Married to a Witch Being married to a witch can be a fascinating and exhilarating experience that brings both joy and challenges. It is not uncommon to encounter preconceived notions and stereotypes about witches, which can sometimes complicate the relationship. However, when approached with an open mind and understanding, being married to a witch can be a unique and enriching journey. One of the first aspects to understand about being married to a witch is that their practice and beliefs are deeply rooted in spirituality. Witches often connect with nature, harnessing its energy and incorporating rituals into their daily lives. This can involve performing spells, divination, and celebrating the cycles of the moon and seasons.
A few days later, out in the garden, my husband tripped over the skeleton of a decomposing snake, ringed by wilted flowers, half consumed by ants.
Even without a malicious intention, I was causing death and destruction just mowing the lawn, drinking my coffee, wiping my ass My actions, all our human activity, had compounding impacts that were destroying the snakes, the ocean, the atmosphere, the forests, the icecaps beyond repair. I don t know if there are any medicinal properties in the tincture of St John s Wort and valerian that I drop into water and hand my husband, to gentle his nervous system.
This can involve performing spells, divination, and celebrating the cycles of the moon and seasons. It is essential for their partner to respect and support their spiritual path, even if they may not fully comprehend or participate in it themselves. Additionally, being married to a witch means embracing their individuality and unique worldview.
How to Tell Your Husband You’re a Witch
Witches we need you. Now more than ever. In the time of COVID-19 we can find respite in place-based reverence, plant magic and the divine feminine. So writes Lisa Richardson, who came to witchiness with nothing but white hetero straight-lacedness and a crush on a yoga teacher.
by Lisa Richardson April 8, 2020 December 9, 2022Share this:
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Lisa Richardson | Longreads | April 2020 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)
On a Friday afternoon, pre-COVID-19, my husband dropped some ice-cubes into glasses, ready to make us screwdrivers and cheers to surviving another week of working/parenting/wondering where the hell the years were going, only, the vodka bottle was empty.
“Oh yeah,” I said, my eyes sliding sideways, trying to not cause a fuss, “I used it for medicine.” The previous week, the kitchen counter had been cluttered with a giant mason jar full of oily plant matter. “Balm of Gilead!” I explained, brightly, as he wiped away the breakfast crumbs around it.
“Cottonwood tips in oil.”
His eyes had flicked, then, over to the brand-new bottle of extra virgin olive oil that was now nearly empty, as I enumerated the medicinal benefits of this old herbal remedy (and all this from a tree in our backyard!). Twenty-four years together means I could hear the abacus in his brain clicking, as he wordlessly calculated the cost per milliliter of a gallon jar of plant matter masticating in top-shelf olive oil, against the cost per unit of a bottle of generic aspirin tables, overlaid with the probability of me losing interest in this project.
First the olive oil. Now the vodka for dozens of little jars of tinctures — garden herbs and weeds soaking in now-undrinkable booze. My midlife quest to attune more deeply to the rhythms of the natural world was starting to incur unexpected, but real, costs.
He was quiet, as he opened the fridge and pulled out a beer instead.
In my defense, I could have pointed my finger at Natalie Rousseau, a yoga teacher living in my 5,000 person village, who I’d first encountered leading a solstice yoga class billed as a way to survive the madness of the holidays (in slightly more gracious language). Thanks to her offerings of insight I did survive the commercial horror of the “festive” season, and a few months later, as the new moon entered Aries (whatever that actually means), I plonked down $200 to subscribe to her online 13 Moons course — my foray into “slowing down and being more present,” as I pitched it to my husband when he inquired about the strange entry on the credit card statement.
But I did not deflect the simmering tension between us by naming Natalie as the instigator of these “kitchen witch” experiments. Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.
But there it is. The word. Witch. The wound.
Every day, after COVID-19 entered our world, Natalie Rousseau has responded with an offering, a teaching — a meditation, an ancient mantra of protection, a yoga practice for managing anxiety, a how-to video on harvesting poplar medicine. It’s as if she’s been resourcing herself for this moment to develop the richest arsenal imaginable, to navigate, not the public health crisis, but the billion personal crises each of us is forced to confront as life as we know it slams into pandemic mode. It’s not what I thought a witch would do, if I ever thought about them at all.
