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" Kumail is 36 years old; Emily is 35. They&amp;#039;ve been married for seven years, together for eight. Emily and Kumail had three weddings: one secret courthouse wedding in Chicago about a year after they met; a massive three-day Muslim Pakistani wedding with Kumail&amp;#039;s family two weeks later; and, years after moving to New York without telling anyone they were married, a reception at a bar to announce their marriage to their friends. Why did you lie [about not being married] in the first place? I mean when you got to New York, why didn&amp;#039;t you just start saying, &amp;quot;This is my wife?&amp;quot; Kumail: Listen, it got away from us! Emily: [laughing] It got away from us! Do you guys remember sitting down and saying, &amp;quot;We just got married and we&amp;#039;re not going to tell any of our new friends?&amp;quot; Emily: [they look at each other] Should we tell her the other part of this that we&amp;#039;re not talking about? Kumail: It&amp;#039;ll be real quick: So Emily got really sick [with adult-onset Still&amp;#039;s, a mysterious inflammatory disease]. Emily: About eight months into us dating. Kumail: And she was in a coma and it was really bad, and I hung out with her parents, and things super-escalated. Wait, what?! Wait. Things super-escalated in your head? Because she was in a coma ... Kumail: I hung out with her parents while she was in a coma for eight days, and that&amp;#039;s when I told my parents. I was like, &amp;quot;Hey! Good news/bad news \u2014 actually, for you guys, bad news/good news? \u2014 I dunno. Anyway, I&amp;#039;m in love with a white girl and she&amp;#039;s in a coma.&amp;quot; Luckily they were really, really good about it and they saw how distraught I was, because if I was just like, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a white girl!&amp;quot; ... Emily: ... They&amp;#039;d be like, &amp;quot;Break up with her right now!&amp;quot; Kumail: But she was super-sick, and they saw how much I loved her, and they obviously aren&amp;#039;t monsters so they were like, &amp;quot;OK, what can we do? Can we come visit her?&amp;quot; and I was like, &amp;quot;Not yet.&amp;quot; So once she came out of it, they knew there was nothing they could do to stop it, so they were like, &amp;quot;Well, you have to get married right now.&amp;quot; So that&amp;#039;s what happened. Emily: I knew that everybody would be like, &amp;quot;You guys just got married because she was sick and almost died.&amp;quot; That makes a lot more sense. Did you have any fears about getting married? Kumail: Yeah, and if this thing hadn&amp;#039;t happened, we probably wouldn&amp;#039;t have gotten married because I wouldn&amp;#039;t have had the guts to tell my parents. There was this huge thing I was struggling with because they wanted me to get arranged married and this sort of forced me to confront all of that stuff all at once. Emily: And I was doing a lot of work on myself to kind of remain myself in a relationship. I think for a long time I would disappear into the relationship I was in. So for me, I was a little nervous approaching it with wanting to stay myself and a full person within it. What&amp;#039;s been the most surprising thing about your marriage? Kumail: I was surprised when we started working together. I never envisioned working with my wife. It used to be when we weren&amp;#039;t working as much together, I just really wanted to work and do stand-up on the road all the time. I was doing it too much and she was like, &amp;quot;Hey!&amp;quot; Emily: Well, you have to get satisfaction out of every part of your life, not just the work part. It can&amp;#039;t be like the only thing that brings you satisfaction is stand-up and then when you&amp;#039;re home with me, you&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;Ugh, god, I gotta get out of here.&amp;quot; Kumail: It&amp;#039;s not like that! Emily: It felt that way, definitely early on for me. Kumail: Really? No! But that&amp;#039;s not what it was! It was that I always felt very motivated and I didn&amp;#039;t derive any satisfaction ... any satisfaction as a grown person from anything other than my career. Emily: We&amp;#039;re saying the exact same thing. And I was like, &amp;quot;You should be getting satisfaction from going grocery shopping with me,&amp;quot; or whatever. Kumail: And now that we work together the challenge is having the boundary between work ... Emily: ... And when you&amp;#039;re just my spouse. Do you feel like maybe you capitulated to his way of thinking about work by instead of beating him, just joining him? Where you&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;His work is the most important thing to him, so I guess I&amp;#039;m just gonna get on board and now I&amp;#039;ll be involved in that part of his life.