How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  Nick began fingering a pair of glass candlesticks.

  “We always had candles at dinner when I was growing up…big tall ones. I got to light them!” he said. I pictured a little blond boy delicately leaning over a dark wood table with a match. And then I thought about me, the messy little girl balancing a Lean Cuisine on her lap on our secondhand couch.

  “Do you want us to have candles on the dinner table?” I asked. Did I really marry someone who wanted to have candlelight dinners every night? I didn’t know what to make of that.

  “Oh, I don’t know. We don’t need them. I guess.” But his eyes said he wanted the candlesticks. I checked the price and decided to order something equally adorable but more affordable on Amazon or Etsy.

  We found pillows made from upcycled denim and rags, pillows made from Tibetan yak wool, pillows hand sewn in intricate Scandinavian designs. I even found a pillow with a crocheted cat wearing a fancy dress. Mindful of the high prices, I was careful to peruse only the bargain-bin throw pillows, which were still of a much higher quality and aesthetic than the ones from Target.

  The owner of one Danish boutique laughed at me as I tripped in her shop, arms piled high with cut-price Scandinavian throw pillows and an alpaca-wool blanket that would perfectly hide that red wine stain on the couch.

  “Are these for gifts?”

  “No,” I said. “For our house. I’m buying hygge.”

  I would call the noise she made a snort if Danish women weren’t too proper to ever snort in public.

  “You can’t buy hygge,” she said. “Getting hygge is a feeling. You have to make your own hygge. You can do it just by spending time in your home with the people you love.”

  “With beautiful chairs?” I said.

  She sighed. “You should have beautiful chairs.”

  Since we’d bought our place, Nick and I had spent less than 50 percent of nights there. Even when we weren’t traveling for work, we were frenetically, almost pathologically, busy with weekend trips to visit friends or family, weddings to attend, or camping trips into the wilderness with Lady Piazza. Even through my homemaking experiments, our refrigerator would often stay empty for weeks at a time. Why buy groceries when you’re both leaving in a couple of days? I was often in the office for ten hours a day. Add on another hour for commuting, an hour for the gym, and then another two hours of preparing at home for the next day’s work. Factor in eight hours of sleep and that left two hours of time for family dinners, conversation, and general relaxation in our space. And rarely, if ever, would those two hours line up for Nick and me. Sometimes we’d never see the other one awake. We’d grown adept at communicating affection through sleepy tangled limbs.

  It couldn’t be healthy for a marriage to feel like we were living in a hotel, like two business travelers just passing through a shared space for a little while.

  On our last day in Copenhagen Nick and I rented our very own solar boat to cruise the canals alone. I picked up some biodynamically farmed red wine, snegles, and smørrebrød smothered in cheese and humanely raised meat. We cruised out to catch a glimpse of the famous Little Mermaid statue, surprised at how little and uninspiring she was compared to the hordes of tourists desperate to take a selfie with her. I left my phone back in our Airbnb for the entire day, Instagram be damned.

  “This is delightfully hoo-gahhh,” Nick shouted into the air, his words catching on the warm breeze.

  “The most hoo-gah-y hoo-gah of all,” I grinned. “We’ve got this.”

  But did we have it? In order to feel cozy in our home something else would eventually have to change. I knew we needed to carve out more time to actually be in our home together.

  She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, MADAME BOVARY

  “American men are afraid of American women. Can you blame them?”

  Poupie Cadolle, the CEO of one of the oldest and fanciest lingerie shops in France, told me this plainly and simply when I met her in Paris. “American women just don’t care enough about making their husbands happy.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” She nodded. Poupie believed it.

  How do you respond to that? I cared about making Nick happy. Didn’t I? I’d just ordered nice candlesticks for the dining room table.

  Poupie, a bold blonde with a companionable manner, has been happily married for more than forty years while running a lingerie company that has made her an anthropologist of human intimacy. She continued to deliver rapid-fire tidbits on why French women are better suited to being wives than American ones.

  “For a French woman, a beautiful set of underwear is part of her personality. She does not save it for a special occasion. She wears it because she wants to feel beautiful every day. American women wear underwear like a uniform.” (Mental note not to tell Poupie I’d been wearing the same threadbare white sports bra for three days.)

  “The French woman, she always aims to please her husband. She’s not mad that he would insist on her wearing a particular kind of underwear. She likes it. She wants him to tell her what to wear.”

  “French women love men. We love being married. We do everything we can to keep being married.”

  “I love men,” I insisted. That was a lie. I loved Nick, but I generally thought most men could be real jerks.

  “Men and women are not the same.” Poupie raised an eyebrow. “If you want to make a marriage work, you need to forget about your feminism.”

  Shit. She was making me nervous.

  “French women want their husbands to be happy, and it’s not because they are weak or stupid. I am not weak or stupid.”

  No one would ever mistake Poupie Cadolle for being weak or stupid.

  Weeks earlier in San Francisco, Nick and I went out for dinner with another couple. Our dining companions were around our age and had been married for five years. They’d dated for another five before that. Ten years total. Nick and I had ten months under our belts at that point. We were in no place to judge a decade-long relationship.