Natalie doesn’t look like a witch either — not in the way I conceived it for last year’s Halloween costume, with my long black skirt, dollar-store pointy hat, and heavy black eyeliner, walking alongside my 6-year-old vampire-werewolf. Natalie is petite, just a few inches over five feet, her long blond hair still evoking the decade she spent living in a west coast surf town, her chest and lean muscled arms bright with full sleeve flowery tattoos and Mary Oliver quotes. She moves like a dancer, demonstrating yoga poses as if she’s transcending gravity. As a teacher, she speaks exactly, even in Sanskrit, and guides movement precisely, padding gently and soundlessly through the room, making an adjustment here, offering an instruction there.
So, I was surprised when she used the word “witch” to launch her new online offering, The Witches Wheel. The lure was irresistible. Natalie was claiming the word “witch” without flinching, without anger, without provocation, not as a way to reclaim feminine power and stick it to the men, warranted as that may be: It was essentially an invitation to observe the cycle of the seasons.
A threshold beckoned.
Natalie, a recent empty-nester, lives with her husband Paul and two dogs in a modest townhome, with a creek and a dozen rogue gardens installed by various residents running behind it. The garage is full of motorbikes. The porch is swept clean on the day I visit, six months into the 13 Moons program, wanting to talk with her about this radical word and why, in a world still unsure what to do with powerful women, she’s not afraid that she’s exposing herself to pitchforks and fires, haters, and trolls.
Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.
A tea blend of her own mixing — vanilla chaga chai — is brewing on the stove in an open saucepan. She tends to it, as I settle in, sneaking glimpses around the room, looking for evidence of witchcraft — pentagrams, cloaks, bottled frogs. Nothing. The space is uncluttered, a throw-rug on the armchair, a couple of stark white deer skulls are mounted, European-style, on a wall against a reclaimed barn board — definitely more Soho chic than occult-goth. Her husband returns from town, where he has picked up fresh croissants for us. He’s tall and strong, with a tightly cropped red beard — he looks like a guy you’d run into at the gym, at the surf break, at the hardware store.
“So, what’s it like living with a witch?” I ask him as Natalie attends to our tea, a light-hearted question sprouting out of the great compost of fears I am thinking. Is it impossibly hard to be with a woman who comfortably claims her own power, magic, cycles, voice? What kind of a man can love and honor a witch? And lurking deep beneath it all: Will my husband be one of them?
Paul rolls his eyes, overly-dramatically, pointing up to the light fixture in the kitchen — light bulbs housed in mason jars of all sizes, evoking summer cabins and fireflies and Kinfolk magazine dinner party lanterns. “I made this for her because everything ends up in jars. Have you seen inside these cupboards?” He walks around the house, in faux-exasperation, opening doors to reveal neat stacks of jars, full of dried petals, leaves, syrups, tonics, salves, salts. “And there’s more upstairs!” If it hadn’t been for the dinner party they’d hosted the previous night, most of their apartment’s horizontal surfaces would be covered in jars, he tells me, and the front porch would have housed a dead raven and a dead Cooper’s hawk.
“She’s always sending me out in search of dead things,” he jokes. He picks up roadkill in case she can salvage feathers or skulls.
“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”
The two of them are remarkably self-sufficient — an animal lover (“he loves animals more than people”), Paul realized veganism left him tired and undernourished, so took up hunting to procure his own meat humanely; one of the deer skulls mounted on the wall was harvested this fall, its meat now fills their freezer. They grow a garden, wildcraft, eat well. There is an ease between them — a tidal push and pull as they navigate their modest shared space and the morning routine, without evidence of fake niceness, of power trips or struggles.
Witchcraft, in Natalie Rousseau’s mind, is too non-dogmatic and non-hierarchical to submit to a single all-encompassing definition. “As a practice, it’s so highly individual,” she says, “but across the board, it is very place-based, land-based and body-based. For me, it’s about cultivating a relationship with your own body, your own mind, your emotions, and subtle sensing faculties. It’s learning how to trust your intuition. It’s about reclaiming your own instincts, but also being able to feel: this is what stress feels like in my body, this is what relaxation feels like, this is what it feels like to say yes to something out of a sense of obligation or pressure, this is what it feels like to have a boundary. This is what it feels like when I’m safe. These cues come to us from our bodies. It has to be, for it to work well, otherwise, you’re always reaching outside yourself for another authority.”
