What makes a great marriage, or even a good marriage? Today we're talking to Frances Mayes, bestselling author of the mega-hit novel Under the Tuscan Sun which has been a touchpoint for women going through any kind of life change or reinvention for nearly 30 years. Now Frances has a new novel called A Great Marriage, to which she brings a lifetime of wisdom from her own two marriages and her parents' tumultuous union. I adore this quote from the book: "You can hammer out a good marriage. Great is a whole other thing. Boiled down, way down, a great marriage happens when two people are big enough to want more for the partner than they want for themselves. Not just as much. More.”

Order A Great Marriage today.

Support the show and get 50% off your first Factor box, plus 20% off your next month with code COMMITTED50 at https://www.factormeals.com/committed50

What happens when you meet the right person at the wrong time? In this heartwarming episode, Nina and Mario recount their love story that began with a chance meeting in Central Park in 1999. From exchanging shy hellos to an unexpected reunion two decades later, their romance is straight out of a movie. Discover how they reconnected after years apart, overcame personal challenges, and are now planning the adventure of a lifetime together. This is a journey of love, separation, and a beautiful reconnection that brought two passionate souls back together when they needed one another the most.

Learn more about Nina and Mario's GoFundMe for their Sicily adventure here and follow Nina here.

In April of 2020 the writer Amy Bloom traveled to Switzerland to help her husband Brian die with dignity before he was plunged into the long term suffering of living with a dementing disease. She writes about their late in life romance and how she helped Brian to end his life in her gorgeous memoir In Love. This story hits close to home for any of us who have ever watched a loved one suffer and felt helpless to try to alleviate their pain. My own dad was bed ridden with muscular dystrophy for eight years before he finally passed in 2016 and I know that if I could have, I would have done anything to help him do what he wanted to do to have a more dignified death. That is exactly what Amy managed to do. Her story isn't always easy to hear, but I promise it will stick with you for a long, long time.

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Levi and Jared are ready to get engaged. But Levi has been keeping his relationship with Jared a secret from his family and that has to change if they want to move forward. This is a story about being honest, completely and radically honest, with yourself and the people you love before you get married.

I asked Levi if he was scared, scared to tell his story in such a public way, if he wanted to use a pseudonym. He didn't. He’s trying so hard to be brave, to be honest. Levi wants to tell his love story now....all of it.

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Raakhee and Agan had finally gotten the exact life they wanted. Then their five month old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. That could have broken them, but instead it made them and their relationship so much stronger. Raakhee’s thoughts on gratitude and embracing adversity are exactly the kinds of things we should all try to remember on our own good days and bad.

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Laura and her husband met in college. They got married quickly and had four sons. Laura’s husband was born a man, but always felt like something else, always felt like a woman. After thirteen years of marriage Laura's husband transitioned into a woman named Samantha. Now Laura and Samantha are navigating their new relationship as parents, partners and wives.

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Allison was five months pregnant when her husband Dave had a stroke on the plane on the way to their Hawaiian babymoon. Their entire lives changed in the blink of an eye. Allison had no idea whether her husband would survive this traumatic brain injury, and if he didn't survive if he would ever be the same. She began to write him letters in the hopes that he would one day be able to read them with her and their daughter. 

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We’re back, baby! On April 11th Committed is coming back for Season Two. Get ready to believe in love all over again as host Jo Piazza interviews couples navigating the good, the bad, the messy, the wonderful and sometimes the hilarious —-often all in the same story. As she did in season one, Piazza will cover an array of poignant and timely topics such as coping with a spouse stricken with a sudden illness, an engagement put in limbo because of immigration status, watching a husband transition to a new gender, processing the news that a newborn baby is diagnosed with a terminally ill disease, adjusting to marrying a famous person, coping with sex addiction, navigating marriage in a brothel and more.

