by Jo Piazza
Not only do we want someone who can guess our feelings before we know them ourselves, but we also need that person to replace the empty toilet paper roll. We want them to be selfless, nurturing, and endlessly entertaining while they tell us we look beautiful in our skinny jeans.
The women in the Mishing village had simple expectations for marriage, unsullied by a lifetime of movies starring Meg Ryan and women’s magazine articles, the ones that provide a litany of things we “deserve” from a relationship. The role of the husband in this village was not the role of savior, life coach, cheerleader, or best friend. It was husband, plain and simple.
Maybe we do ask for too much.
Americanized Sunitta was fired up. “It’s so true, don’t you think? We’re such brats! In America we cry over the things we don’t have rather than cherishing the things we do have in our relationships.”
I thought about my friend Raakhee then. For as long as she could remember, Raakhee had envisioned her family in a very certain way: a husband, three kids, a life filled with laughter and travel and a summer beach house. Then when her first daughter, Satya, was just ten months old, she was diagnosed with stage 1 neuroblastoma, cancer. It required two surgeries and months filled with hospital stays and uncertainty. It was a nightmare, but Satya came out of it a healthy, happy, badass toddler who adores leopard print pants. Raakhee later said that the nightmare became an opportunity to think about everything they had to be grateful for. “It’s not just that we appreciate what we have together—although, trust me, it’s hard to get pissed about potty training or being on a school wait list when your kid’s résumé already includes ‘cancer survivor.’ Getting through cancer was like obtaining a master’s degree in gratitude. Agan and I are grateful for her life; we are grateful for our life together….I want, finally, to slow things down. Savor them. Take stock of what we have rather than continue to visualize what we want.”
And, on the advice of a friend, Raakhee keeps a gratitude journal of three things she’s grateful for each day. “The first entry, every single day, is Satya’s health. It seems cliché and simple, but I need to remember never to take it for granted.” Now, I’ve known Raakhee for a long time, and she isn’t the kind of person who throws “gratitude” around lightly. She gets that it’s hard to be grateful. But she promised me that it helped her marriage. “Marriage can be annoying, overwhelming, and stifling. But like with most difficult situations, those feelings are often fleeting. Mostly marriage is lovely, a guarantee that you always have someone in your corner. Someone who doesn’t just love you but will face the world and all of its bullshit with you. So gratitude is important to work through the little annoying shit so it doesn’t fester, grow, and start to infect all the good stuff. It helps me to see Agan for the man that he is to me, to the world, and to Satya, as opposed to the asshole who didn’t empty the dishwasher,” Raakhee told me.
Raakhee’s story reminded me that I should find ways to be grateful, to never take my life with Nick for granted, even as we faced a situation we didn’t plan for.
“How do I show I’m thankful?” I asked Lae back in the Mishing village.
She looked at me as though she didn’t understand the question, and I repeated it for the translator. Lae gave a small shake of her head. “You just feel it.”
The women I met in Assam kept telling me I had to seek a blessing for my new marriage and offer thanks for my husband at the Kamakhya Devi temple in Guwahati, a sacred place of pilgrimage for India’s 830 million Hindus, particularly for women. One of its more playful nicknames, one never used around men, is the Temple of Menstruation. In Hindu mythology Lord Shiva, the god of transformation, was so distraught when his wife Sati, also known as Parvati, committed suicide that he distributed 108 parts of her body around the world to be worshipped in different temples. Kamakhya is the place where her yoni, or vagina, fell, and some Hindus believe the temple actually bleeds. It’s one of the few temples in India where animal sacrifice is still allowed. Men, women, and entire families visit the temple to seek blessings, but I’m told that many Hindu women come here specifically to ask for a long and successful marriage and fertility. In return for asking for these blessings they also give thanks for their husbands and for their families. It was early in the morning when Sunitta and I began our walk to the temple, perched high on a hill. We passed women in brightly colored saris walking to work, beggars lying prone and naked in the streets, and boys playing cricket in the gutter with a stick and deflated tennis ball. Street dogs with peculiar poise and confidence pushed their way past us as if they had somewhere very important to be, and everywhere the holy cows took up as much space as possible, batting their beautiful eyelashes at passersby. An astrologer with Hindi tarot cards squatted shirtless on the ground next to three green parakeets chirping from their cage. Closer to the temple pilgrims grasped live white pigeons by their wings and new brides with beautifully mehndied hands and arms led scruffy black goats covered in garlands of marigolds up the formidable stairs. The sacrificial goats pranced delicately up each new step, oblivious to the fate that awaited them past the temple gates.
Priests at Kamakhya wear red robes instead of the usual white or saffron to represent the blood of the temple. Crimson handprints and fingerprints cover every available surface, part vermilion powder, part blood. No shoes are allowed in the temple, and the bottoms of my feet would be stained red until long after I returned home to America.
Hindus bring presents to offer the gods and goddesses when they visit a temple. Because I was praying to Parvati, a female goddess, I was told to purchase pieces of gold and red fabric for her sari, kohl for her eye makeup, betel nuts for her lipstick, and plenty of bangle bracelets. Bangles, more than a ring, show that a woman is married in India, and only married women are allowed to offer the bracelets to the goddess.
