by Jo Piazza
“A lopsided contest always makes for a better story,” I said with a small smile. I’d heard that somewhere, but I didn’t really believe it.
“Saddle up!” cried the announcer. I stepped in front of Nick and gave him a brief peck on the lips.
“We’ve got this!” I lied.
Nick heaved me onto his shoulders and we were off.
Alpha Couple sped up the hill and became tiny specks in the distance within seconds. We moved forward slowly and steadily. Unable to see anything, I had to trust Nick to tell me when we were about to climb over a log or risk smacking my face into the obstacle. He had learned his lesson from our tempestuous practice runs in San Francisco and this time around warned me about obstacles in plenty of time.
“Log comin’!” he’d shout.
“We’ve got a hole in the ground! Watch your head.”
All I could see were his feet, moving slower and slower. The crowd cheered and shouted encouragement, which I worried was embarrassing Nick even more.
“Smack his backside,” they hollered. “Smack his ass!”
I did my best to balance my weight equally between his front and back, striving to make myself as easy as possible to carry, trying to breath in rhythm with his steps. A sense of impotence came over me. What else could I be doing to make this easier for Nick?
I could be his biggest cheerleader or, as Peter Pearson had suggested, his coach.
“You’re the best! Don’t drop me. I love you. Don’t drop me. I love you. You are the greatest husband in the history of husbands! Don’t drop me. I love you. Don’t drop me,” I hooted, high on adrenaline. “I love you so much, baby!”
And he didn’t drop me. We crossed the finish line in two minutes and twenty seconds, the longest race time of any team that hadn’t dropped a wife. Yes, several wives were dropped. Nick was out of breath, muddy, and freezing.
“This is the first major hurdle we’ve gotten over as a couple. I kinda can’t believe we did it. We agreed to do this crazy-ass thing together and then, you know, we did it,” Nick babbled on, in possible shock. He wrapped me in an enormous hug. “You know, Squeaky, this taught me a lot about having a sense of humor about setting expectations for things. I’m just happy I didn’t drop you. Also I think I threw out my back.”
I posted pictures on Facebook of us slogging through the muddy pit with the caption “We may not have won the North American Wife Carrying Championships, but at least Nick didn’t drop me.” My friend Matt pointed out, rightly so, that “Nick Aster isn’t just not dropping you. He’s holding you up!”
And he was.
Soon after we made it home from the race and the wedding, we learned we’d been approved for our mortgage, which opened the door for even more paperwork and appointments. I don’t want to give all the credit to the wife-carrying competition, but it felt like we were in a better place to handle it all together, trusting each other to work in our team’s best interest. I took care of the inspection process. He fought with the bank to lower our interest rate while I negotiated the lowest price possible with a moving company that may have been run by the Mob. We divided and conquered, and our newfound commitment to teamwork kept us from wanting to kill each other through the process.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Nick said, once it was all over and we’d forgotten how many times we had to search the city for fax machines.
“It was terrible,” I disagreed, taking one final look at Nick’s bachelor apartment. “We’re never buying a home again.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’d rather run up a ski slope with you on my back thirty more times than get another mortgage. It looks like we’ll have to live in the new place forever. I hope you really like it there.”
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—MAYA ANGELOU
We bought a home. We own a home. We’re homeowners.
Gahhhh! What next?
After all the buildup, the paperwork, the meetings, the fretting, the faxing, we had done it. We closed, a verb I still didn’t fully understand, on our own very small part of the American dream.
This colossal marker of adulthood felt almost more significant to our marriage than the wedding.
I don’t know what I expected—a party, balloons, someone to welcome us into our new place with a banner that read YOU’RE REAL GROWN-UPS NOW? Someone to hand us cloth napkins with napkin rings, stamps, and Tupperware containers with matching lids?
The day of our closing our real estate agent met us after work, shook our hands, and handed us a plastic bag filled with two dozen unmarked keys. No one congratulated us. There was no banner, no parade, just two people squinting in the last light of the day, smiling dopily despite their new burden of gigantic debt.
“Good luck,” the agent said and drove off, her job with us complete, her commission paid. She’d seen every bank statement I’d had since college, helped me sign away my life savings, and held my hand at the title office, but our brief intimacy had come to an end. It took Nick and I an hour to figure out which key unlocked the front door.
Soon after, one Saturday morning, we sat in a tableless dining room eating off the two plates we kept washing and reusing until we’d located their mates. I assured Nick I was going to get all of this new-apartment chaos under control. “I’m going to learn how to take care of the house. I’m going to be a homemaker,” I announced.
“Okay, Sugar. Just don’t burn the place down,” my husband said with a mixture of skepticism and curiosity. He walked into the kitchen to turn off the toaster I’d left on and then opened a window to let out the smoke.
When we got married, the problem wasn’t just that I didn’t know how to properly take care of another person. The problem was I hardly knew how to take care of myself. For a long time New York City fulfilled the duties of being my spouse. In the city that never sleeps there’s always someone who can do anything for you. When I first moved to New York, I lived with two roommates in a one-bedroom apartment I could barely afford. I ate all of my meals at work events, filling up on passed appetizers and champagne, wrapping bite-sized brownies in napkins and hiding them in my purse. We never set foot in a grocery store.
