by Jo Piazza
Call it gratitude, call it appreciation. Call it whatever you want. Just do it. It’s truly the easiest thing you can do to make each day together a little bit better.
Equality isn’t fifty-fifty all the time.
When I first got married, I worried that my feminist card would be revoked if my husband and I didn’t split things right down the middle. Now I realize how ridiculous that notion is. There are days, weeks even, when I do all of the housework (laundry, cooking, bed-making) because Nick is swamped with work. Then we switch. Sometimes I nest, sometimes he nests. While I was in Scotland Nick completely transformed our house by wallpapering the bathroom, installing shelves in the kitchen, and buying new picture frames for our bedroom. Our responsibilities change on a daily basis and we try to be outspoken when one of us feels overwhelmed. It’s still a constant conversation. After one month of cooking dinner every single night I got a little agitated and brought up the fact that I felt relegated to the kitchen. Nick was surprised. “I thought you were just getting into cooking,” he said. The truth is we fell into a rut, we discovered it, and switched things up the next week. And to be honest, I do like cooking, I just didn’t like the idea of it automatically falling to me. Balance in a marriage isn’t about a spreadsheet, it’s about both partners feeling supported. Our motto is: “If you see something do something. Don’t say something. Why are you talking about it? Just do it.” This goes for everything from making the bed to feeding the dog to paying unexpected tax bills. No one should expect praise or a medal for helping make both our lives run more smoothly. The balance of who does what will ebb and flow and the most important thing is to be conscious of how it changes.
Keep talking.
It’s easier than you think to stop talking. I have entire conversations in my head that I believe I had with Nick, but I never said any of it out loud. For us it isn’t about setting up a regimented schedule for serious conversations, it’s more about keeping the floodgates open and not being afraid to speak up. The second anything feels off, or strange, we try to talk about it. It’s something we’re both still getting used to.
Money doesn’t equal power.
Don’t let money rule your relationship. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that earning power determines who has a bigger say in marital decisions. Both partners have to let that go. While who does what in a marriage will ebb and flow, big decisions need to be made by consensus, or it will lead to resentment down the road.
Never stop adventuring.
This doesn’t mean climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro once a year. Adventuring can be as simple as trying a new restaurant together.
The anthropologist and relationship guru Dr. Helen Fisher put it best when she explained that “Research shows that novelty—taking risks or trying something new—can trigger the release of dopamine in the brain. I’m not just talking about novelty in the bedroom (although that would be a good start). You can get the same effect from sampling a new type of cuisine together or riding the roller coaster at an amusement park.”
Relationships thrive on newness and the ability to keep learning and growing together. And if you ever get the chance to sign up for a wife-carrying race, take it. We’ll buy you a beer.
I think a lot about how I’ve changed in the past year. I’m still surprised by the fact that I’m now a person who always has stamps in the house, and cloth napkins, and very hygge napkin rings. I learned to fix the garbage disposal on my own and I’ve managed to keep the houseplants alive.
Nick and I have dinner together at the dinner table at least three nights a week, and we use the cloth napkins and the napkin rings. I no longer sleep with my phone. Nick has stopped being such a snob about artisanal slow-drip coffee. We do ride our bikes most everywhere in the city, but Nick has agreed that taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts make better sense in inclement weather and when we don’t know where the hell we’re going. We’ve learned the value of teamwork and compromise and what it actually means to tough it out through sickness and health, good times and bad. We’ve learned that marriage is work. It’s getting up every single day and saying, “I choose you and I choose us. Let’s do this!”
Nick makes my life better. He provides the warmth, comfort, and security I’ve craved since childhood. When we got engaged so quickly, friends wondered whether we knew each other well enough to get married. I know without a doubt that I know him better than I’ve known anyone in my entire life.
The sun had nearly sunk behind the mountains and Glynnis and I were lost. Nick would know what to do, I thought. He’d know where to go. Shit! The straightforward trail veered off into a half dozen tributaries, leaving us to guess at the direction of the shelter. I glanced over at Glynnis, who was wearing a rabbit fur sweater that wouldn’t keep her warm much longer.