This is what she wants to help women, particularly, to reclaim: their sense that they are the first authority on themselves, that they can trust their bodies’ wisdom.
“The biggest thing I want to share with people,” says Natalie of her teaching and online courses, “is how to trust themselves. Everyone can very easily make the medicines that their household would need for common household complaints — colds and flus and chest colds and menstrual cramps — so many basic things that anyone can make very simply, quite affordably. I’m not anti-pharmaceutical. There are many medications people have to take daily to live. And if I have a serious infection, I’m going to take antibiotics; if I am seriously ill, I am going to go to the doctor; if I have any kind of trauma, I’m going to be so grateful for that form of medicine. But I believe the role kitchen medicine has is in the maintenance and prevention of illness.”
One of her biggest laments, though, as she makes videos and handouts and shares them with her online community, is that even people who have paid to do her course don’t feel that they have the time to take it into their kitchens. “Making a tincture is literally pouring vodka over plant materials and leaving it on your counter for four weeks!” she says. But it is easier for most people to just buy one online and have it delivered to their doorstep. “I am saddened by how easily women give their power over. This is the biggest thing I’ve noticed as a teacher in the past couple of years — how quickly women will say, ‘but how do you do this? I don’t know how to do this! I’m afraid to try this because I might not be good at it, I might be doing it wrong. I’m an imposter.’ I really struggle with this. Where is it coming from?”
But she knows. We have relinquished our power, over a thousand years or more, of wounding, of witch-burnings, of patriarchy either convincing us we have none or forcibly stripping it away, (hello Harvey Weinstein), until all we feel empowered to do, now, in 2020, is consume. And we’ve been doing that with all our might.
We override the listening, we ignore the nudges, we push through, like good soldiers. “Most people are running so hard,” observes Natalie. “Our culture is so focussed on productivity. We are so overly heroic — it’s all or nothing. I can’t do something unless I’m an expert. I don’t want to try. But this is a craft. It’s a path of education.”
Natalie’s invitation is gentle, and she’s crafted her online course to serve that: Start with one plant and learn its taste, its smell. Spend five minutes a day on meditation or in conscious ritual and begin to notice what’s going on in your nervous system, in your mind, in your body.
“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”
Don’t get so distracted by the word witch, that you fail to notice that it is connected to craft. Witchcraft, for Natalie, is a path of learning “how to trust and problem solve, from within, knowing that we are in a system of power that, for better, for worse, will strip us of any ability to trust ourselves and to always feel empty so we have to keep buying more stuff.”
When she says this, a deep thrill of recognition hums in me, accompanied by a shiver of fear. Those are revolutionary things to say out loud, to cast into the open air. I recognize it viscerally as the kind of talk that gets people in trouble.
Last summer, before I met Natalie, I had stepped from my backyard patio stones onto freshly cut grass and spied the sinuous form of a wandering garter snake. I leaned in quickly, excitedly, about to call my 6-year-old over to glimpse the garden visitor before it shimmied away. But it was eerily still. Ugly slash wounds marked its body. It was dead. Innocent victim to the ride-on lawnmower. Obliterated by our oblivion.
“Oh no,” I muttered. “I’m so sorry!”
I had already begun to wake up to the natural world, it’s rhythms, it’s offerings of medicine, it’s otherness, but it had come with a shadow side, a growing despair at what we were doing to the world. Even without a malicious intention, I was causing death and destruction — just mowing the lawn, drinking my coffee, wiping my ass: My actions, all our human activity, had compounding impacts that were destroying the snakes, the ocean, the atmosphere, the forests, the icecaps — beyond repair.
I wanted my garden to be a habitat. I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.
I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. My penitence froze me in place, scared to make a move for fear of ruining something else. Then, regret overriding my squeamishness, I fetched the flat-bladed shovel and edged it under the dead snake. I carried her body over to the vegetable patch, and in a space between the beds, where the mower never goes, I laid her down. I picked marigolds and calendula from around the garden, where they’d been planted to keep the snails away, and lay the bright orange blossoms in a circle around her.
