How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  They were wonderful. I read them both cover to cover. It was like hitting rewind and watching the beginning of our relationship again in slow motion. Even though life seemed so perfect in the pages of these books, I knew that at the time we had thought things were difficult as we planned the wedding and I moved my entire life across the country. But the only thing that came across in those pages was how happy we were and how grateful we were to have found each other. I loved these books. I wanted to find a way to keep expressing how thankful we were for the rest of our marriage.

  Gratitude may be trendy in San Francisco, but in India it’s a way of life. The concept of gratitude weaves its way into almost every facet of Indian culture and relationships. This doesn’t mean that Indians go around thanking everyone for everything all the time. Rather, the concept of gratitude, in many Indian traditions, is about giving earnest thanks, expressing humility, and letting go of your own ego in order to cultivate more bliss and joy for yourself and for others. It’s about feeling grateful instead of talking about it.

  When it comes to gratitude in a marriage, I think the Hindu monk Radhanath Swami put it best when he said: “I’ve seen small things like a thank-you save a marriage from total collapse…if it’s consistent. It’s a small thing but it makes a bigger difference than all the big things you’ve been working for.”

  Nick and I had both been invited by the Ministry of Tourism of India to visit the country as journalists, but a work emergency made Nick bail on the trip just three weeks before we were scheduled to leave.

  “That means we’ll be apart on your birthday. Your forty-second birthday!” I lamented after he called the airline to cancel his ticket. Nick’s birthday was also the anniversary of our engagement.

  Nick looked properly chastened. “I know, Honeypot. I’m bummed too. But it’s too stressful and we’ll celebrate my birthday and our engagement-versary in May. And can you please stop reminding me I’m forty-two.”

  I set off without him for three weeks, the longest time we’d been apart since we got married. Friends warned me that “India is different. Travelers either love it or hate it. There’s no in-between.” I was worried I’d hate it before I even left. The process of applying for an Indian visa is long and labyrinthine and practically requires you promise them your firstborn baby, along with a blood sample and a list of everyone you’ve ever slept with. I watched a grown man burst into tears and flee the visa office in San Francisco.

  “I can’t take it,” he screamed as he stormed out the door. “Screw India. I’m not going.”

  Once I’d endured the dozens of forms and questions from bureaucrats and flown the sixteen hours from San Francisco to New Delhi, where the temperatures topped 114 degrees, another two hours to Kolkata, and one more to the smaller village of Jorhat, I’d been prepared to feel as broken as the man who bawled in the visa office, but I didn’t. As soon as I landed, I immediately fell in love with India’s riot of colors and smells and her warm and welcoming people. Everything was brighter and more intense. It was hot and dirty and beautiful and exotic all at once.

  I didn’t have to look for it; talk about marriage was everywhere in India.

  The Indian man next to me on my flight looked at my wedding ring and asked why I was traveling alone. “My husband is at home in the States.” He looked at me sadly, as if to say, What kind of man lets his woman travel so far by herself?

  “The difference between American marriage and Indian marriage is heaven and hell,” he informed me (I hadn’t asked). “In the U.S. the sex is free. In the U.S. you believe in divorce. Divorce for us is a big deal. You might think us primitive, but we have one man and one wife. That matters to us. We protect our marriage.”

  “So do we,” I replied politely and unfolded my copy of the Times of India to conclude the conversation. What did he mean by that? We protect our marriage. Didn’t we also believe that marriage was sacred, a big deal? My eye landed on the marriage advertisements in the newspaper. Indian mothers and fathers still regularly place traditional classified ads in the hopes of finding their adult child a suitable spouse. They’re wildly specific, with requests broken down by caste, profession, religion, and language.

  Very b’ful & qlfd MBA 32/5’7” girls family seeks alliance from well settled business professional background.

  Established business family from Bhopal seeks alliance for their only son (MBA London). Smart. Handsome. Issueless. Divorcee. 5’10” 25 ½ associated in well established family business looking for beautiful well-educated girl (suitable height).

  The best marriage classified ad I’ve ever seen from India was specific and honest and perfect in a way you’d never see on a Match.com or OkCupid profile.

  27/6’1” MBA/Engineering graduate with a good job based in Mumbai looking for a Tamil Brahmin bride. Had epileptic seizures 5 years back. Lost one testicle in accident. Doctors certify above conditions normal now and will not impact marriage.

  It’s always wedding season in India, and since weddings stretch over many days, you can stumble onto a wedding celebration any night of the week. Later that evening, as I checked into my hotel, I admired the intricate henna designs on the hands of a woman in the lobby. She informed me, in perfect English, that she’d just come from the mehndi ceremony of her cousin. The mehndi is one of a multitude of rituals that happen during the weeklong Indian wedding festivities. During the mehndi the women, sometimes hundreds at a time, gather with the bride to have their hands and feet painted with henna mud. Some believe that the darker the color the mehndi stains the hands of the bride, the more she will be loved by her husband and mother-in-law. Others believe the longer the mehndi remains on the hands, the longer the couple is allowed to enjoy the honeymoon period after their wedding ceremony. Traditional healers in India told me the herbs in the mehndi sink into the nerve endings of the hands and feet, helping to calm the bride’s prewedding jitters.

