how to be married – jo piazza

Interesting travel and relationship book. Recommended by my wife. Excerpts below:

• “Marriage is no longer about making alliances to further your parents’ interest or about linking a dependent female to a dominant male. Now both women and men can say they want to marry someone with similar ideals, talents, aspirations, and qualities. We want equals,” Coontz told me. “It creates new tensions when each person in a marriage has the ability to just walk away,” Coontz added. I could walk away from my marriage at any time. I could support myself, protect myself, feed myself, buy my own property, and even make a baby alone with the help of a very expensive doctor and a turkey baster.
• Marriage experts call the first year of marriage “the wet cement year,” because it’s the time when both members of a couple are figuring out how to exist as partners without getting stuck in the murk, without being trapped by bad habits.
• Research suggests that couples who travel together end up more satisfied with their partnership. Both men and women have a strong need “for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise, for journey, for travel.”
• The most important thing I’ve discovered is that a good marriage isn’t about shit always going right. It’s about the times when shit goes wrong, very wrong, and two people coming out the other side and saying, “Okay. We’re still in this together. I still want you to be here when I wake up in the morning.”
• A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time. —ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING
  Dancing successfully with a partner is all about patience and anticipating what the other person is going to do. It demands communication without speaking. These three skills are also cornerstones of a successful marriage.
• The novelist Vicki Baum once wrote, “There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them!”
• Did equality have to mean that no one led in a relationship? Wasn’t that a recipe for anarchy and chaos? Or could it mean taking turns, with each person leading in the things they were good at?
• Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
• In Hindu traditions rain on the wedding day foretells a strong marriage, since a wet knot is more difficult to untie than a dry one.
• “Marriage is a long conversation,” Nietzsche said. “When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”
• I believe that if the government made getting married as hard as banks make getting a mortgage, more people would say, “Let’s just keep living in sin, because then I don’t have to sign my name a hundred and twenty-seven times.”
• “You can’t treat a relationship like a spreadsheet. It has to be more organic than that. Each couple needs to find their own rhythm, where each person is participating in a way that makes you both feel like you’re getting a good deal.” It was hard to say who was getting the worse deal when it came to wife carrying. Was it Nick for having to carry a person around on his shoulders, or was it me for having to dangle upside down with my head just below my husband’s butt cheeks?
• “When building up the relationship, you´ll find hygge-moments everywhere; candlelight dinners, walking in the parks, movie nights, and a lot of focused attention. Continuing to embrace hygge is a fantastic way to nurture your marriage,”
• “Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us,” the author and academic Sherry Turkle wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review. Baylor University’s business school even gave a name to the phenomenon: “phubbing,” which means snubbing someone for your phone.
• 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?”
• 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.
• Maybe some marriages fall into a rut because we allow that sense of relaxation to turn into laziness.
• “When you have desire, words are excess baggage. Speaking, in fact, eliminates desire.”
• The prolific author, essayist, and quintessential Frenchman Honoré de Balzac once wrote that passion is an essential part of the happiness of marriage. “But to be passionate is always to desire,” he wrote. “Can one always desire one’s wife? Yes. It is absurd to pretend that it is impossible always to love the same woman as to say that a famous artist needs several violins to play a piece of music and create an enchanting melody.
• The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility. —PAULO COELHO
• Love yourself first, and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. —LUCILLE BALL
• Without community we turn to the economy to replace what we’ve lost by hiring therapists, nannies, doulas, reiki healers, and housekeepers. But it’s hard to hire a mentor.
• No one gets on the phone anymore without exchanging at least a dozen text messages about when might be a good time to talk.
• I couldn’t help but wonder why I kept devoting myself to, killing myself for, companies where both I and the company were disposable.
• I did like Amsterdam. It was like Paris but smaller, cooler, and less pretentious.
• A popular T-shirt shop was selling out of a shirt emblazoned with the words “He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”
• The stock and bond approach to the marital division of labor. One spouse has to be the bond, the one without risk, with a dependable payout. If that’s the case, the other can be the stock, focusing on something that could pay off big in the long-term. Of course it’s only fair if the partners keep switching who is the stock and who is the bond.
• Dutch women are fierce, independent, and ambitious. They just use that ambition to craft a life rather than a career path. That did seem like a feminist choice to me.
• I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all. —LAURA INGALLS WILDER
• It’s about feeling grateful instead of talking about it.