Grandmother snake, I whispered, hoping that some force that exists beyond the definitively dead snake at my feet, might spread the word among the entire species, “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean it. I will try to be more careful.”
It was a made-up ritual, the kind that a kid might perform deep in her dream world at the bottom of the garden, and it made my 44 year-old-self feel a little bit better. At least I’d made a gesture of repair, had expressed my desire to return into balance with the living world around me. If it had any effect, I’d never know. I went back inside, said nothing.
A few days later, out in the garden, my husband tripped over the skeleton of a decomposing snake, ringed by wilted flowers, half consumed by ants.
“That was spooky,” he confronted me. “What’s going on? Are you some kind of witch?”
Many witches hold unconventional beliefs or adopt alternative lifestyles, such as Wicca or paganism. Their partner must be open-minded and accepting of these practices, understanding that they are an integral part of their spouse's identity. It is crucial to engage in open and honest communication to foster understanding and bridge any gaps in belief systems. Living with a witch also means embracing the mystical and magical aspects that come with it. Witches often have an affinity for herbs, crystals, and other objects believed to hold spiritual properties. Their partner may find their home adorned with various tools, altars, and symbols which contribute to a mystical ambiance. This can be an exciting and enchanting environment for both partners and can create many opportunities for personal growth and self-discovery. However, being married to a witch also has its challenges. Witches tend to possess a deep connection with their emotions and the spiritual realm, which can sometimes lead to periods of intense introspection or vulnerability. It is crucial for their partner to be patient and understanding during these moments, offering support and space for their spouse to navigate their journey. Trust and open communication are essential for maintaining a healthy relationship. Another challenge is managing societal judgments and stereotypes associated with witchcraft. Society often perpetuates negative portrayals of witches, associating them with evil or malevolent intentions. As a partner, it is essential to stand by and defend your spouse against these misconceptions, educating others about the beauty and spirituality inherent in witchcraft. In conclusion, being married to a witch is a unique and fulfilling experience that requires open-mindedness, understanding, and support. By embracing their spirituality, individuality, and mystical practices, a deep and harmonious bond can be formed. It is crucial to navigate challenges with patience and communication, fostering a relationship built on trust and acceptance. Ultimately, being married to a witch can be an incredible journey of growth, love, and spiritual exploration..
Reviews for "The Role of Humor in a Marriage with a qitch"
1. John Smith - 2/5 - I found "Married to a Witch" to be disappointing and predictable. The storyline felt cliché and lacked originality. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked depth, making it difficult to connect with or care about their struggles. Additionally, the humor fell flat and the jokes felt forced. Overall, I was hoping for a more engaging and unique experience, but sadly, this movie didn't deliver.
2. Emily Jackson - 1/5 - I couldn't stand "Married to a Witch". The acting was subpar, and the dialogue was cringeworthy. The pacing was incredibly slow, and the plot development was practically non-existent. The film relied heavily on dated stereotypes and relied on sexist tropes that were offensive and outdated. In my opinion, this movie is a waste of time and lacks any redeeming qualities.
3. David Thompson - 2/5 - "Married to a Witch" was a major letdown. The storyline had potential, but it was poorly executed. The characters lacked depth and their actions felt unrealistic. The movie also suffered from choppy editing and inconsistent pacing, making it difficult to stay engaged. I was hoping for a captivating romantic comedy, but instead, I was left feeling disinterested and unimpressed.
4. Jessica Anderson - 2/5 - I had high expectations for "Married to a Witch," but it fell short. The plot felt contrived and lacked originality. The chemistry between the lead actors was wooden, and their performances felt lackluster. Additionally, the movie's attempts at humor felt forced and often missed the mark. I was left feeling underwhelmed and regretful of the time I spent watching this film.
5. Michael Rodriguez - 3/5 - Although "Married to a Witch" had its flaws, it still managed to entertain me to some extent. The plot may have been a bit cliché, but it did have a few surprising twists that kept me engaged. However, the character development was lacking, and I struggled to connect with the protagonists. The pacing was inconsistent, with some parts dragging on while others felt rushed. Overall, while it didn't meet my expectations, it was still a decent movie for a casual watch.