“If we don’t do it now, we never will. All I’m asking is that you try,” was Sid’s plea. And because we were a decade deep into our relationship by this point, and sometimes you have to make sacrifices, I agreed that I would. But if I was going to go, he had to be willing to go all in; we would get married as soon as possible.

I pulled together a small wedding for under $1,000 — just a handful of friends and plenty of prosecco. But what we didn’t know, as we stood in a loft in deepest Brooklyn making promises of forever to each other, was that Sid’s visa prohibited his spouse from employment. I would be able to remain in the U.S. as long as he did, provided I didn’t do anything that remotely resembled work.

It quickly became obvious that, as a writer, convincing a magazine to pay thousands of dollars for my sponsorship would be almost impossible, so I busied myself with the task of decorating my clean slate instead. I spent the next seven months writing, taking yoga classes, going on friend dates, and familiarizing myself with the skyscraper-ed streets. But things went downhill fast when winter arrived. Snow fell shin-deep, and the wind bit so viciously it felt like welts would form on my cheeks. The honeymoon period with both my husband and my city began to cool, and the reality that I didn’t have a job — or a Fuck Off Fund — sunk in. Being beholden to a man was unnerving. Our marriage was heavy with expectation on both sides, feeling to me like an anchor — secure and confining at the same time.

I wasn’t alone. Of the thousands of H4 visa holders across the U.S., the overwhelming majority are women. Smart, talented, reluctant housewives, reduced to cleaning and pacing and clinging to the last fragments of their sanity. An ambitious person who is unable to work is a psychological car crash waiting to happen. If we can’t create something, we start to channel our energies into dismantling something else. In my case, it was my body.