I asked one of the temple priests, Nilambar, a bald, spectacled man with a calming demeanor, what most women asked the goddess for. Were they very specific? Did they ask for a bigger house, a better job, a smaller waist, a more attentive husband, a vacation somewhere warm and sandy?
“You can ask the goddess for whatever you want,” he said with a wide smile, stooping to pat a doomed baby goat on the head. “Most ask for a long and prosperous marriage.”
“That’s it?”
He laughed. “What else do you need?”
To make my blessing I was also given two small terra-cotta pots with candles in them and two sticks of incense. It was imperative, the priest told me, that I light two candles, one for Nick and one for myself. The sickly sweet smell of animal blood and smoke overwhelmed me. It was so dark inside the temple that I needed to use my bare toes to grasp the edge of the next stair to keep from falling. I didn’t realize until that moment that my hands had begun to shake. I wanted to get this right. I wanted to truly give thanks for all of the wonderful things in my life. I wanted to mean it. I felt a tugging in my stomach and a stinging behind my eyes as though I’d burst into tears at any moment. A baby goat nuzzled at my foot; I stumbled and dropped one of my candles, watching as the terra-cotta shattered onto the hard stone floor. A woman behind me clapped her hand on my shoulder and stuttered in broken English. “No. You cannot use that. No. Bad.” I didn’t know what to do. “I just doomed my marriage,” I whispered to Sunitta. She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She looked behind her. “The gods are pretty forgiving. They’re cool. I promise.” I squinted through the darkness and the smoke at the priest, who appeared to be suppressing a laugh. “Light one and think of two,” he whispered.
Closing my eyes, I steadied myself. Light one and think of two. Light one and think of two. Light one and think of two. I thought about all of the times Nick had taken off work to come with me to my doctor appointments. I thought about the long nights when he had held me as I cried, scared about how long I’d stay healthy. Sometimes things don’t turn out as you imagined them, and no marriage is without its flaws, but in the grand scheme of things mine was pret
ty good.
As I moved the single flame closer to the inner sanctum, the hairs on my arms stood on end and the single wick broke apart. It became two tiny flames flickering around each other.
In marriage do thou be wise: prefer the person before money.
—WILLIAM PENN
India is an onion, one of those juicy ones you get from upscale farmers’ markets. Just when I thought I’d peeled away all the layers, there was yet another one below, and then one below that, until I realized I would never fully understand the country.
I would have missed out on one of the most interesting models for marriage and partnership in India if I hadn’t started talking marriage with this tuk-tuk driver outside the Kamakhya temple. A tuk-tuk is essentially a bicycle with a cart on the back where passengers can sit. In India’s overcrowded cities it’s by far the best way to get around. But even the tuk-tuks hit traffic jams (typically caused by the holy cows). As we waited for five minutes and then ten, I chatted with our driver, Chittesh.
“You can’t leave without going to Meghalaya,” he insisted. At this point I was used to being told I couldn’t leave India without seeing at least one thing, be it the Taj Mahal or the new Taco Bell in Delhi.
“What’s special in Meghalaya?”
“It’s the place where the women are in charge. They’re the heads of the family,” he explained. That was all he had to say. I changed my plans.
That’s how I ended up in Shillong, the capital of the northeastern state of Meghalaya, so close to the border with Bangladesh that the two cultures spill into each other, a melting pot of Muslims, Hindus, and Christians with dark skin and wide-set features.
The Khasi and Jaintia hill tribes of Meghalaya are matrilineal. Property and assets are passed down through the youngest daughter in a family. All of the children take the mother’s name instead of the father’s. The husband moves into his wife’s home, often bringing with him just a single suitcase of his things—a few changes of clothes, maybe his guitar or his cricket bat. It’s the women who run the households and are largely in control of the finances and the major financial decisions. The men work, but they often hand their money over to their wives.
Meghalayan tribes have been matrilineal as long as anyone who lives there remembers, since long before the British came, back when all of what we now call India was just a medley of tribes linked by geography. No one could tell me for certain where the matrilineal tradition originated. It’s as old as the oldest stories they talk about. There are theories, of course. Local men told me it came from a time when so many men were off fighting wars that it became necessary for names and property to be passed down through the women. Others claimed the tradition began in premonogamous times, when the Khasi had multiple partners, making maternity easier to discern than paternity.
I’d traveled to more than thirty countries in the past two years and never been anywhere, including the States, where women were institutionally favored above men.
“How incredible is it, this matrilineal thing?” I said to Nick over a spotty Skype connection before I met with the women of Meghalaya. It was morning for me and very late at night for him. His eyes drooped as I poured myself a second mug of coffee and readied for an enthusiastic discussion with my husband about cultural gender norms.