• 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. (same for the other sex)
• We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons…but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters. —GLORIA STEINEM
• When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world in my arms. —MARY OLIVER
• Climbing Kilimanjaro – I’d frequently stop and pretend to take pictures on my phone just to catch my breath. I began to appreciate the flat bits—the simple sections, relaxed and smooth. It was nice for things to be easy. These reminded me of the parts of a marriage you might call boring—the long stretches where you settle into a daily routine, grocery-shop, do the laundry, binge-watch The Wire, go to sleep at a reasonable hour every night, and wake up and do it all over again the next day. For so long I’d considered this kind of monotony to be boring. I wanted the hills, the roller coaster, the constant adrenaline rush of newness. For too many years I had relished the things that were hard. I wanted to conquer the most difficult jobs, explore the furthest reaches of the world, tame the men everyone else said couldn’t be tamed. Now I wanted to just appreciate the flat bits of my life and marriage.
• Marriage means lifting up the other person when they can’t do it themselves.
• One of the most important things I learned was to maintain my own life outside my marriage.
• Getting married doesn’t mean you leave the support systems that existed before the marriage behind you, or that they become less necessary. We create families for ourselves well before we get married, intricate webs of relationships that aren’t recognized by law, but are no less important, valuable, and meaningful. Maintaining those is a crucial part of making any relationship work. Your spouse can’t be your everything. Amazing friends can still feed your heart and soul in a different way, a way that ultimately supports the health of your partnership.
• When you wake up next to someone every day, pick their hair out of the drain, clean up their dirty dishes, socks, and underwear, listen to them bitch about their job and tell the same stories and jokes over and over again, it’s nice to be reminded of what it’s like when they’re not around—and to realize things are better when they are. I often think about what Bobby Klein said to Nick and me in the Mexican jungle: “People come to me right after they get married and they say, ‘Now we’re one.’ That’s bullshit. And it’s a problem. You’re not one. Becoming one is impossible.”
• I started this book believing that somewhere someone has figured out the secret to the perfect marriage. Now I know everyone, no matter how good their relationship, struggles to make it work. If you visited my Instagram in my first year of our marriage, you’d see a cute couple with a ridiculously good-looking dog traveling to exotic locations together, climbing mountains, strolling along Dutch canals, eating too much delicious food. You’d have no idea that I lost my job, that I had a shitty medical diagnosis, that the doctors told me my dad was close to dying three times, or that my mother had a nervous breakdown. You wouldn’t know about all the times I fought with my husband or drank too much wine and cried myself to sleep, confused about whether I’d made any of the right decisions in my life. I hope this book showed some of that. Because that’s what’s real. That’s what the first year of marriage is really like.
• “Leo Tolstoy once remarked that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But the more I study the history of marriage, the more I think the opposite is true. Most unhappy marriages in history share common patterns, leaving their tear-stained—and sometimes bloodstained—records across the ages. But each happy, successful marriage seems to be happy in its own way.”
• Our society has a narrow definition of a “successful” marriage. According to Katherine Woodward Thomas, the author of Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After – “We go to this automatic assumption that a relationship has failed if it ends before one or both people die. We’re judging the relationship according to how long it lasts rather than by the quality of the connection. Yet, the reality of our time is that most people will not meet and mate with one person for life. ‘Happily ever after’ is an antiquated model from four hundred years ago, when the life span was under forty years of age. Rather than judge the value of a union according to how long it lasts, we may want to begin looking for the growth that happened for both people in that relationship, and the amazing things that union created, no matter how long they were together.” That advice was a good lesson for me to resist passing judgment on anyone’s marriage or divorce and to stop automatically thinking about the end of any marriage as a failure. Just staying married isn’t my goal for Nick and me. The goals are constantly moving and shifting, but they include things like being fulfilled, growing together, and making a positive impact in our little corner of the world. Just sticking it out, that’s not enough for us.
• I keep going back to Erica Jong’s challenge that we create a new kind of marriage. It is up to us to figure out what the modern marriage looks like. It’s scary, but it’s also exciting and inspiring.
• Having a baby was, as my friend had told me almost two years earlier, the best way to throw a grenade in the middle of our marriage and blow shit up. It was soon apparent after bringing Charlie James Aster home from the hospital that things between us would never be the same. We were exhausted and short-tempered and confused most of the time about whether we were doing the right thing, or whether our fumbling would forever scar our tiny baby and turn him into a future sociopath or the kind of guy who lives out his days in his parents’ basement watching Japanese porn. It was OK that a grenade had blown up my marriage. I’d chosen the right person to rebuild it with.
• Dialog with a Sicilian lady over a glass of wine – “Does it get easier?” I asked her in what I hoped were the right words. She laughed at me. “No.” “I didn’t think so,” I said. “But, it does get better,” she said. “I promise it gets better.”
• “Don’t try to be the person you were before you had kids. You’re not that person. That person is dead.”