative,” Dr. Peter Pearson, the founder of the Couples Institute in Palo Alto, California, explained to me shortly after our honeymoon. Peter and his wife, Dr. Ellyn Bader, are pioneers in the field of couples therapy, having founded the institute more than twenty-seven years ago and counseled thousands of couples from around the world. They’re the go-to marriage counselors for Silicon Valley bigwigs. If you’re a Facebooker married to a Googler and can’t figure out how to make your individual operating systems work together, they’ve got you covered.

  They’ve also worked as psychologists for the San Francisco 49ers, so they know a few things about team dynamics.

  Peter Pearson’s acronym “TEAM” stands for “Together Each Accomplishes More.”

  “When you do something on your own, you aren’t as successful,” he said. “You and your partner need to have an agreement to coach one another, to tell one another what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. When you start doing that, your relationship really starts to hum and the hidden capacities of the team start to surface.” His advice was to find something neither of us had done before and try to conquer it together, preferably something fun that didn’t involve draining our entire savings account, making the largest purchase of our lives, and taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

  Soon after we submitted all of our paperwork to find out if we were worthy of becoming homeowners, we found out about this batty wife-carrying race in New England.

  The concept for the race didn’t originate in Maine. It began in Finland, which made wife carrying (they call it eukonkanto) an actual sport in 1991. The grand prize of the competition is the wife’s weight in beer. No joke. The idea for the obstacle course actually dates all the way back to a nineteenth-century legend about a robber named Ronkainen, who was the overseer of a large band of unsavory criminals. In order to figure out who would be a good robber, one who was adept at pillaging and destruction, Ronkainen made his recruits race through an obstacle course carrying a woman on their backs. A woman, you see, is about the same size and weight as a bag of stolen gold, jewels, and china; it was also a helpful tool for Ronkainen to assess whether his recruits could help him steal an actual woman.

  We wouldn’t be able to make it all the way to Finland. (Good lord, it was $2,000 a ticket!) But by a bizarre stroke of luck, the North American wife-carrying qualifying race happened to be taking place the very same weekend, and in the same state (Maine) as my friend Leah’s wedding. How could we possibly say no?

  The wedding was scheduled for the afternoon and the wife-carrying race would end by midday.

  “We’ll be cutting it close,” I said to Nick.

  “So what? We’ll bring them your weight in beer!” Fair point.

  It turns out that there are a lot of ways a man can carry his wife across the finish line in the sport of eukonkanto, but by far the most popular method for racing is the “Estonian carry,” whereby the woman hangs upside down behind her husband with her legs thrown over his shoulders. It looks ridiculous, but it properly balances the woman’s weight and allows the husband’s hands to be free for climbing over logs and protecting himself when he falls on his face.

  Of course there are rules. A wife has to weigh at least 108 pounds. If she weighs less, she has to carry a heavy rucksack to make up for it. Neither husband nor wife can wear any sort of “equipment.” This means no harnesses, saddles, or ropes. If a contestant drops his wife, he is required to pick her up and continue carrying her to the finish line unless he is gravely injured.

  The Finnish wife-carrying Web site offers wonderful tips for how to become a “master wife carrier” that may or may not have been written by the author of Fifty Shades of Grey:

  The wife carrying is an attitude toward life. The wives and the wife carriers are not afraid of challenges or burdens. They push their way persistently forward, holding tightly, generally with a twinkle in the eyes….You can sense the excitement in the air during the wife-carrying competition. The core of the race is made of a woman, a man and their relationship. The wife carrying and eroticism have a lot in common. Intuitive understanding of the signals sent by the partner and becoming one with the partner are essential in both of them—sometimes also whipping.

  Yes, whipping. A wife who is being carried is encouraged to smack her husband’s ass like a jockey urging on a prize-winning steed.

  We made our first practice run just a couple of days before the race. Nick squatted on the ground while I flung myself over his shoulders so that my own head hung down below his backside. I grasped his hips for dear life.

  We teetered left and right and then toppled over.

  “You’ve got to work with me,” Nick said. “Get centered. Shift your weight.” I shifted my weight, but nothing made it any less awkward. Working together as one physical unit is not the way humans are naturally built.