  Who would have expected my offhand compliment to turn into an invitation to the wedding? But this was India! The cousins and aunties of the bride insisted I join them for the mehndi and wanted me to cancel my plans for the next week so that I could attend the entire wedding. “It’s fine. What do you have to do?” the sister of the groom asked me plaintively. “You’ll stay as our guest. You’ll come.” This isn’t so out of the ordinary. Indian families of all socioeconomic levels will often invite their entire village to a wedding celebration, sometimes up to a thousand people.

  I smiled at her nervously. “Let’s start with the mehndi,” I said. She led me to the conference room of the hotel. The chairs and tables had been pushed off to the side, and the space was filled with women sitting cross-legged on the floor, their arms outstretched on pillows while artists illustrated intricate flowers, suns, peacocks, and butterflies on their hands and feet. Because it takes several hours for the mehndi to dry, the event brings female family members from both sides together for long talks, teasing, and advice for the wife-to-be.

  I was introduced to the bride as I waited for my own mehndi to dry. “Are you excited?” I asked her.

  She nodded but whispered, “I have some prewedding jitters.”

  I smiled back. “So normal,” I assured her. “I had to have two, maybe two and a half, glasses of champagne just to get down the aisle. Just breathe and enjoy it. And don’t let your mother-in-law boss you around too much on the big day.” She let loose a girlish giggle. Some things were universal.

  All the women in the room wanted to know everything about me. After we took many selfies, I explained I was recently married. An older woman in an intricately beaded Pepto pink sari insisted I call her Auntie and pinched my hip fat, her bangles jingling against my side, and shook her head. “Too skinny.” The older generations in India believe a fat bride is a happy bride. God bless them. “Do you feed your husband?” she asked in a mixture of English and Hindi, reminding me of the old Israeli women on the shore of the Dead Sea.

  I nodded. “Too much,” and I made the motion of a circle
extending from my belly region. “I’m making him fat.” This pleased them. “Do you have a good biryani recipe? I can give you one. Make sure your husband is happy and fat and strong,” they told me. “Make your home pleasant.”

  “Our home looks rad. Throw pillows everywhere! The Danes helped with that,” I said to confused stares.

  At most of these suggestions the younger women rolled their eyes. Marriage is undergoing a sea change in India. The Indian subcontinent has long been a universe where women were subservient to their fathers and their husbands. Both female infanticide (the killing of girl children in favor of boys) and bride burning (disfiguring a woman in order to obtain a new wife with a higher dowry) have been realities for centuries. Until as recently as 1988, distraught widows would hurl themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres in a suicide mission called sati, which translates in ancient Hindu texts to “good wife.” The rationale behind this is that the life of a woman without a husband is not worth living, so she may as well die with him. The practice is outlawed, but some of that sentiment remains: that a woman cannot be truly fulfilled unless she has a husband.

  Almost all of the older aunties in the room had had arranged marriages. India maintains one of the lowest divorce rates in the world, and studies have shown that Indian arranged marriages based on community ties, caste, education, business connections, and potential compatibility often receive high marks in the satisfaction department in the long run.

  “It’s better when the family is involved,” one of the aunties told me.

  “We’re looking out for your best interests,” another chimed in.

  “You young people focus too much on love. Love is not rational. When your family chooses a husband, we choose him based on his character,” the first said.

  But what if you don’t want to have sex with his character? I thought, though I bit my tongue to keep from saying it out loud. My expression must have given me away, because all of the older women laughed in unison.

  “The parents work hard to find someone you’ll enjoy being with,” one of them told me. It was similar to what I’d heard from the Maasai. An arranged marriage was a partnership between two families where the bride and groom were assigned the roles of husband and wife. In searching for partners, the elders took into consideration character, family bonds, education, and compatibility, things that are often overlooked in the throes of early romantic love. This careful consideration, the older generation assured me, was what made so many arranged marriages stick. It may also have something to do with expectations and choice. There’s plenty of research on consumer behavior (and in Western cultures finding a partner is often like shopping for a new car) that claims having too many options can lead to dissatisfaction with the final decision, even if someone has made a good choice. “Psychologists and business academics alike have largely ignored another outcome of choice: More of it requires increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don’t work out,” writes Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It goes back to the lettuce experiment. When expectations are lower, as they often are with an arranged marriage, satisfaction is often higher.

  Still, I didn’t meet a single woman my age who was having an arranged marriage. That didn’t mean their parents weren’t trying. I heard one tale of a single woman whose mother and local priest were desperate to find her a match. She gave them the benefit of the doubt when they found a college-educated man from Mumbai now working abroad. He claimed to be a Secret Service agent for President Obama here in the United States. The pair corresponded over e-mail for three months before she learned that it was all a lie. He was an ordinary IT consultant who’d only ever seen Obama on CNN. The cover story was created by the suitor and his mother to make him seem more attractive to Indian women back home.

