As a woman who has been married for close to a decade, I am consistently asked how we keep the marriage alive.

“Simple,” I say “we learn how not kill one another.”

I am joking. Kind of. There comes a point in a marriage where two people either learn each other, or they opt out of the vows they took. It isn’t an easy come-to-Jesus type of situation. It just is what it is. Some of these realizations happen easily, and some happen stubbornly.

I think mine, like everything else in my life, has come stubbornly.

If I were to describe my marriage in less than five words, I would describe it as a “work in progress”. It is far from perfect, but it is manageable. Most times. Even in its darkest moments, my marriage has a way of being okay.

But is “okay” ever really enough?

This is one of the questions I have been asking myself as of late. When do the expectations of what a marriage should be, and the reality of what the marriage actually is, or has become, meet in the middle? When is ‘too little too late’ an applicable cliché if the partner who was not a very good one, decides to join the party? Where is the point where you start looking for marriage tombstones?

R.I.P. Marriage … it was good while it lasted.

So many of us give up too easily on life. Not just marriage. When a job pisses us off, we quit. When a friend makes a mistake, we cut them off. I try to always stick things out, to the point where metaphorically I am white knuckling whatever it is I am trying to hold on to … and I find that sometimes I held on too damn long, and that my efforts were wasted ones.

But is that really keeping a marriage alive? White knuckling it until I lose my grip? Probably not.

What I used to reply with when someone would ask me, adoringly, how I kept my marriage alive, would be “with romance” or “with constant effort”, because that is what I did. I made constant, tireless efforts to keep a (mostly) one-sided marriage alive. Maybe I should have been an artist because I painted this picture of amazingness to everyone on the outside; when in all honesty, it was far from it.

In all honesty, and this is probably going to sound horrible, if it weren’t for my two beautiful children, I would have given up already. And this marriage would have been 6 feet under long before I had words to write about it. A moot point if you will. In retrospect, growing up with my two loving parents, who are still in love, has a lot to do with these white knuckles of mine. I am proud of the fact that I can say I have both my parents willingly under the same roof. I feel like I could very well be doing my own children a disservice if I walk away. I know that is not the right way to look at things, but it is how I naturally assess things.

So how do I keep the marriage alive, you ask?

I smile through the b.s. and white knuckle through the rest. Sounds super healthy, and not at all dysfunctional, doesn’t it?

The moral of the story here is that neither I, nor you, nor Dr. Freaking Phil is an expert on anyone else’s life. And to be an expert on your own life, you actually have to live it, and live it honestly. Because without honesty, you will end up like me: struggling to figure out what to do with something so broken, that seemingly even super glue won’t hold it together anymore.