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This Valentine’s Day we want to think about celebrating marriage for more than just one day. A marriage is ongoing. It’s a collaboration, an adventure. This week we have two bonus love stories, a collaboration and an adventure. We have a couple who met in Antarctica and has spent the majority of their marriage traveling to one of the most hostile environments on Earth...we’ll meet Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarehli who collaborated on one of this year’s most lauded Academy Award winning documentaries, Free Solo. Their stories are incredible examples of partnerships that continue through the ups and the downs of creating something beautiful together.

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Some of the very best love stories come in small packages. Last year we asked all of you to tell us your own stories in three minutes or less, and let me tell you a lot can happen in three minutes. You can fall in love with someone in three minutes. You can fall out of love in three minutes. While we're working on Season Two we wanted to share a few of these three-minute love stories with you. In them, you are going to meet Colleen and Sam who fell for each other when they were just 15 years old, got married, and figured out how to fall in love again after Sam had an affair. You’ll meet Shannon, who talks about what it's like to support your spouse when they decide to do one of the most challenging things in the world. And finally we'll hear from Christie, on how her marriage has evolved and persevered through her daughter’s special needs diagnoses. All of these stories could have been full episodes, but there is something special about boiling them down to their essence. The essence of a marriage. So, take about 15 minutes, settle back, and enjoy!

Leave your committed story at 404-996-1173

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The actor Nico Tortorella plays a sexy heartthrob on the romantic comedy television show Younger. Nico's real life love story with fitness star Bethany Meyers is so much more interesting. Bethany and Nico are both non-binary, queer and in a polyamorous marriage. This special bonus episode will have you questioning everything you think you know about how we define a marriage, why we choose monogamy and how we build our own families. Nico and Bethany are so open and honest about how they got where they are today after twelve years of on and off dating and sexual exploration. We could have held onto this one for season two, but it was just too good for us to wait!

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Buddy Woodall is serving three life sentences for murder. In January he'll celebrate his 22nd wedding anniversary to his wife Kristy.When Buddy was sentenced he asked Kristy to divorce him, he begged her to divorce him. She refused. She says she will stay with him until the very end. This is their love story. It starts when they were 15 years old and Kristy hit Buddy in the head with a volleyball in gym class. It takes them through the difficult early days of their marriage when they were just trying to make ends meet and it follows them through Buddy's arrest, his trial, his sentencing and now his time in Telfair State Prison. Buddy and Kristy believe they have a love that transcends the prison walls. 

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Carol is 25. Her husband John is 51. They got married when she was just 21 and had plans to travel, buy a house, start a family. Four months after their wedding John was diagnosed with stage four gastrointestinal cancer. Carol quit college and started working full-time to pay John’s medical bills. They struggle every month to take care of all the expenses. She went from being a newlywed to being a caretaker in the blink of an eye. John’s doctors have told him that he has less than a year to live. For now, they’re trying to make every moment count.

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Last fall Renee moved from Singapore to Los Angeles to be with her partner April. April calls it a grand gesture and it certainly is. But it was confusing to a lot of people because Renee and April aren't in a romantic relationship. At all. And yet they do consider themselves life partners. The two women have been best friends since they were teenagers and they now consider themselves platonic life partners. But our society doesn't really recognize that as a thing. Committed is a podcast about love stories, and here's the thing. This IS a love story. We talk so much about romantic love in our culture. We see romantic love in movies and books and songs...so many songs. And yet we rarely talk about the lifelong friendships that are the backbones of our lives. The ones that often last much longer than a marriage. Today we do.

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Natalie was in junior high when she first met Brandon. He was the father of one of her friends. Fast forward 15 years, Natalie and Brandon become a couple and they’re forced to consider how this might devastate their families and their entire lives. Today, as they plan their wedding, they’re dealing with the realities of their age difference—all of the judgements and stereotypes that come when a younger woman is married to a much older man. People ask Brandon if Natalie is his daughter. They judge her, silently and out loud about her motives for marrying someone who is older, but is also wealthier. They’re both still figuring it out. This is their story.

