Don’t judge me when I say Pinterest is one of the greatest things to happen to my marriage. The love, the companionship, the commitment are great too, but Pinterest is what makes my marriage possible.
I get it. I meet Pinterest haters all the time. When I tell them how much I love the site, they roll their eyes and scoff and put on a snooty public radio voice and say things like, “Oh are you also into scrapbooking now?”
I’m not into scrapbooking, but I’m not ruling it out either. Jerks.
Being someone’s wife didn’t come naturally to me. I lived in New York City for 15 years, a place where all my food was delivered, where my laundry was dropped off on a Tuesday and picked up on a Wednesday, and someone came by to clean the apartment twice a month while I worked 80 hour weeks. I never saw the human who made the kitchen gleam, because I was never ever in my kitchen. I didn’t know how to take care of myself let alone someone else.
Pinterest is what would happen if you powered Google entirely by actual real, live intelligent people. In other words, women. Pinterest makes me feel like Martha Stewart on a daily basis.
If you don’t understand how helpful Pinterest can be to your life, you aren’t doing it right.
If you don’t understand how helpful Pinterest can be to your life, you aren’t doing it right. Nearly every time I have needed help with something wifely, Pinterest has saved the day. I type my questions into the search bar and no matter how obscure or esoteric, Pinterest has answers—with pictures and diagrams and helpful infographics and videos.
How do I get the duvet on the comforter without climbing inside of it?
The burrito method. Lay the duvet on top of the comforter. Safety pin the corners. Roll it like a burrito. Invert the duvet cover on itself. Roll it back. This changed my life.
What is a lemon zester and what do I do with zest?
It’s like a cheese grater and then you use bits of the lemon rind to make lemon olive oil and lemon pesticide that gets rids of ants in the bathroom.
How do I keep Christmas lights from getting tangled when I store them?
Wrap them around a wire hanger and hang them in your closet for next year.
How do I bake the best chicken ever?
Panko crumbs, butter, parmesan cheese and ranch dressing.
What should I do if my towels start to smell funny?
Baking soda and vinegar in the washing machine.
How do I tie my husband’s tie?
Cross, behind, over, through.
What do I do with leftover wine besides drink all of it?
Braise short ribs.
How do I get pet fur off all of the furniture?
Use a car squeegee.
Pinterest doesn’t always get it right. There was the time I wanted to make the house not smell like dog but I was too lazy to go to the store to get air freshener. When I searched “household” and “smell” and “dog” and “fix.” I found a tip to boil a pot of water with vanilla and cinnamon sticks. The smell was supposed to diffuse across the house and neutralize gross dog odors. I had all of these things! But nowhere did it say how fast the water would boil down so I decided to take a shower. I came out of the bathroom to a house filled with smoke, a blaring fire alarm and two firemen at the door. I let them in wearing just my towel and found the pot smoldering on the stove with the cinnamon sticks hardened and curled in on themselves. The firemen looked at me like I wasn’t just stupid, but perhaps I was roasting tiny human bones over the fire.
There are some battles I will never win. I watched a video about how to fold a fitted sheet no less than 20 times and it still ended up in a ball of misery in the back of the closet.
‘Where’d you learn that?’ he asked in awe. I rolled my eyes as if to say, ‘I’m just incredibly handy and brilliant.’
The other day my husband made a wicked mess drilling some screws into our bedroom wall. “Stop darling.” I ran into the other room and brought a Post-It note, stuck it underneath the drill bit and folded it up into a V-shape so it would catch the dust before it fell on the floor. “Where’d you learn that?” he asked in awe.
I rolled my eyes as if to say, “I’m just incredibly handy and brilliant.”
Pinterest for the win.
It was less than 60 years ago that homemaking was considered a woman’s highest calling. If housewives knew they would one day have a tool that would show them how to make every single dinner for the rest of the week in just two hours, they would lose their minds. Of course, women in the 1950s didn’t need Pinterest. They talked to each other. They shared knowledge. Women these days don’t sit around and gab about what we do around the house. It’s not PC. We believe when we get together we’re supposed to talk about high-level things like politics and what happened on the latest episode of The Affair. We no longer trade recipes or home cleaning tips—even though we all cook and clean things up, no matter how “equal” our marriage is. Being on Pinterest feels like sitting down to have a cup of coffee with a bunch of ladies who have all gone through exactly what I am going through right now. No judgment about my smelly towels.
Pinterest lets me easily search for what I want to cook that week, organize it by day and meal and then pull up the recipe when I am shopping in the grocery store. It gave me a list of household chores for the week that stopped me from throwing my hands up in despair and crying, “I don’t know where to bloody start.”
The truth is you have to do weird things once you get married and I’m not talking about in the bedroom. You buy placemats and linen napkins and napkin rings to go on those napkins.
When you get married you have to send out holiday cards.
When I was single I hated receiving holiday cards. Maybe I was bitter I had no reason to send out holiday cards, but (no offense to my friends who got married and had babies before I did) I chucked each and every one of them in the trash.
The holiday cards we received were always the very best (fake) version of my friends’ lives, overly photoshopped shots in soft lighting of them frolicking on a beach wearing all-white outfits like they just left a party at Puff Daddy’s.
I’ll never be that person, I swore.
And then I was.
But I didn’t want to be an asshole about it. Thankfully, Pinterest saved the day yet again. Back in late November I searched “Christmas cards that don’t suck,” and found the most amazing things—whole families dressed as ninjas and Star Wars characters, infographic Christmas cards that were nerdy but awesome. I didn’t want to steal anyone else’s ninja thunder (I filed it away for later) but what that search showed me was that I could make a Christmas card that felt like we were a family now. And I did. I grabbed a silly picture of the two of us in front of the Eiffel Tower, pouting like ornery French waiters and wearing silly berets and photoshopped in a picture of our dog, Lady Piazza, who is always pouting, also wearing a silly beret.
Pinterest for the win again!
Jo Piazza is an award-winning journalist, editor, digital content strategist and author. Her novel with Lucy Sykes, The Knockoff, became an instant international bestseller in May 2015. She is currently working on a memoir entitled How to Be a Wife. Follow her on Twitter @jopiazza.
Photo via Ethan/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
