marriage

The Wedding Photo

June 23, 2010

Passed this scene on San Francisco’s Embarcadero last weekend. I don’t know these people, but they made me a lovely picture.

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On Love

January 18, 2010

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of research about love, relationships, marriage, and divorce. I’m still mystified  – and so are the experts. But new technology (fMRI) allows us to look inside the brain in new ways, so perhaps we are finally on the road to explaining the great “mystery of love” which has puzzled [...]

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It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

January 17, 2009

Enrico and I were married (by a justice of the peace in New Haven, Connecticutt) on January 17th, 1989. Here’s the story: Part 1: Tanzania Surprise Part 2: Coca-Cola, and an Ostrich Part 3: Justice of the Peace Part 4: The Wedding

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The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone

September 1, 2008

My life is lived in multiples.

I’ve read books, articles, and blogs about multicultural marriage, living, and child-raising. I have written about being a third-culture kid, raising a bilingual child, and living and trying to work in a foreign country.

But this is the big question, more difficult than any of the above: how can a marriage survive being made up of two people whose careers are equally important to each?

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A Woman’s Work…

January 19, 2007

When somebody asks “How are you?” my usual response is “Tired”. And that’s been my usual response for as long as I can remember. How did I get to this state? Let us review my typical day: 6:45 wake up, wake Rossella, turn on my computer, take a shower. 7:00 if it’s Monday or Friday [...]

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Shotgun Wedding

May 19, 2006

May 28th will be the 17th anniversary of the day Enrico and I had our party wedding. We had been legally married – for health insurance purposes – since that January, and I had moved to New Haven and started living with him around March, in an apartment just for us furnished with hand-me-downs from [...]

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Shotgun Wedding 1: Tanzania Surprise

June 20, 2004

In January Enrico and I had one of our 15th anniversaries. May 28th was our other anniversary, the one we more often celebrate. Confused yet? Let me explain. As I recounted in that earlier story, in the spring of 1988 we had decided that we should get married. We didn’t actually tell anybody about this [...]

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Shotgun Wedding 4: Justice of the Peace

June 20, 2004

I took a charter flight to Rome, full of Italians who had been on safari vacations in Tanzania and Kenya. I loved flying over Africa, looking down on the Sahara, a vast expanse of sand with some mysterious geographical features that I couldn’t identify. Then we flew over the Mediterranean. The Kenyan crew spoke no [...]

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The Bride’s Bouquet

March 4, 2004

A year after we met, Enrico and I attended the wedding of two high school friends of mine (I was a bridesmaid). At the end, I stood among the other unmarried women while the bouquet was thrown. I wasn’t particularly keen to catch it, and am no good at catching things, so I didn’t even [...]

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The Italian Proposal

January 19, 2004

Enrico and I maintained a long-distance relationship for over two years; he was doing his PhD at Yale, I was working in Washington, DC. At first, we saw each other about once a month, then about every three weeks, then about every two weeks… Luckily, there was an airline price war on in those days, [...]

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How My Italian Adventure Began

October 27, 2003

Strangely enough, my Italian adventure began in India. In June, 1986, I finished up my study abroad year in Benares. It had been a fun but intense time, and I looked forward to a vacation in Mussoorie, my “home town,” site of Woodstock School. My dad was supposed to join me, having just finished a [...]

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