“Is this the right way?” she asked me.
“It feels like the right way,” I said in a voice I hoped was reassuring.
“At least there are no predators in Scotland! The last wolf was killed here in the seventeenth century. I Googled it. There’s a plaque to commemorate it,” she said. Between the two of us we had about half of the wilderness and camping knowledge of Nick Aster. It would have to be enough.
I chose a path and hoped it was the one that would lead us to shelter.
We continued our walk up and over rolling hills blanketed in royal purple heather, leaping over gurgling mountain brooks and skirting a loch so green it had to be a home for fairies. The still-damp air smelled vaguely of peat and something smoky, like the aftertaste of Scotch whiskey. We ascended yet another hill and went around a bend, nearly tripping on tree roots that cracked up through the rocky path. And then we saw it—a small stone structure so tiny and quaint, it was likely inhabited by a hobbit. Our shelter for the night.
“We did it!” I exclaimed. “I got us here!” It was such a small thing, but there was something powerful about doing this without Nick.
Of course we had remembered to bring the chocolate and the whiskey, but had only packed a total of two matches.
“If we use one match to light the end of this Us Weekly then we can use it to light the other candles,” I said, feeling like Bear Grylls.
We managed to light a small fire that kept us warm through the night.
Glynnis fell right to sleep, but I stayed awake, staring out the window at the black hills. I rolled over and dug my phone out of the bottom of my backpack. It had maybe a bar of service. I texted Nick.
“Are you sad that this is over? The first year? That our adventure is ending?” I wrote. After this trip, we had no more plane tickets booked, no trips planned.
I closed my eyes and waited to see if the message would send.
His reply came just as I drifted off to sleep.
“Baby girl…” he texted back. “This adventure is just beginning!”
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Thank you, Glynnis, for delivering Nick and me into the great unknown of marriage in so many ways, for being the Thelma to my Louise and the Louise to my Thelma.
Donna Loffredo went above and beyond to usher this book to its conclusion and Heather Jackson had the vision to help me start its journey. Thank you both for your wisdom, patience, brilliance, wit, and understanding.
It takes a village to make a marriage work and to write a good book, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of Jaclyn Boschetti, Danielle Antalfly, Megan Hall, Megan Bramlette (The Megs), Ben Widdicombe, Dan Wakeford, Leah Ginsberg, Kim Rittberg, Micaela English, Sheryl Connelly, Jackie Cascarano, Lisa Belkin, Amy Benziger, Annie Daly, Raakhee Mirchandani, Kavita Daswani, Rebecca Prusinowski, George Rush, Joanna Molloy, Daisy Noe, Ruth Ann Harnisch, Sara Dunn, Laura Begley Bloom, and Leah “my mana” Chernikoff. Thanks to Mikey Sadowski and Justaz Leonidas for getting us almost to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Thanks to Sunitta Hedau for being my ever-faithful translator and guide through the wilds of India. I plan to find you a husband yet.
Thank you to John and Tracey Piazza and Dick and Patsy Aster for making Nick and me both humans who thought getting married before thirty was a ridiculous idea (although Nick was reall
y pushing it at forty). Thanks to Geoff Aster for keeping me company in the Galápagos while Nick climbed volcanoes and stalked marine iguanas.
I have the greatest agent in the world. I couldn’t write books without Alexandra Machinist, who is never afraid to tell me when I’m not living up to my potential and was kind enough to tell me I could turn this into a book idea after I’d had several glasses of wine. Here’s to a lifetime of eating good food and writing good books together.
Nick. This book wouldn’t exist without you. No one would read a memoir about a girl and her big gross dog. On second thought…maybe they would. Thank you for being my teammate, my partner, my companion, and my husband. Thanks for showing me that with a lot of hard work, cheese, and frequent-flier miles, happily ever after might just be possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JO PIAZZA is an award-winning journalist and the coauthor of the bestselling novel The Knockoff. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York magazine, Glamour, Elle, Time, Marie Claire, the Daily Beast, and Slate. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money and If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in religious studies from New York University. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Nick, and their giant dog.
