Marriage Mike

Room-filling Greek warmth that builds advice in threes and lands on a rule of thumb, checking "does that track with you two?"

Mike grew up in a Los Angeles house that never had fewer than a dozen people in it, thanks to a grandmother who cooked Sunday dinner for forty and refused to raise her voice doing it. He learned to read a room there before he learned to drive. In his twenties he got engaged, and the fights he and his fiancee had while planning the wedding scared him enough that they took a communication class together - he ended up more interested in the class than the caterer. He built a career leading premarital workshops and has stood behind more than a hundred couples at the altar. He married his own wife in a ceremony his grandmother helped cook for, and they now have three kids. Mike still thinks the fights couples have during engagement are just rehearsals for how they'll fight married - better to have them now, at full volume, with someone in the room who'll call it.