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What happens when a liberal falls in love with a conservative..... On the eve of this wildly contentious election day we wanted to bring you a short episode that proves love can cross the aisle. When Rick and Jeanne met in the seventies Jeanne was a liberal psychoanalyst and Rick was a writer for the National Review and William F. Buckley. Over the past forty years they've learned how to live with the other side. Their marriage and love story offers us advice for how we can all cross the aisle.

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Ryan sold Brittany some bad heroin. Then they reconnected in rehab and it was love at...second sight. But both of them put their relationship ahead of their recovery. They imagined that doing drugs together would be the best high they'd ever had. So they bought $500 of dope and checked into a motel outside of Augusta. Within days they'd both overdosed. Ryan couldn't believe he had nearly killed the person he loved most in the entire world. In order to ever be together again, they had to give one another up.

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Kaitlyn Kiely hates it when people tell her that her fiancé Matt Wetherbee is so lucky to have her. "I'm lucky to have him," she says. Matt was in an accident just two days before he planned to propose. It left him completely paralyzed from the shoulders down. He vowed that he wouldn't propose to Kaitlyn until he could do it on his own.

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Most marriages don’t survive more than a few years after losing a child to violence. Fred and Maria Wright have had dark days since their son Jerry was murdered in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in 2016. Two years later there are days when they still can’t even leave the house.  This is the story of two people forced to confront the worst thing that can happen to parents and finding a way through the darkness together. 

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Mickey was 14 when she found out she was pregnant. She was 15 and Matt was 17 when they had their first baby. A year later, Mickey's parents emancipated her so she could marry Matt. Over the next few years, they had two more kids, got jobs and lost jobs, bought a house and lost a house, and then divorced in their early twenties.

They sowed their wild oats. They did all the things they couldn't do because they got married when they were just babies. 

Then, three years later, after Mickey had a health scare and Matt stepped in to help, they both ended up falling in love again...with each other. Mickey and Matt's story is unique because of how young they were when they first got married, but their story speaks to a larger universal truth: marriage is tough and sometimes you have to grow into yourself as a person before you can have a successful marriage. While interviewing them, it was easy to see that Mickey and Matt always cared for one another, even when they were apart. They just had to grow up a little to make the marriage part work. 

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Abbott Jones fell for a mystery woman who called herself Lauren the first time she tried online dating. Her friends told her that Lauren was probably a “shady lady.” It turns out Lauren did have a secret. She was Miss. America. When Deidre Downs Gunn walked down the aisle to marry Abbott Jones 13 months later she would be the first Miss. America in history to marry a woman.

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Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp got engaged in Tahiti before they set off to sail across the Pacific Ocean. Only one of them made it to land. This is a story of bravery and survival and a love than transcends life and death.

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Every couple has a career fantasy. Bestselling novelist Emma Straub and her husband Mike made theirs happen when they opened their bookstore Books Are Magic. Opening a bookstore after being together for 16 years was like having another baby and it has completely changed their marriage. This is how they made it happen.

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Mark’s lovely wife Giulia has been in the psych ward three times since they got married right after college. You wouldn’t know it to look at her or to talk to her. When Mark first saw Giulia when they were freshman at Georgetown he thought of her as the exotic Italian girl he would be in love with for the rest of his life. Now it’s 18 years, three hospitalizations and two children later and their family’s motto is “We’re all in this together.” This is a story about hope as much as it’s about the ways mental illness can shape and shift a marriage. 

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On their first date Tony Dokoupil said to Katy Tur, "So, we both have crazy parents."  This was wildly refreshing for Katy to hear and for Tony to say at the start of a relationship. Any of you with crazy parents will understand how much easier it is to be with someone who also has an unorthodox family.  As she recounts in her stunning new NY Times bestselling memoir Rough Draft, Katy's parents were the first helicopter news pilots in Los Angeles; they covered some totally insane stuff from the OJ Simpson police chase to the LA Riots, often with Katy along for the ride. Her dad was brilliant and volatile and often abusive. Tony's dad was a multinational drug smuggler who used the drug money to fund Tony's fancy education and privileged childhood. Getting it all out in the open was the start to their relationship. But there were bumps along the way. Tony was divorced with two kids. He didn't know if he wanted more and if he didn't that was a dealbreaker for Katy. At the time Katy was a rising star in the news world covering the 2016 Trump campaign and Tony was struggling with what to do next in his career. They were both on the road all the time. But they figured it out. They fell in love, got married, had babies, living and worked through COVID, supported one another's careers and it all began with Tony saying, "we've both got crazy parents." 

