“Everyone from the checkout clerk at Trader’s Joe to your great-aunt to Oscar-winning celebrities likes tell you that marriage is hard, but no one tells you how it is hard or what to do about it,” says Jo Piazza. It was that quandary—and her own first year of marriage—that compelled Piazza to ask hundreds of people from places as varied as Chile, Kenya, Denmark, India, and France about what exactly it takes to make a marriage work.
The results of that reporting have made their way into Piazza’s new—and rather fascinating—book, How to Be Married (What I Learned From Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First Really Hard Year of Marriage) out in hardcover from Harmony Books later this month. Part poignant memoir, part enlightening anthropological study, and part entertaining travel journal, the book divulges some surprising discoveries about love, longterm relationships, and our own societal beliefs.
“We aren’t set up for success here,” says Piazza of the United States. “Too many of us move far away from our families, communities, and support system, which puts an awful lot of pressure on a spouse to be one person’s absolute everything.” Combine that with our collective obsessions with our jobs, our addictions to our phones, and the overall lack of work-life balance in American life (not to mention the lack of affordable child care and dismal maternity leave policies!), and no wonder so many of us have trouble maintaining healthy relationships—let alone our health and sanity. As Piazza says: “Knowing you have health care and paid time off [like our counterparts in Northern Europe] makes a huge difference. Equality is deeply ingrained in their cultures and it feels like much less of a struggle to find a balance. . . and puts less pressure on a marriage to be a certain way.”
Still, that’s not to say there’s one magical place in the world where everyone is experiencing perfect matrimonial bliss—which is precisely why Piazza’s book is so helpful. It’s the collective learnings from each place—the sum of the wisdom culled from the cultures explored in each chapter that makes for such an inspiring read. “I started this book believing that somewhere, someone has figured out the secret to the perfect marriage. Now I know that everyone, no matter how good their relationship, struggles to make it work,” Piazza explains. “A happy and successful marriage requires effort every day.”
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