As I grew into jobs with higher salaries and more responsibilities, I worked late and got cheap takeout from Seamless, ordered in the back of a cab on my way home and delivered warm, ready, and delicious to my door before I went upstairs. I dropped a bag of laundry off every Monday morning and picked it up, clean and folded, on Tuesday. I let the apartment get messy. This was the check and balance on my love life. Did a guy like me enough to wade through an ocean of dirty underwear just to get to my couch or my unmade bed after a date? Once a month a wonderful woman named Wencess came to clean my apartment. She scrubbed the bathrooms, mopped the floors, changed the sheets, and left me lovely notes reminding me to thank Jesus. I did thank Jesus many times for Wencess. My trash disappeared down a chute at the end of the hallway and someone even washed my windows twice a year. Like a 1950s working husband, I didn’t have a care in the world when it came to home economics.
“And how do you plan to do this?” Nick kissed me on the cheek and nibbled the black bits on his burned toast.
“I don’t know yet,” I said and shuffled off to sit on the couch with my laptop to figure out how to bake a chicken.
One of my personal heroes, the writer Nora Ephron, wrote: “Whenever I get married [Ephron was married three times], I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride’s disease.” That’s exactly how I feel about Pinterest. I never looked at the site until the months leading up to my own wedding. But now I consider the Web site to be my own personal bride’s disease, a place where I can ask, without shame, the most basic of homemaking questions.
How do I get the duvet on the comforter without climbing inside of it?
The burrito method. Lay the duvet on top of the comforter. Safety-pin the corners. Roll it like a burrito. Invert
the duvet cover on itself. Roll it back. (This changed my life.)
What is a lemon zester and what do I do with zest?
It’s like a cheese grater, and you use bits of the lemon rind as garnish on desserts and in cocktails.
How do I keep Christmas lights from getting tangled when I store them?
Wrap them around a wire hanger and hang them in your closet for next year.
How do I bake the best chicken ever?
Panko crumbs, butter, Parmesan cheese, and ranch dressing.
What should I do if my towels start to smell funny?
Baking soda and vinegar in the washing machine.
How do I tie my husband’s tie?
Cross, behind, over, through.
What do I do with leftover wine besides drink all of it?
Braise short ribs.
How do I get pet fur off all of the furniture?
Use a car squeegee.
But it wasn’t enough.
“We should go to Denmark,” I said to Nick later that week. While researching a story on the evolution of modern Scandinavian cuisine, I’d also learned that the Danish are a people who are particularly adept at creating a cozy and happy home.
Maybe it’s because the country is enveloped in cold and darkness for the majority of the year and making a cozy home is fundamental to not going insane. Maybe they just know something we don’t about being happy humans. Regardless, it’s a place where the concept of household coziness is so ingrained in culture and daily life that they have their own term for it—hygge, a word confusing to the American tongue that vaguely sounds like “whoo-gah” and involves an enthusiastic clearing of one’s throat. Its roots come from the Germanic word hyggja, which translates loosely into “feeling satisfied.”
“We don’t need to go all the way to Denmark. I can make anything hoog-hah,” Nick said. “Remember our second date?”
I did. After I’d been blown away by Nick’s Eagle Scout level of preparedness at LAX, we’d trekked to Joshua Tree National Park for my very first camping trip. On the second night a thunderstorm triggered flash-flood warnings in the park. We scrambled to pack our supplies and find shelter at a hotel for the night. Keen to impress me with his camping skills, in or out of doors, Nick went foraging for sticks in the posh Palm Springs resort’s garden wearing only the hotel’s terry-cloth bathrobe. He lit the gas fireplace and candles, poured two glasses of wine, and roasted s’mores for me over the fake flames. They were the best s’mores I’d ever tasted. I ate three in succession. “I think I might throw up,” I said that night. “But I don’t care. I want another three.”
“I live hoog-hah, pretty girl,” Nick said to me as he recalled the memory months after we’d gotten married. “I know what I’m doing.”
We ended up making it to Denmark anyway when Nick was invited to speak at a pair of conferences in Scandinavia. When I told friends I was going to explore the Danish concepts of homemaking and happiness, they scratched their heads.
“You’re going to Amsterdam?” they said.
“No,” I responded. “They’re totally different people, the Danish and the Dutch. The Danes come from Denmark. They’re Scandinavian, like Vikings.”
The truth is that even though I was a longtime travel editor, I was nearly as clueless about Denmark as most of my friends. I knew little except that it was the country where Hamlet lost his mind and that its capital city, Copenhagen, was home to the best restaurant in the world, Noma. Wikipedia informed me that Denmark is the smallest of the four Scandinavian countries, the farthest south, and is an archipelago that sticks out of the top of Germany like a lobster’s claw.
Of course, the Netherlands and Denmark do have some striking similarities. Gender equality is very normalized in the two countries, the social safety net is strong, and both nations prioritize family, quality time, and personal happiness over billable hours at work.
