How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage

Written by Jo Piazza

Narrated by Jo Piazza

Everyone tells you marriage is hard, but no one tells you what to do about it.

At age thirty-four, Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long, Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone’s partner—all the time?

In the tradition of writers such as Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Gilbert, award-winning journalist and nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza writes a provocative memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony.

A travel editor constantly on the move, Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means. Throughout this stunning, funny, warm, and wise personal narrative, she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen, French ladies who lunch, Orthodox Jewish moms, Swedish stay-at-home dads, polygamous warriors, and Dutch prostitutes.

Written with refreshing candor, elegant prose, astute reporting, and hilarious insight into the human psyche, How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of an utterly charming couple. When life throws more at them than they ever expected—a terrifying health diagnosis, sick parents to care for, unemployment—they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times.

Through their journey, they reveal a framework that will help the rest of us keep our marriages strong, from engagement into the newlywed years and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524734459

Jo Piazza

Jo Piazza is a bestselling author, podcast creator, and award-winning journalist. She is the national and international bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction books including We Are Not Like Them, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, The Knockoff, and How to Be Married. Her work has been published in ten languages in twelve countries and four of her books have been optioned for film and television. A former editor, columnist, and travel writer with Yahoo, Current TV, and the Daily News (New York), her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York magazine, Glamour, Elle, Time, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Slate. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in economics and communication, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in religious studies from New York University. 

Reviews for How to Be Married

[mickyfine · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In her mid-thirties, Jo Piazza ended up stumbling into a relationship of fairy tale proportions after meeting her dream man while on a trip to the Galapagos and getting engaged three months later. But as she prepared for her wedding and settled into the realities of married life, she realized she wasn't quite sure how to be married and how to have a good marriage. So she decided to explore what other cultures and experts had to say on the subject over the course of her engagement and her first year of marriage.

Fascinating reading in this one. Piazza is a compelling writer and she beautifully evokes the many international destinations she visited and the personalities of the many people she interacted with during her travels. She also doesn't flinch away from providing a "warts and all" depiction of her first year of marriage, which was even harder than the typical first year. Recommended whether you're about to get married, newly married, or even married for years and decades.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really, this was a delightful book to read because although Piazza was describing marriage in different cultures, she added so much about her own marriage, in detail, in relation to what she was discovering that it was nearly a book you couldn't put down. The range of advice that she picked up were suitable for marriages of all different descriptions and ages of marriage. Fun to read.