The only reason I got married in 2003 was for my children. I had a therapist who said marriage is really a container for a family, and that made sense to me.
The only sense marriage makes is to share property, your children inherit the name and all that... it is all legal reasons to get married and no reason for love.
The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'
When I got married for the third time, and I had children from my other marriage there, that's what I said when it came time in the ceremony for me to say something. I said, "I'm grateful to everybody that participated, everybody that participated in my life that got me to this moment. And everything was dead-right because everything is right now."
When I got married and when my sister got married, my mom made us both individual cooking books with all of our family recipes and pictures and kind of the history with our Sicilian family, so that was really special.
I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
Also, I thought the main reason people get married is to have children. And since having kids had never been of interest to me, I didn't think marriage was necessary.
My parents aren't married. And one of the reasons why they never got married is because they had been married before, and they liked it the way it was. They didn't feel like they needed a piece of paper to be committed. So for me, I know that marriage is not a golden ticket.
I wrote this book [ Desperate Marriages] because of my own marriage. My wife and I struggled greatly in the early years of marriage. In spite of the fact that we were Christians before we got married, we prayed about getting married, we believed it was God's will for us to get married, and we still had great struggles.
I grew up with an Italian family in an era when a woman's path was laid out for her: You got married and had children. Simple, right? Then I got to a point around the age of 30 when I had three little children and was a single mom, and I realized life was not so simple.
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
As my friend said to me, when you have children, typically in a second marriage, when you're older and you get married again to a woman who would have children, you must always remember that you make sure the children attend a college where the commencement ceremonies are held in a facility with a wheelchair accessible ramp.
Christmas means a great deal to me. I was reared in a family that celebrated Christmas to some extent, but I married into a family that celebrated Christmas in a big way. And my wife always made a big thing of Christmas for the children. We have five children, and we had a terrific time at Christmas.
I had a family, I had children, I got married. My ambition changed.
People still think that a woman who doesn't have children or doesn't want children is really lacking in something. I've seen this over and over again in my life. I've had this thinking used against me repeatedly. I remember I had a therapist once, and I brought this up, and she said, "Well, I think women who don't have children feel very self-critical. They feel bad, so they think other people are critical in that way."
I would never have gotten married if it weren't for him. You have to want to be married to someone. You have to feel that reciprocated. Marriage for marriage's sake doesn't make any sense to me, and I found someone with whom I could put my money where my mouth is, I guess.
I got married at 22 and remained in an abusive marriage for 10 years. I made up my mind that that was never going to happen to me again. I made a brave step to walk out in a society when you didn't walk out of an abusive marriage. It was mental and physical abuse.