  “Women are more independent now,” my friend Narayani, an editor for the Times of India newspaper in New Delhi, told me. Narayani has raised two daughters. She’s divorced and happily travels the world with her own two sisters. “The deterrent for divorce here hasn’t just been the cultural stigma. It’s been financial insecurity. Now more women are working, and that means they don’t have to stay in an unhappy marriage. It means they can postpone marriage. They can choose a love match or even choose not to marry at all.”

  My other friend Sunitta Hedau, who met up with me in India for this trip, is the perfect embodiment of the evolution of marriage for young Indian women. Sunitta is sassy and Bollywood beautiful, with dark hair reaching halfway down her back and the longest eyelashes you’ve seen on a human being. She was born in Mumbai, the youngest of four girls in a conservative family. Longing to travel and see the world, she moved to London and then the United States as a successful luxury travel adviser and finally started her own business, Kora Journeys. For years her conservative mother tried to set her up with a nice Indian boy back home, parading eligible but unsatisfactory bachelors in front of her when she returned to Mumbai for the holidays.

  “At first she wanted me to marry a boy from the same caste. Then she relented and said to marry a nice boy born in India. A few years later she said I could marry an American as long as he was also Indian. Now she’s given up and just told me to marry whoever makes me happy,” Sunitta told me and tasked me with helping to find her a suitable love match.

  Diana Hayden, a former Miss India, recently had a baby from a frozen egg at age forty-two. “A career woman need not think about her biological clock and get pressured into getting married earlier than she wants to or have a baby when she isn’t ready,” Hayden said after she gave birth.

  And during my visit to the subcontinent, everyone was buzzing about a new Bollywood movie, Ki & Ka, where the main female protagonist has a successful career while her husband stays at home and attends to the housework. All over the cities you see billboards marketing big-ticket items to women—cars, motorbikes, and even houses. One advertisement even targets women for home loans: “Home loans for the ones who make the HOME.”

  At first I assumed this liberation from the traditional marriage system would be confined to the modern urban centers in Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata, the places most influenced by Western media, where newly engaged women wear diamond engagement rings and trade their brightly colored wedding saris for white wedding dresses. I began to wonder what I would find if I left the cities for the rural villages and tribal areas.

  And so later that week (I was sorry to skip the rest of the wedding festivities), I traveled to the state of Assam in the northeast, one of the wildest, unspoiled, and least visited parts of the country, to find out.

  Sunitta and I were welcomed into a traditional home of a woman who belonged to the Mishing tribe, an Assamese farming and fishing village where the houses stood on tall stilts to keep them safe from the frequent floods. It’s not uncommon for entire towns on the banks of the river to be completely washed away during monsoon season. This was a place where women depended on having a husband to survive the harsh realities of monsoons, fires, animal attacks, and famine. The privilege of independence was not an option. The men farmed and fished and went off in search of odd jobs in neighboring towns while the women often stayed home taking care of the animals and the children.

  Hens and pigs made their homes beneath the huts, and when I arrived piglets scurried to meet me with squeals of delight. The children were more reserved, hiding behind their mothers’ legs. One little boy in particular caught my eye. He was missing his two front teeth and wore a T-shirt, clearly a donation from somewhere in the West, that proclaimed: “Be a good person, but don’t try to prove it.”

  I stumbled, trying to climb the narrow ladder that led into the raised hut, using a long bamboo rod for balance. The simple room was meticulously neat, saris carefully folded on a shelf over the bed, pots and pans precisely stacked in the corner. There was no clutter, no mess. This single roo
m was home to six people. Like the Maasai and Samburu, this was a tribe of women who took care of the other women. All of the jewelry and silks in the village are community property and there’s no concept of ownership. They pass the pretty things along to whoever is celebrating a wedding or special occasion.

  Lae, a forty-five-year-old woman with small eyes and a broad face, offered me tea. A group of women introduced themselves to Sunitta and me. We laughed and clapped as we learned the youngest of the women present was also named Sunitta. The pair of Sunittas immediately hugged and took a selfie together.

  Sunitta was twenty and had left the Mishing village to attend college. She had just gotten married two months earlier to a boy she had chosen.

  “I found him and I brought him home to my parents and I said this is the boy I want to marry,” she told me. “My mother was angry. She beat me.”

  Her mother rolled her eyes and then beamed with pride at her daughter’s boldness. “It was not so bad. I got used to the idea. I’m happy for her. I want her to be happy.”

  “But what does it mean to be happily married?” I pressed.

  Lae squinted at me. “You Westerners make marriage too complicated. Be happy for the things marriage gives you. We have our husbands. I trust my husband. We have our pigs and our goats. We have our children. We are happy. You want too much. Be thankful, because you never know what tomorrow will bring.” Those were strong words coming from a woman living on the banks of a river that regularly sweeps away entire villages in the blink of an eye.

  I flashed my friend Sunitta a sheepish smile and thought about all of the things we expect our marriages to give us—great sex, perfect companionship, best friendship.

  We enter marriage thinking our spouse is going to solve all our problems and fill all our voids. We too often take all of our unmet needs and desires and gift wrap them in a pretty dress and tuxedo and present them to our spouse at the altar.