  She was early for dinner, and he was late. The look of derision in her eyes when he finally walked into the room made me want to get up and hug him and kiss him hello myself. Throughout dinner she consistently rolled her eyes at his jokes and spoke to him in a voice that should be reserved for very small children or bichons frises. In return he stared hungrily at the waitress’s ass as we debated whether to order a molten chocolate cake. This is sadly a common pattern among many of my married friends. After a year or two of marriage they become exhausted by their spouse and are quickly irritated, mentally downgrading them from lover to friend to an annoying roommate who never unloads the dishwasher. There are little things that bug me about Nick. Same for him. Nick wants to cry when I order an Uber instead of taking public transit. He doesn’t understand why I mix up the composting and recycling. He becomes a socialist philosopher after three beers, he corrects my grammar, forces us to take flights based on frequent-flier miles, and gets a horrified look on his face when I drink bottled water instead of tap. I despise his fancy Chemex coffeemaker because I don’t have the patience to wait for snobby slow-drip caffeine. He thinks I’m a jerk because I don’t tuck the sheets into the mattress.

  I look at my long-married friends and wonder if perhaps the quotidian nature of daily married life—the repetition, routine, and perpetual proximity of another human—makes it dangerously easy to become numb to whatever made you fall in love in the first place and to search for imperfections where you once only found delight.

  I’d recently noticed a degradation in our own conversations. We’d gone from thoughtful discussions of philosophy, global politics, and elaborate plans for the future to a running commentary on the dog’s digestive habits. “Did Lady Piazza poop today?” I’d find myself asking while I stood in the kitchen without pants applying deodorant.

  “Huge poop,” Nick would reply and pick a piece of lint out
of his belly button. “Biggest this week.”

  I kept pondering whether it had to be that way. Did familiarity necessarily breed contempt and complacency? French women don’t think it has to be that way.

  Next time you find yourself in Paris, notice the way French women’s husbands look at them. Even after years of marriage, having babies, losing jobs, losing elasticity in all the body parts that matter, flirtations with other people, failures and successes, husbands still gaze at their wives with an intense mixture of passion and curiosity.

  Nick was going to Paris to cover one of the biggest stories of his career—the COP21 conference on climate change. Presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, celebrities, and journalists would convene on the City of Light. I took a week off from work so that I could tag along and eat all of the cheese while I learned French women’s secrets for keeping the spark alive in their long-term relationships.

  Long before everyone was crowing over the wisdom in French Women Don’t Get Fat, I was already keenly aware of French women’s talents at imparting advice to non-French women. One of the most invaluable things I learned in my twenties came from an incredibly chic editor for French Vogue whom I once sat next to during a fashion show in New York. She looked at me, disheveled, barefaced, and smelling of last night’s cheap martinis early in the morning, and said, “Always wear red lipstick. No one will know you are hungover.” For the past ten years I’ve carried a tube of Chanel Rouge with me at all times—and it has served me well.

  “I’m going to pack like a French woman,” I announced the night before we left as I folded clothes into my suitcase.

  “I don’t know what that means, Squeak,” Nick said as he went about carefully packing the nine practical items he packs for every trip (a pair of jeans, two button-down shirts, a sweater, two T-shirts, a sport coat, dress shoes, and hiking sandals).

  I twirled like a ballerina and banged my shin against the bedpost. “Fuck! Ow! It means I’m going to be light and carefree.” My French friends have a universe of acceptable clothes that is quite narrow—leather jacket, skinny jeans, ballerina flats, and a trench coat. I told Nick that’s what I was planning to pack, along with a sweater that would fall effortlessly off my shoulder.

  “Is it effortless if you’re planning for it to fall effortlessly off your shoulder right now?” Nick said, a wry smile bending his lips.

  I just rolled my eyes. My intensely American need to be prepared for every possible situation defeated my desire to be French, and before I knew it my two suitcases were filled with four dresses, five pairs of pants, three pairs of shoes, five sweaters, two skirts, a cape, and three pairs of yoga pants…for a six-day trip.

  I landed in Paris an hour before Nick (separate flights maximize frequent-flier miles, or so I had been told). As I lined up for coffee and a buttery warm pain au chocolat in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I couldn’t help but stare at one particular couple in the café. He had a very French nose, bony and crooked, but not unattractive. It reminded me of Serge Gainsbourg’s nose, even though I couldn’t recall the rest of the French singer’s face. His hair was short but thick, and he wore a turtleneck in an unapologetically Parisian way. She was beautiful. But then, I’ve never seen an ugly French woman. They embrace their imperfections in such a confident manner that all French women appear beautiful, no matter the configuration of their features. “Let’s leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination,” the French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote. The French even have a phrase for beauty coupled with imperfection, jolie laide, which translates very loosely to “ugly pretty.” She was tall and reedy with thin lips and sharp cheekbones, elegant with a sophisticated insouciance. Her husband stared at her as though she were the only reason he had to live.

