So Money - Episode 579
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Jo Piazza

Author of "How to Be Married"

A new topic for us today. We’re talking about marriage. I’m obsessed with this topic. I wrote a book, When She Make More, about female breadwinners in modern day relationships. When you think about marital advice in this country, it typically centers around pre-marital advice and then advice on how to deal with divorce.

But what about the years in between?

Marriage is wonderful but it’s also hard, and the more prepared you and your partner can be for the challenges – from your money differences to raising children to taking care of aging parents –  the less likely it is that you’ll need to read that article about how to survive your divorce, right?

Our guest today is Jo Piazza, a prolific writer and author whose recent book is part-memoir, part-investigation on the topic of marriage. The book is called: How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage. In the book, Jo shares a framework to help the rest of us keep our marriages strong, from your engagement into the newlywed years and beyond.

More about Jo: She’s an award-winning journalist who’s written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Magazine, Elle and many others. Her novel, Knockoff, became an international bestseller and she’s also the author of the critically acclaimed If Nuns Ruled the World and Celebrity Inc. How Famous People Make Money.

In our conversation we discuss…
  • Jo’s personal foray into marriage and the multiple challenges she and her husband unexpectedly faced.
  • Our culture’s stigma around divorce and how it leads couples to stay in unhappy marriages.
  • What we can learn from French marriages…and no, infidelity, despite popular belief, is not necessarily the secret to a long marriage there.

To learn more about Jo visit www.jopiazza.com and howtobemarried.us or follow her on Twitter @jopiazza.

One of my favorite quotes from the interview: “You can’t equate money w/ power b/c the second you start that, you set your marriage up for failure.” – Click To Tweet

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