Elizabeth Weil is a striver, working constantly to be a better mother, a faster runner, a more successful writer.
She has been married for more than a decade, too, but that role never got much of her effort. “I had an attitude about it that it was either star-crossed or it wasn’t star-crossed,” she explains.
(Scribner) - ‘No Cheating, No Dying. I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better’ by Elizabeth Weil
But at some point, Weil realized her marriage was getting short shrift, and she began to wonder if it could be enhanced by some deliberate attention.
With her initially reluctant husband, she embarked on a year-long relationship-improvement project, documented in her just-released book, “No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better” (Scribner, $25).
The book is a nakedly honest account of the sometimes painful attempts she and her husband make to understand their relationship and enhance it through therapy, marriage education, sex coaching and religious counseling.
Weil makes it abundantly obvious that she adores her husband, Dan Duane, who is also a writer. But she doesn’t spare details about his occasional bouts of depression, the pain he caused her at the beginning of their relationship or his complicated relationship with her family. Nor does she paint herself as anything other than a deeply flawed woman, sometimes nagging and often ignoring Duane for the sake of their two daughters.
“I had this mantra for myself as I was writing, ‘Just be totally honest and everything will be okay,’ ” Weil, 42, says from her home in San Francisco.
Weil began by reading books about marriage. She was surprised by how much scientific research existed on marriages and what makes them more likely to endure.
“We like to think that hopefully you just find the person and then you’re done,” she says. “It’s not quite a blind spot, but there is sort of this zone of passivity we can have around marriage.”
She found that concerted effort did improve her marriage, though not in the ways she expected. “I assumed that better would look like a Photoshopped version of good,” she writes. “Essentially unchanged, unsightly elements gone.”
Weil hoped, for example, that the endeavor might make them more strategic on finances and the religious upbringing of their daughters. But she ultimately decided neither needed an overhaul. The pressure to perfect those things “was coming from the outside.”
“And we really came to understand who we were from the inside,” she says. “We came to value our idiosyncrasies and embrace them, instead of seeing those things as negative.”
One of the biggest surprises was the benefit of a marriage education class, which was “probably the thing that both of us were most resistant to,” she says. “It sounded horrible. And even when we got there, it seemed stupid.” But the pair came away from the weekend with deeper empathy for each other and communication skills they would turn to repeatedly in the future.
Reaction to the experiment has been decidedly mixed. Men seem to mostly feel bad for her husband, Weil says, though he was fully on board with the project once it got going and at times was even more enthusiastic than her. Others said the subject was too private for such a public exploration, but Weil says she’s convinced we need more honest accounts of marriage in all its glory and torment.
In the end, her biggest lesson learned, and the one she hopes to convey, is that it’s worth it to try.
“And don’t wait until you feel like you’re in trouble to try to make it better,” she says. “If you’re in a good place, it’s really easy to make it better from there. But if you wait until you’re in a hole, it’s really hard.”
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