  “Our limbic system—that ancient nerve network that controls our emotions, our desires, and our instincts, moods, and drives—is organized around immediate gratification and avoidance of pain and fear. That means that a lot of the time our bodies think about our own needs and we want our partner to adapt and bend to what we want to make everything easier,” Peter
Pearson explained to me about the challenges all humans face when trying to work in tandem. There was such an inertia to being single. We’d become so set in our ways. Nick and I were a classic example of two individuals calcified in our habits, our primordial limbic systems in tune with our individual survival, unaware that another team member even existed.

  “Because more people are marrying later, they have a better sense of who they are. They are more fully formed in certain ways, and their ideas about how things should be and how life should go may be different from their partner’s. A lot of people forget that they’re going to have to compromise in lots of ways when they get married because they’ve lived autonomously for so long,” Lori Gottlieb, a world-renowned couples therapist and New York Times best-selling author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, told me. She added that women can be particularly averse to giving up freedoms because we’ve worked so hard to establish ourselves and our autonomy. Having to compromise in a marriage can often feel like a much bigger loss than it really is because of what it represents. According to the experts, there was no quick fix that would instantly make compromise come more naturally to the two of us. The only thing that would rewire our brains for teamwork was practice.

  After years of perfecting the art of wife carrying, the Finns also realized that working as a team does not come naturally to many human beings. That’s why they warn potential wife-carrying participants that finding a mutually beneficial groove is crucial for the winning team.

  It is of great importance to find a mutual rhythm. If the wife on the man’s back is rocking out of time, the speed slows down. When the rhythm is good, the wife and the carrier become one in accompanying the motions of each other. It is advisable to practice in order to find the mutual rhythm before the competition.

  This is as true in marriage as it is in a race where the husband carries his wife upside down on his shoulders.

  Lori Gottlieb told me that many of the couples she sees are adamant about treating marital teamwork like work teamwork. “They divide everything fifty-fifty. Half the time one person does the laundry; the other half of the time the other person does the laundry. They split the bills down the middle and the child care down the middle,” Gottlieb said. “You can’t treat a relationship like a spreadsheet. It has to be more organic than that. Each couple needs to find their own rhythm, where each person is participating in a way that makes you both feel like you’re getting a good deal.”

  It was hard to say who was getting the worse deal when it came to wife carrying. Was it Nick for having to carry a person around on his shoulders, or was it me for having to dangle upside down with my head just below my husband’s butt cheeks?

  Nick and I attempted a second practice run. This time he was able to straighten his legs and I was able to balance on his shoulders. Then, without warning, Nick took off running a lap around the park.

  “I’m going over a bench,” Nick yelled.

  “What? No. You aren’t going over a bench. Do not go over that bench.”

  He was already going over the bench. He climbed onto the seat and then up onto the back as I dangled, helpless.

  “Keep your head up.”

  “Put me down!”

  “Let’s try going over this log.”

  “Seriously. Put me down!”

  “Just one log.”

  “Screw you.”

  After two more logs, I hated my husband.

  When Nick finally chose to stop, I was able to awkwardly unwrap myself from his body by doing a handstand and tumbling to the ground. I made my way to a park bench to rub my bruised tailbone and thought about a quote one of my creepy athletic coaches from high school used to tell our team before a big game: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

  We were not a success.

  The originator of the quote was not my pervy athletics coach, but Henry Ford (who was talking about building cars), but the quote can easily be applied to high school lacrosse, wife carrying, and building the solid foundation for a marriage.

  “Could your wife step on the scale?” the race coordinator asked Nick when we went to pick up our wife-carrying race packets at the rustic ski lodge at Sunday River.

  “That’s not necessary,” I said in what I believed to be an adorable singsong voice. “I weigh a hundred and thirty pounds.”

  “You’ll have to get on the scale if you want to compete,” the no-nonsense Mainer replied.

  One hundred and forty pounds.

  “More beer for you!” Nick and I high-fived.

  It wasn’t until we arrived at the race that we realized just how serious the people who participate in wife-carrying competitions really are about wife-carrying competitions. The other couples had arrived hours earlier, much closer to dawn, and were already practicing in the chill morning air as we lazily sipped our lattes.

