This week I felt compelled to get really personal with my readers. If I want you to feel connected and genuinely gain something from the words I write, transparency is a must. You guys, marriage sucks sometimes! My marriage sucks sometimes! My husband and I have been struggling lately, and if I’m honest, it is absolutely due to a lack of trying, on both our parts. In a marriage or any type of long term committed relationship, it is so easy to become complacent and neglectful. It’s easy to take your significant other and their needs for granted, because you figure, they will be there tomorrow. It’s much harder to put in the work that it takes to keep a marriage flourishing, especially when you are being pulled in so many different directions, whether that’s with kids, work, school, or volunteer obligations.

This past year my family moved across the country, my husband, an air traffic controller in the Air Force, started working at a new facility, we introduced two new children to our family, making us a family of six, all while I worked on finishing the last year of my degree program. There are only so many hours in the day, so, it’s no surprise that something was going to suffer. Unfortunately for us, that something was our marriage. For my husband and I, the pure exhaustion and constant stress of daily life made us forget that our marriage is the foundation for which everything else is built on. Without a happy and fulfilled relationship, we cannot possibly be happy or fulfilled in any other aspect of our lives. It is not that we have fallen out of love, but merely have forgotten how to communicate it.

You see, marriage is not a one-time commitment; it is an everyday commitment.

It’s the commitment to nurture your relationship continually, and to wake up every single morning choosing to love that person over and over again. The real work begins after “I do.” At the end of a long day, we are often inclined to postpone date night, intimacy, and many times, genuine conversation. Eventually, that pattern becomes the norm, and it begins to form cracks in that very foundation. Stepping back and recognizing that a problem exists is sometimes the most significant battle to overcome. When something becomes normal, we don’t always see a need for change or improvement, but in a marriage improvement and change is a necessary part of relationship growth.

For us, we couldn’t see that the reason it felt like everything in our world was falling apart was because we were falling apart.

Instead of leaning on each other, daily frustrations and anxieties caused my husband and I to become closed off and distant. Unmanaged issues lead to anger, fighting, and misplaced resentment. Instead of partners, we became rivals in our own home. Once we took a step back and evaluated our marriage, we realized we weren’t thriving as a couple, we were merely coexisting. Counseling has been an integral part of our relationship for the last five years. Both marital and personal counseling is necessary for us to continue to strengthen as a couple and as individuals. We have the knowledge and the tools to have a successful marriage, but lately, we need a swift kick in the ass to remind us to actually use those tools.

So why am I sharing this all with my readers? Well, there are many different reasons, but the first is because I think social media has brainwashed us. Social media and the internet has flooded our mind with crap, and it has us convinced that every other relationship is perfect, and that every married couple is 100% happy 100% of the time. Social media is often used as a branding tool, or a way to highlight the best and most successful parts of something. An individual’s Instagram or Facebook story is no different. They take parts of their lives and piece them together to create the brand or the version of themselves they want the world to see. We are all guilty of this, but in doing so, we, as a society, have created this fictional idea of what marriage is really like. When in reality there will be hardship, there will be pain, there will be times where you can’t stand to look at each other, and there will be days where you will feel like giving up altogether. This is normal! Walking through life with false expectations is only doing a disservice to your partner and your relationship.

Yearning for what we think everyone else has, only causes us to lose focus on what’s standing right in front of us.

The second reason I felt compelled to talk about my marriage is that there is still a stigma when it comes to therapy, more specifically, couple’s therapy. Either people are in denial that they have issues, or they feel they can solve those issues on their own. Maybe they don’t want to allow someone else into their personal lives, or perhaps it’s a fear of therapy itself. Whatever the reason, many couples are afraid of marriage counseling, because the world has us convinced that only couples on the verge of divorce seek counseling. You rarely hear it promoted as a tool for growth and preservation. I believe therapy should be regularly scheduled maintenance for a marriage. You don’t wait until your car breaks down to get an oil change, do you? So why wait to go to therapy until there is a severe breakdown in your relationship? Instead, use therapy as a way to strengthen what you already have. Is it exhausting and is it hard work? Of course! Anything worth having is! Over the last six years, life has tested our marriage over and over again, but I will go to therapy with my husband for the rest of our lives if I have to because marriage is a constant work in progress.

What we are going through is normal, and I choose therapy because I value him and the life we’ve built together.

Every couple hits rough patches now and again, but it’s how you handle those rough patches that truly speaks to your relationship. No one gets married or commits to another person because they think it’s going to be easy; they do it because they want to share their lives. It’s okay not to feel happy 100% of the time, and it’s okay to ask for help when you feel like you can’t fix your relationship on your own. Yes, marriage sucks sometimes, but if you can work through your problems together, you might just come out better than you were before.