&amp;quot; Emily: Well for me, I was a therapist for years and had a 9 to 5 and was in the office, and as he was getting more successful, that meant he was going on the road and his hours were different. I was literally never seeing him. So I had a choice of, I could either keep this job, which I was already burning out in, frankly, or I could figure out a new way to work and make money that I would also enjoy and that would also allow me to see my husband and have a marriage. Kumail: I mean honestly, I couldn&amp;#039;t do what I wanted to do at that point without traveling and working nights. Now I think we&amp;#039;ve figured out a life where it&amp;#039;s kind of easier to stay at home, and that&amp;#039;s been a big priority. Emily: What I&amp;#039;m doing now, though, is like a dream job and it&amp;#039;s something that I never even knew existed, so that&amp;#039;s a really cool thing that came out of our relationship. [Ed. note: Emily is now the producer of Kumail&amp;#039;s upcoming Comedy Central show, The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail.] What&amp;#039;s the main difference between dating and being married? Kumail: I know because of the fact that we&amp;#039;re married, that every fight we have, it&amp;#039;s going to be fine. I feel OK having a fight and really sort of ... Emily: ... Getting into it. There&amp;#039;s a safety there that the other person isn&amp;#039;t going to walk out the door. Has your sex life changed since you got married? Emily: I don&amp;#039;t think so. Kumail: Not so much. I mean, when you first meet, you&amp;#039;re having sex ... Emily: Constantly! Kumail: Like three times a day, every day. So it&amp;#039;s not like that, but it&amp;#039;s been about, you know, the same. Emily: It&amp;#039;s just that when we get super-busy, we&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s just do that tomorrow.&amp;quot; But, you know, like, we try to keep it fresh? I don&amp;#039;t know what I&amp;#039;m saying! [laughing] Kumail: We try to keep it fresh. We have masks that we wear. Shut up. Emily: No. [laughs] I will say that we try to not say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to anything. Like always be open to new experiences because that&amp;#039;s all you have in the end. Are you telling me you&amp;#039;re in an open relationship? Emily: [laughing] No! Kumail: Not at all! But we have, like, Butt Stuff Sundays, you know? [laughter] Kumail: That&amp;#039;s not real. Emily: It is a safe spot though. No one&amp;#039;s gonna be offended if we want to try something new because, good god, it&amp;#039;s so many years with this person! Every conversation we have about something like that starts with, &amp;quot;I think you&amp;#039;re great, and you think I&amp;#039;m great, and we really like fucking each other. Now let&amp;#039;s talk about this other thing.&amp;quot; Kumail: For me, a weird thing with sex was that it&amp;#039;s OK to do stuff that&amp;#039;s not just real basic. Emily: You were weird about that? I didn&amp;#039;t notice. You took to it like a duck to water. Kumail: Okkkk. Emily: [laughing] What are you most looking forward to in your marriage? Kumail: Well, we just bought a house and I&amp;#039;m excited about that. The other day we went there at night. We&amp;#039;d just gotten keys, and it was just cool to walk around this empty house and to think, &amp;quot;In five years, this place is gonna feel so different to us and we&amp;#039;re gonna think back on this night as the first step toward what that will be like.&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s the best thing you&amp;#039;ve done for your marriage? Emily: We&amp;#039;ve been trying to take a straight-up vacation once a year. We try to go far away where there&amp;#039;s no work allowed. Kumail: Because we used to go to a comedy festival and think, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;ll be like a vacation, but I&amp;#039;ll do a show at night.&amp;quot; While it is fun, it&amp;#039;s just a completely different mindset. So she really convinced me to do that, and since we&amp;#039;ve done that, it&amp;#039;s been really, really good. The Secret Life of Marrieds is a weekly series of interviews with married couples about the things no one tells you about marriage. Check back every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST for a new interview. Previously: A Couple With a Sexy Second Marriage. Jane Marie is a writer living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter. Photo credit: Christie Smith "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a6877/secret-life-of-marrieds-kumail-emily/>