Denmark was the first country to legalize gay marriage and the first to allow gender changes without sterilization. They elected a female prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, in 2011, and one of the country’s most popular television shows, Borgen, is popular for depicting the life of a strong and independent female politician. The Danes’ love of gays, women, classy design, and delicious food won me over before we’d even left San Francisco.
“They’re a very smart people, the Danes,” Nick said once we’d landed in Copenhagen. “The Danish are very organized, like the Germans, but with a much better sense of humor.”
Denmark is most often named the happiest country in the world by the kinds of studies and stories that rank such things. They came in first in the United Nations’ World Happiness Report in 2013, 2014, and 2016.
Based on my limited knowledge of the Danes and their headline-making joy, I expected to be greeted by shiny, happy people milling around streets of gold and smiling like Moonies. But on first impression, after we landed in Copenhagen’s spotless airport, I wouldn’t have known these were the most blissful people in the world.
To start, they wear a lot of black, which is the color I associate with looking thin but not the color I associate with delight and joyfulness. On weekdays the city bustles with the same frenetic activity as any American city. The Danes are efficient and aggressive bike commuters. During rush hour and around midnight, when the bars close, Copenhagen’s bike lanes are more crowded than its car lanes.
But here’s the difference between Copenhagen and any busy American city: A normal workweek for the Danes averages about thirty-seven hours, and most Danish employees get five weeks of vacation a year. While Americans usually spend a disproportionate number of waking hours in their offices, Danes spend more quality time in their homes bonding with family and friends. Perhaps that’s where their focus on creating a cozy home comes from. They simply spend more time in their houses than they do in their offices, which is the complete opposite of how too many of us live our lives in the States. It was definitely the reverse of how Nick and I lived. We stared at the blank white walls of our respective workplaces for far more hours than we spent in our new apartment.
Our Danish adventure began splendidly. We’d been informed by fellow travelers that Copenhagen was one of the most expensive cities in the world, but Nick and I were surprised and delighted to learn the current exchange rates were in our favor. Nick ran the calculations in the first bar we stopped into, a charming dive called Escobar with pleasant graffiti on the wall that read, “Let all your pain be champagne,” where patrons as old as my grandmother sipped giant beers while wearing black twinsets. We invented our own system for figuring out how to convert the Danish krone into a dollar. We divided the amount by ten and cut it in half.
“These beers were, like, three dollars,” Nick said, plunking two generous mugs in front of us. Coming from San Francisco, where the average beer now cost ten dollars, this was a bargain. “It’s an exciting city, isn’t it, Squeak?” Nick said. “Doesn’t everyone look like they’re doing something interesting?” We clinked glasses and looked around at the Danes happily letting off steam after their thirty-seven-hour workweek, all crowded around candlelit tables or spilling out of the bar to drink their tall cans of Carlsberg on the street.
At dinner that night our entrées, a wild elk burger and arctic char, were just $10 and a taxi home $5. We were a happy (and wealthy!) couple in the happiest country on earth.
The next morning, my head cloudy from so much Danish beer, I woke to an e-mail alert from our bank.
“Shit! Honey, what did you say the exchange rate was again?” I asked Nick. He rolled over in bed and put the pillow over his face. I looked at the totals from the night before one more time.
“I think it may go the other way from what we were doing. We need to divide by ten and then triple it.” Those delicious Danish beers had cost closer to $16 a beer and the entrées had been $40. No wonder the Danish were so happy. They were making a mint off confused foreign tourists.
That afternoon, wiser and poorer, we decid
ed to take a walk around the city (because it was free), which is how we found ourselves admiring the Københavns Rådhus, the city hall.
Before I knew what was happening, I became a wedding photographer.
Weddings in Denmark tend to be low-key affairs that take place at the town hall. Danes marry on the later side, thirty-five for men and thirty-two for women. The country has the fourth-highest divorce rate in Europe, 42.7 percent, which is about the same as the United States, but the divorces are almost as low-key as the weddings. Divorces are cheap (under $100) and relatively painless. You can even file for them online. Danes explained to me that because female employment is so high and the social safety net is so strong, a Danish divorce is less likely to become a nasty battle over money, which can make the entire process much less filled with hate. Because divorces don’t tend to be acrimonious, there isn’t as huge a stigma attached to them. Many Danes who do get divorced tend to get married again and stay friends with their ex-wife or ex-husband. Some of them even celebrate their “divorce-aversary” together over beers and a well-cooked meal of elk and arctic char with their new partners.
And instead of paying thousands of dollars for a wedding photographer, the Danes just hand their iPhones over to foreign strangers, like me.
I snapped a photo of a handsome gay couple, both of them in matching blue blazers, one in perfectly pressed jeans and the other in khakis, with thirty of their family members smiling broadly behind them. “That was nice,” I said to Nick as we began to walk away. But then I was asked by a second couple to take their photo, and another and another after that. I was the most popular girl in the Rådhus. In the space of a half hour we saw more than twenty wedding parties (half of which I was now a member of) gathering on benches or in corners of the building, laughing and drinking champagne out of plastic cups. Some brides wore formal princess gowns while others wore jeans and white T-shirts.