  We had a lazy day before Nick had to start covering the conference and spent it walking and talking and eating and drinking. The sweet smell of roasting chestnuts filled the air as we bought vin chaud on the street outside of the Louvre for just two euros. Some of my American friends claim that the French are snobs, to which I reply, “Would snobs heat up red wine in a pot and serve it in a Styrofoam cup on the street?” We lit a candle to Joan of Arc in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and ate frites at a bar, seated next to a dog eating a pork chop and wearing a tricolor French flag scarf around his neck. We walked and walked, avenues and streets and alleys all mingling together: rue du Temple, rue de l’Abreuvoir, cour du Commerce, rue Cremieux, avenue Winston Churchill, quai de Jemmapes. I stopped to admire the chunky love locks on the Pont des Arts—padlocks that couples write their names or initials on and lock to a public place to symbolize their love, tossing away the key together.

  “If I were going to declare my love and fidelity for you with a lock, I wouldn’t put it here with all the others. I’d find a nice empty bridge somewhere in Omaha,” Nick said.

  I wound my arm through his and admired the motley collection of padlocks, as the words love and fidelity lingered in the air.

  “What do you think of the French take on infidelity? What do you think about cheating…generally?” I suddenly asked, my brain leaping from love that inspires locks and chains to the kind of love that can induce you to break them.

  “Well, you should probably interview all eight of my mistresses,” Nick joked, pausing to take a picture of the Seine. I paused too. I have a serious problem with cheating. Namely, I have a problem with being cheated on. In the fifteen years before I married Nick I’d had a total of seven serious boyfriends, five of whom had cheated on me. One of them cheated on me with thirty-seven women in a single year, which I think is some kind of world record, even though Guinness has yet to get back to me. My father adored the attention of other women besides my mother, often to an egregious extent. One of my earliest memories is of my mother confronting my father’s secretary turned mistress in the parking lot of the grocery store. My chubby toddler legs kicked out from the cart’s basket as my mother screamed, “Stop destroying my family.” Yeah, infidelity was a serious issue for me, one Nick greeted with an annoying nonchalance. He’d never cheated on a significant other. “It would never even enter his thoughts,” his ex-girlfriend Jen told me. “Cheating is something that would make no sense for him. He would be so confused if another woman hit on him.” Or as Glynnis put it: “Congratulations. You won the marriage Olympics. Not only did you marry someone good-looking, kind, and caring. You didn’t marry your father!” Yet no matter how much I trust Nick, it had been impossible for me to rid myself of the knee-jerk reaction that all men, under the right circumstances, could be cheaters.

  Approximately 20 to 40 percent of American married heterosexual men will have an extramarital affair during their lifetime. The number drops to between 20 and 25 percent for American women. And yet a large majority of Americans say affairs are wrong, unacceptable, unforgivable! The French see things a little bit differently.

  According to research from the Pew Institute, only 47 percent of the French say it’s not okay for married people to have an affair. France was the only country of the thirty-nine surveyed where fewer than 50 percent of respondents described infidelity as unacceptable. This is compared with 84 percent of Americans who say affairs are wrong. Let’s be honest here. Both of our countries have a history of high-profile affairs, but the difference is that the French are less likely than American public figures to be castigated for them.

  The Emperor Napoléon was famously unfaithful to his wife, Josephine, despite declaring she was the absolute love of his life. In 1899 French president Félix Faure died in the arms of his mistress. When François Mitterand, the country’s longest-serving president, passed away in 1996, his wife and his mistress stood side by side next to his grave at his funeral, accompanied by both of their children. The famous French intellectuals Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre made a pact to follow their hearts into the beds of other people. And while they had their ups and downs, their open-minded philosophy did lead to a long and successful partnership, although they never married.
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  But not all French women tolerate infidelity with such laissez-faire.

  More recently, when it was revealed that François Hollande, the president of France, was having an affair with a journalist, his longtime partner, Ségolène Royal, chucked him out of their home. That’s not the end of the story; this is France, after all. Royal wouldn’t tolerate the man she loved sleeping with another woman. But she would work with him as a political ally. Several years later Royal became the president’s minister of ecology, de facto vice president, and closest adviser. The two maintain a platonic and healthy working relationship, but not a romantic one. I ran into Royal at a party at the Ecology Ministry during the COP21 conference and marveled at her poise, beauty, sophistication, and pink cashmere coat. All night I worked up the courage to ask her about her thoughts on love, infidelity, and long-term relationships, but after I was champagne-pickled enough to do so, I attempted to pet the back of that glorious coat and her security detail gently ushered me away.

  Unable to talk to the most powerful woman in France about infidelity, I asked my friend Hélène, a Parisian model who has two kids with her long-time partner, about her take on whether infidelity was something viewed more favorably in French relationships than in American ones. I thought she might hit me.

  “Do I wish for my man to fuck someone else?” she spat back. “No. This is not what I want, and it is a silly cliché that you Americans believe this is what French women want.”

  She softened once I apologized and mentioned my own history with infidelity. “It’s okay, my darling. You American women have a lot of stupid ideas. Here’s what it is like. Okay? I don’t mind if my president has sex with other women,” Hélène said. “That’s not my problem. But a man who disrespects his woman and hides it is not treating her right,” she said. “Of course I hope my man does not do it to me.”