  “That’s a steep-ass hill,” Nick said, gazing up at the ski slope.

  The other men leaped over log hurdles like gazelles or Namibians, their petite wives balanced delicately on their shoulders.

  “All of these people look very athletic,” Nick said, staring them down. “We are not very athletic.”

  “Let’s do a practice run,” I said, rubbing his shoulders. “It’s cool. We’ve got this. We’re a team.”

  We attempted a hurdle. Nick lost his balance and I fell on my head.

  “Sonofabitch!” Rubbing my head and glaring up at my husband from the ground, I began to think that a marriage is like a long and difficult race…or an obstacle course where you carry your wife up a mountain and through a pond of muck and sometimes, albeit by accident, drop her on her face. You can’t expect to glide through it. There will be obstacles and pain and incredible highs and terrible lows, and you need to keep moving through it together. I told my sentimental thoughts to Nick, but he was preoccupied.

  “Did you see that guy’s biceps?” he said about a wife-carrying challenger with upper arms the size of chubby babies.

  It was clear we were the least prepared couple to arrive in Sunday River.

  Contenders began to gather at the base of the ski slope, sizing one another up with elevator eyes and inappropriate questions.

  “What’s your wife weigh?”

  “How much did you eat for dinner last night?”

  “Are you flexible?”

  There were all sorts of couples competing. There was the Alpha Couple. They were the ones doing synchronized jumping jacks while emitting low, intimidating grunts. There was the drunk couple who kept crushing beer cans on the ground and chest bumping each other. You’d think they might be less prepared than we were, but they clearly felt no pain of any kind. There were the couples in matching costumes. Nick and I wore a motley mismatched mixture of yoga clothes and pajamas from the night before.

  There were the strangely swift older couple in their sixties and a pregnant couple who moved like a pair of cheetahs. The husband on that team was wearing a shirt that said, “I’m carrying two.” The wife wore a shirt that said, “I’m carrying one.” She was two and a half months along.

  “The doctor said it was fine as long as he didn’t drop me,” she said.

  There were the Russells, who were about our age but had their four kids with them, each of them adorably outfitted in his or her own Team Russell T-shirt. I loved the Russells. I wanted to put the Russells on our Christmas card and send it out to family and friends.

  “We almost didn’t make it,” Mama Russell told me before the race began. “But we wanted to make sure to do this together. Not much else bonds a couple like this. The key to a happy marriage, even after four kids, is to never stop adventuring,” she told me. Mama Russell was wiser than she knew. Scientists have long insisted that maintaining novelty in a marriage contributes to a couple’s general well-being, their happiness, and the success of the partnership. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine,
the same chemicals that are released in the brain in the early throes of romantic love (and also incidentally when you do a lot of cocaine). Continuing to adventure and try new things helps remind a couple of the feelings that made them fall in love in the first place.

  Researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook recruited fifty-three middle-aged couples to test this theory. One group was sent out on a pleasant but run-of-the-mill date night once a week. The second was sent off to do something completely new and “exciting.” The couples who engaged in the “exciting” evening showed a much greater increase in marital satisfaction than the group that simply had a “pleasant” date night. The wife-carrying competition was definitely not a pleasant date night, but it did qualify as a new and exciting experience. More than a year later we’d still show pictures of us in the Estonian position to friends at dinner parties.

  As we walked away from the Russells I asked Nick, “Honey, can we bring our kids here one day?”

  “Yes, Squeaky…if we survive.” We had entered this race with the intent to win. Now we just wanted to cross the finish line intact.

  As we approached the start line for our heat, we realized we were racing against Alpha Couple—last year’s wife-carrying champions. As Alpha Husband limbered up, he lunged from side to side, giant thigh muscles pulsing beneath spandex. Alpha Wife leaped into the air like a nimble little bunny.

  “This won’t be humiliating at all,” Nick said. My husband likes to be very, very good at things, and when he isn’t very, very good at things, he is mortified. He also hates showing weakness in front of strangers. This competition could be the perfect storm of awfulness for him. And I’d be on his back the whole time.