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The pastors Vanessa Brown and Twanna Gause met as choir girls when they were teenagers. They became best friends. Both of them considered marrying men they didn’t love just to make other people happy. It took 30 years for these two women to find their way back to each other. 

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When Nora’s husband died of a brain tumor she had a plan. She’d adopt more kids. She’d date. But she wouldn’t fall in love again. She wouldn’t have another grand love story. But then lightning struck. Along came Matthew, a handsome divorcee who made her snort wine through her nose when he fell out of his chair at a bonfire. Finding someone new was easier than she thought, figuring out how to make it all work...that was a lot harder. This is the episode for everyone who has asked us whether they can love again after losing love. Sometimes the answer is yes.

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When Nora found out her boyfriend Aaron had a brain tumor she told him they were getting married. They lived their lives like Aaron wasn’t dying. They had a baby, binge watched Netflix, had lazy Sunday barbecues with friends. This is a story of how you love when you know the person you love won’t always be around.

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Matt and Doree (of the podcast Matt and Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure) are on their fifth round of fertility treatments and they’re both wearing a little thin. Getting pregnant isn’t always easy, but no one ever talks about that. Matt and Doree do talk about it. They’re open and honest and raw about the challenges infertility place on a marriage. But they’re also hilarious. It’s important to note that they have stayed hilarious through this entire insane journey of trying to make a small human. 

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Duke believes he was one of the most evil men on the planet. He was the co-leader of the largest Neo-Nazi organization in the world. He was also the bodyguard for a black woman named Catherine who loved him despite all of it. Duke says that Catherine's love is what rescued him. Their story - and their marriage - is raw and powerful and romantic. It was one of the most difficult stories we've reported and produced to date. Too many people have been harmed by the noxious things the National Socialist Movement represents. We had a difficult time reckoning with that. But we also believe that Duke and Catherine have a beautiful love story, one that is worth telling.

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Running for political office is a team sport. Your spouse is a critical part of the campaign whether they like it or not. Lauren Baer is running for Congress in Florida’s 18th district. Her wife Emily is the support system behind the scenes. They’re two working moms trying to get Lauren elected. This is how they do it.

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You May remember Gweneviere Mann from our second episode, Forget It. Shortly after we aired the episode Gwen was diagnosed with a rare and fast moving cancer. She passed away last week and we are running her episode again with these updates to show a commitment that truly lives on after a tragic death.

Please visit, https://www.gwenevieremann.org/, for more information regarding the foundation and how you can help.

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How do you define a marriage when your job involves having sex with other people? Mick Blue and Annika Albright are two of the top performers in the adult entertainment industry. They’ve built their four year marriage on a foundation of respect and communication. Throw out everything you might think about how a porn star lives, acts and loves before you listen to this week’s episode. 

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How do you become an astronaut? You marry a hero of a woman who helps you get there. Chris Hadfield and his incredible wife Helene are frank and honest about what it really takes to get a spouse into space. And of course there's the bonus of hearing Chris sing David Bowie's Space Oddity...in outer space. 

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Professional figure skaters Chris and Alexa Knierim shared the same dream when they fell in love and got married - get to the Olympics.....together. They didn’t let broken bones or a mysterious illness get in their way. Their love story is better than Jo’s favorite romantic comedy, The Cutting Edge. 

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For Mike Comforto, the worry and the anxiety over his infant son completely took over his life and his marriage. He was constantly convinced that the baby was in near fatal danger and those fears only intensified when he and his wife Nicole had a second child. Once he was having panic attacks and anxiety episodes every single day Mike was diagnosed with OCD and his road to recovery was a long process that is still ongoing today. The term OCD gets thrown around a lot, but we rarely think about the impact that it can have on an individual, and their spouse and their children. Mike and his wife Nicole had to learn how to tame his crippling panic otherwise they'd never be able to thrive as parents of two children or as husband and wife.