“What makes you think that things will be better there just because they’re matrilineal, because the women control the property and money? Why is that naturally a better way to live?” Nick yawned. He didn’t say it, but I know he was crabby because I’d missed his birthday to be in India. He’d spent it with friends in LA who dragged him to a beach party with strangers that looked fun in pictures but was exhausting and awkward in real life. “I presume there will be both good and bad things. I wouldn’t be so quick to judge them as awesome just because of the woman thing. Take some time to get to know them first.”
“Oh, honey,” I said. “Don’t you remember what happened in Lord of the Flies? That wouldn’t have happened if there were little girls on that plane.” Nick had heard my Lord of the Flies argument too many times to count when I lobbied for more women running more countries and companies.
“Keep an open mind,” he said and turned off his light. He began snoring before the Skype connection could fizzle out.
The way the women in Meghalaya control the money and the property made me think of my own marriage and the dynamic between money and power. When Nick and I first met, I earned the higher salary, which made me feel like I had the right to manage our finances and make major decisions. In America I was definitely in the minority. In 1970, only 4 percent of husbands had wives who brought home more income than they did. In 2016, only 24 percent of straight women earned more than their significant other, according to a study from the website Refinery29.
There is plenty of evidence that suggests there’s greater conflict in a marriage when the woman earns more. Research from the University of Chicago found that unequal earning, particularly when the woman earns more than the man, could contribute to higher rates of divorce because it often makes both parties unhappy. The man can resent the woman for her financial success, and the woman can often feel like her husband is a slacker.
Let’s be honest, the relationship between power and money is an issue no matter how you live, where you live, or how wealthy you are. I talked about it with Wednesday Martin, an author and social researcher who studied a very different tribe of women for her book Primates of Park Avenue—the elegant, (very) wealthy “wife tribe” that makes its habitat on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“I’ve seen this often when the women I studied on the Upper East Side go back to work right around when their kids are settled in school full-time. A fair number of them have reported seismic shifts in their marriages. Sometimes for the good, but some got divorced afterward,” Wednesday said. She recounted one tale of a stay-at-home mom who felt like she had no power and no control in her relationship. Having four kids kept her at home full-time for a long while. When they were finally all in school she went back to work. Her husband was skeptical at first, but then she closed a big deal and he came around.
“He was nicer to her, consulted her on more financial decisions,” Wednesday said.
But soon after the economic downturn she began making more money than him. That’s when he wanted her to quit her job.
“Her husband was a good guy, a committed guy, but his ego was fragile. She said, ‘No way in hell am I going back to the way things were,’ ” Wednesday told me. “All marriage is about power, and money gives that power.”
The conflation of money with power is a difficult thing to shake off. Now that I made much less than my husband, I felt a complete loss of control. I worried constantly that I wasn’t contributing enough, and that made me feel even more powerless.
I wasn’t sure how the recent changes in my earning power would shift the dynamic of our marriage.
We didn’t have a joint checking account, not yet. Both of our names were on the mortgage and we both paid it each month with a transfer from our own separate bank accounts. My bank account was even in my maiden name. I didn’t need my therapist to tell me what my refusal to merge our finances meant. My checking account felt like the last thing that belonged only to me. It didn’t matter that the balance was now inching down to zero without being replenished each month. I would cling to it like spandex on a Kardashian until it went into overdraft.
Extensive research shows that issues surrounding finances are often the main cause of conflict in a marriage. According to one study conducted by Utah State University, couples who disagreed about their finances once a week were 30 percent more likely to get divorced than couples who disagreed about them once a month. The National Institutes of Health has done research that determined “compared to non-money issues, marital conflicts about money were more pervasive, problematic, and recurrent, and remained unresolved.”
There’s even a growing field called “financial therapy,” which is exactly wha
t it sounds like, therapy that helps a couple work on their financial issues, as opposed to their emotional ones.
The key, according to financial advisers, therapists, and marriage experts, is to have a constant dialogue about money, to talk about the good things that money can do and the stresses that not having enough money can cause. It’s important to make sure that money doesn’t become some kind of weird taboo topic in your marriage. It should be an ongoing conversation to make sure that money doesn’t create a wedge between a couple.
The only time I could bring myself to talk about money was after I’d had a third glass of wine, which is never a good time to talk about anything except whether you should adopt another dog.
Money conversations in a marriage are most productive when they aren’t spontaneous, or fueled by Chianti. I learned this from Jean Chatzky, a financial journalist and the money guru who gives practical financial advice on the Today show while wearing smart dresses and the perfect shade of nude lipstick. First she counseled me to set up times to talk about money with Nick when we were both sober. She wanted me to make an actual appointment and put it on the calendar.
“My husband and I set ground rules before we start talking about money, so that we won’t fight,” Jean told me. “This isn’t fun for anyone! It also helps to come in with a list of questions, because when you get in the thick of it, you can never remember what you wanted to talk about.”
“But what if one person is making way more of the money?” I pressed her. “Doesn’t that make everything weird?”
Jean didn’t mince words.
“Money definitely gives you power in a relationship. And that’s why it’s important to keep talking about it on a regular basis and come to an understanding about how where the money is coming from impacts your relationship. Open the floodgates! Don’t be afraid to talk about it.”
