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Kamy
Wicoff Susan
Shapiro Barash Susan
Maushart Rachel
Safier Marg
Stark Elizabeth Freeman An academic deconstructs the wedding Eva Unger Bowditch and Aviva Samet on how to survive your mother-in-lawStephanie Rosenbaum Lisa Miya-Jervis Nancy Cott Sheryl
Nissinen -----------
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t h e i n d i e i n t e r v i e w :
Marg
Stark
SPRING 2003 | So you don't feel like a Mrs.? That doesn't mean something's wrong with you. Author and journalist Marg Stark helps betrotheds and newlyweds alike ease into their new roles in her book What No One Tells the Bride: Surviving the Wedding, Sex after the Honeymoon, Second Thoughts, Wedding Cake Freezer Burn, Becoming Your Mother, Screaming about Money, Screaming about In-Laws, Maintaining Your Identity, and Being Blissfully Happy Despite It All (Hyperion). Drawing on interviews with 50 new brides, advice from marriage counselors, ministers, financial advisers, and sex therapists, and her own experience, Stark has put together a must-read manual for women on the verge of marriage. When you were planning your own wedding, what was the biggest secret no one told you? That the wedding is about the wedding and not the marriage. I think we expect all the excitement, all the focus on this incredibly idealistic day will transport reality to something impossibly wonderful, and reality just doesn't go with it because it's a real couple, probably grieving the life they're getting ready to leave behind, which is totally normal. They're not separating from family, largely because they've been single for a while. It's not straight from our parents' house to the home of our beloved, but we've had an opportunity to shape our identity as single people, and it's very hard to leave that behind, despite your joy and rapture. We also expect that for some reason, the ring and the ceremony and the excitement of this announcement will remove mixed feelings, that we'll just be enveloped by bliss. And life just isn't like that. We expect to go into the dressing room and have a "this is it" feeling. Most brides I talked to were like, "I don't know" and those who expressed that were made to feel like there was something wrong with them. As a journalist and someone who likes to tell the truth, I felt awful about having to cover up. I covered up the fact I picked out my ring prior to the proposal ... it wasn't quite the surprise that my husband had worked months on, as if he picked out the perfect cut and style without any input from me, but that's what I told everyone. I felt compelled to hold back on anything that made my marriage seem less than perfect. What are the most common problems your friends and other new brides faced in their first years of marriage, and what were the most creative ways to solve them? There are a lot of symbols of your former life that cause problems. It can be furniture you try to merge when you move in together. It's this standoff when you don't want to lose your identities, you draw this line in the sand, like, "You can't make me change." Over time, those symbols become less important. I have this friend who had this sofa that cost a bloody fortune. Her fiancé couldn't get it up the stairs of the apartment, so he very covertly cut it into three pieces to get it upstairs. God forbid they got a new sofa. The sofa represented her sense of making herself at home, making her own money, all these things you wouldn't think a sofa would represent. It's our fear that we will be submerged in marriage and never come out again. Tell me one first-year-of-marriage horror story. My first-year horror story is that my husband never finished reading my first book. I had this dream of a soul mate, someone who would finish my sentences, yadda yadda. I thought it was that he wasn't acknowledging his rival, which was my writing career. And he just wanted a fast paperback read on an airplane. It's just funny how everything in that first year or so has these enormous implications ... eight years later, two small children, a mortgage, a cat, a dog, I could care less whether he reads the piece of notebook paper by the phone. I want him to help change diapers. Why do modern brides often experience an identity crisis? As Gloria Steinem said when she got married recently, for decades and decades up to our mothers' generations, marriage very well could subvert a woman's desire to be her own person. And I think still our society looks at it as the be-all-and-end-all way to live your life. Research shows you can be perfectly happy single all your life and not improve your health by being married. Gloria Steinem now feels what used to be an institution now has enough Lycra in it to expand, grow, change or move with you. I think we still have to be a little on guard, but I do not think it's automatic like it used to be, that you surrender your job, sense of self, sexuality, friends, everything for marriage. Now it's seen as enhancing your lives with someone you love rather than sacrificing all to enter into a union. The title of your book lists more than half a dozen sources of conflict between new brides and grooms -- sex, money, in-laws, to name a few -- and you say the conflicts are normal, even healthy. How do newlywed couples fight fairly about these issues? It's a learning curve. In the beginning, don't expect to entirely know how to fight fairly. I think one way is to drop your impression of a marriage being 50-50. Don't go into it with your calculator because marriage is never 50-50. At any moment of the day it's 60-40, 10-90, 0-100, whatever. Expecting your husband to have the same skills in proportion to yours is unreasonable. You should look at it as complementary skills over a very long spreadsheet. Not at any one fixed point could you possibly measure how big a person's contribution is overall. My husband is the tightwad, the saver, the worrier, the risk-averse, the realistic. I'm the dreamer, the spender, the passionate and creative one, so we bring a really great mix. But for me to expect that he's going to be creative with birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations, and for him to expect I'm going to feel as scared as he does about the future much of the time, is not realistic. We just have very different skills. "Becoming your mother" is another on that list of early marriage issues in the title. How do brides break from stereotypical behavior? It's almost impossible because that's what you grew up with, so it's frighteningly fast how quickly you get into that groove. It's good to have an appreciation of what your mom went through, the challenges your mom faced. I think you kind of decide, "OK, which battle is really worth fighting? I don't mind doing the dishes. He doesn't mind taking out the trash." There isn't enough time in relationships these days to dwell on arguments when it's just about stereotype and not about your preferences. It's really important for brides not to give up hobbies or friends. There's no reason a married woman can't go out with single friends for drinks. There's no reason a woman who used to play folk songs on the guitar in coffeehouses has to stop once she gets married. You'll feel a lot less like your mother bending over the dishwasher if you're in the coffeehouse playing folk songs the night before. You've had two kids since you wrote this book. Have you followed your own advice from the marriage and parenting section of the What no one Tells the Bride? Totally not. I'm in the process of writing a book about parenthood and marriage after parenthood. It's shocking how little I followed my own advice, how complicated marriage is, how na«ve my advice seems now. Optimism about maintaining your identity, your whole person, marriage not being about sacrifice, etc. -- all that falls apart when you have children. Because we have breasts, because we bear children, the tie that binds babies to women from the very beginning dramatically changes the balance of the marriage. So ultimately what Gloria Steinem says is that motherhood is the cross on which feminism died. It's not marriage anymore. It's very possible to be feminist and be married. It all falls apart with motherhood. She says that the revolution has stopped there, and I really believe that's true. What do you hope brides take away after reading your book? The most important message is to relax and not worry if you're having mixed feelings or ambivalence -- that doesn't mean there's something wrong with your marriage or you are not marriage material. I'm thrilled that it's helped brides feel relaxed. That's what they tell me in letters. I kind of wanted to be the country doctor telling brides not to worry. ----------- Katie Foutz is a reporter for the Naperville (IL) Sun, a daily newspaper in the western suburbs of Chicago. A newlywed as of September 2002, she lives in Naperville with her husband Colt. ----------- Buy What No One Tells the Bride at the Indiebride book store. |
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