Be the Marriage With Nina and Will

The first time Nina Bargiel popped up on my radar was the Girls In Tech event, “Girls Only” at the V Lounge. Sean and I were compiling the recap photos, when I came across this mysterious, raven haired women who was sprawled out in fabulous red boots. Better known as the @slackmistress on Twitter, I recently learned through a sweet little bird that she is married to Will @betheboy. He tweeted that he had posted on his blog about his wife and family.

How To Find Things

My great grandmother gave directions in reverse so we’d know where not to go. She’d send me looking for things by saying:

- You know the cabinet by the window? It’s not in there; look under the sink and you’ll find it.

The lesson here is that knowing where to go is important but knowing where NOT to go can help too.

I wish she lived long enough to meet my wife so she could have said.

-You know the girl with the boots and the wine?  Stop looking; you found it.

Curious about his wife, I clicked. There she was again, Ms. mysterious red boots. I was amazed to learn that they were engaged after only dating for five weeks, and were married a mere five months after that. And that they have been doing a live show for a year now, letting viewers into their lives and giving them a real he/said she said take on what it’s like to be married to someone that you have known less than a year.

Wanting to know more about them, I asked if they would give lala a  glimpse into their lives, he said/ she said style. You can catch them live each Saturday on BetheMarriage Live (On Ice). Considering most people thought they wouldn’t even make it to the one year mark, you may want to pay attention to a couple that is so clearly doing something right.

Five Questions with Nina and Will

1. What brought you two together?

Nina:
That was all Will. I had commented on someone’s Flickrsteam, Will saw my thumbnail and thought it was cute, followed it back to my profile page. He soon discovered that I lived in LA and was single. So he sent me an email. Which I promptly ignored. I didn’t mean to, I swear!

I eventually responded, we eventually met, he eventually started writing “The Detective Posts” which were a series of posts that were written to a “Mystery Girl” (me) who he wanted ‘to be Detective Partners with, like Nick and Nora.’

He charmed the pants off of me. Literally. When we started dating, he announced that I was the Mystery Girl and five weeks after that he proposed, and five months after that, we were married.

Will:
Persistence. I liked her and let her know as much right away, although not in a creepy way. Then I just waited and hoped she’d give me a chance. I thought of it like a job interview, if I could just get a chance to talk I could show her I was the right person for the job. Of course I didn’t call a thousand times (or even once). I just said “Hey, I’d like to get to know you and when you’re ready I’ll be here.”

2. How did he propose?

Nina:
Via blog post. It was on his old blogger blog, so when he moved to Worldpress he didn’t have all of the comments transferred, but you can see it here.

Will:
I began proposing about three weeks into dating and after saying “we should just go get married” for a few weeks she called me on it. We had been dating about 5 weeks at that point. I actually proposed via blog comment and she accepted the same way.

3. Why did you decide to document your relationship on the web? Where you inspired at all by Josh Harris’s project We Live In Public?

Nina:
I had to Google Josh Harris. Eeek. I don’t actually work in tech, so some of those touchstones are occasionally lost on me. Although you could probably classify my current job as tech-adjacent since I’ve started writing  on a couple of web series.

I’ve been blogging since 1997 – was blogging even a word back then? My former manager once said to me that I should forget blogging, ’cause the Internet doesn’t matter.” I’m nearly 37, so that’s nearly a third of my life that I’ve been writing as the slackmistress with the public at large.

His blog readership and mine basically watched our entire relationship unfold, and the proposal happen, so it seemed only natural to continue inviting them in. We didn’t want to combine blogs, so we decided on “BetheMarriage” which started out as a he said/she said videoblog. We (meaning me) got sick of having to record and edit, and it morphed into a Saturday night chat show on Ustream.

Will:
I was not inspired by We Live in Public. This happened almost accidentally, our first co-videoblog was the result of a plumbing issue in our apartment.

If I had to pick a inspiration I’d probably say I was inspired by couples who have lived very public lives as a result of their professions. Specifically I think of Richard and Linda Thompson who lived together, created together and preformed together all out in the open.* Of course you don’t see everything they did but their work was a window into their lives.

We have never intended to show EVERYTHING we do. For starters, no one cares about 90% of it and secondly we’re not exhibitionists. We show what we think is important, good and bad and the show is really a back and forth with the audience. We aren’t performing so much as we’re communicating with people we’ve grown to really like. It’s become a community for us but it’s not all about us. We just take the stage for an hour or so once a week.

*For the record Richard and Linda Thompson divorced so we hope the similarities end there

4. What do you hope people will take away from this?

Nina:
Oh crap, we’re supposed to have a message? Let’s see…Will rocks my socks, and anyone who spends 30 internet seconds (or 30 real-life seconds) can tell that. Hopefully we make people laugh (whether it’s with us or at us, I don’t really care) and show them that marriage isn’t SO SERIOUS. But we take it seriously. Does that make sense?

Will:
That there is no traditional path to happiness and that being with someone isn’t always going to be bliss but it should be fun more often than not. Mostly I just hope people laugh and have fun.

5. You started doing videos, then moved to a live show, what’s next for Be the Marriage?

Nina:
We’re going to start marketing Transformer-type toys of your favorite bloggers that you can assemble together for the UBERBLOG. Oh, I don’t know. A booze sponsor would be nice. Hopefully I won’t have to take off my shirt for that.

Will:
We both have our own career aspirations that don’t always require us to work together so the show is out one regular collaboration. We both write separately from this and ideally we’d like to do more of that. As for this show we want it to be fun and we hope that people aren’t mortified by us.

(Photo by Slackmistress)