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When Maryanne and Tommy first got engaged people didn't want them to get married....didn't think it was right. They've defied the odds and been together for 28 years. 

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Love is not a competition. Except sometimes it is. Susan and Dan are baseball reporters at rival newspapers competing for scoops and sources. Yet they still manage to kiss goodnight and drive each other to the airport.

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Emmy wasn't looking for love when a homeless man asked her out on a date. She said yes and got so much more than she ever bargained for. 

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We all want answers. What happens when your wife has them all....because she's a psychic. 

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A near-fatal brain injury, a stroke and amnesia turned Gwen and Yasir into one of the most interesting and accomplished couples you'll ever meet.

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On a perfect day in 2013, newlyweds Jessica and Patrick both lost their legs in the Boston marathon bombing. How do you build a marriage when you need to rebuild your entire life?

These are the hilarious, heartbreaking and inspiring stories of couples of all kinds who’ve soldiered through unimaginable circumstances, and after the longest of days, still want to wake up next to one another in the morning.

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Renee Montgomery is a basketball legend. She won two WNBA championships with the Minnesota Lynx. Today she's a part owner and Vice President of the WNBA team the Atlanta dream and a social justice activist. Renee talks a lot about the many, many ways that basketball has changed her life, including getting to meet her wife, the singer Sirena Grace. Meeting Sirena at an Atlanta Hawks game completely changed Renee's life in myriad ways and the two women wake up every day thinking about how they can each support the other's dreams, goals and personal brand. I love this story because Renee seems so tough on the outside, but when you get to know her she is a hopeless romantic who found her soulmate when she least expected it.

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Sarah and Eric became foster parents in the hopes of one day adopting. And when baby Coco came into their lives it looked like it could be for good. But that wasn't the case. Caring for Coco became much messier, more challenging and more difficult than Eric and Sarah ever expected, mainly due to the fact that the foster system continually told them that they would likely be able to adopt Coco and then completely blindsided Sarah and Eric by pushing for reunification with Coco's birth mother who they called a "bad prospect" for getting her child back. Sarah writes about this heartbreaking situation so beautifully in her book Stranger Care, the title of which was inspired by how the foster system refers to the non-relative men and women caring for the hundreds of thousands of children in their care every year. Sarah and Eric had to learn a new kind of love, not just a love for baby Coco, but also a love for her birth mother Evelyn, in order to give Coco the best possible life she could have. 

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Erin and Jason's third date ended with Jason falling off of a roof and ending up in the hospital with a major spinal cord injury that left him in a wheelchair. The two of them have only been on a few dates, but both of them had felt a serious connection, maybe even the beginnings of love. But neither of them knew what could or should happen after an accident that completely changed Jason's life.

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Peloton Instructor and international cycling champion Christine D'Ercole was not looking for love. She was focusing on her work, her sport and her daughter. And then one shout out on her bike led to some witty banter with a rider which led to a deep friendship which led too much, much more.

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Committed is back for Season Seven on June 8th!

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Holly Frey, host of Stuff You Missed in History Cass, sits down with Siedah Garrett, one of the ten winners of Seneca Women to Hear: Search for the Next Great Female Podcasters

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Casey and Steven met on a study abroad program in Morocco when they were juniors in college. After school they traveled to Beijing to teach English and then to Mali to live in Timbuktu. Travel does something to a relationship. It creates intimacies and speeds up the way we learn about one another. Now, two decades later, Casey and Steven have opened an Inn together in the Catskills, they have two daughters and they have found a sense of balance and give and take in their relationship that allows the other one to thrive.

Follow Steven here to see more of his art and his wonderful children's books.

You can pre-order Steven's new book What is Color? here.

Check out The Spruceton Inn here.

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