Jonathan and I have been married for nine years.

Nine years.

Calculated a little differently, that’s 108 months; or 472 weeks; or 3309 days. Or, just a really long(ish) time.

Y’all know I don’t front about things that are hard. I don’t put on a shiny face or pretend like things are blissful, when in fact, they aren’t. I’m honest for a myriad of reasons, especially when it comes to life’s hardships, because I think being dishonest about the hardships of life sets us up for failure. And when it comes to marriage, there are hardships.

Here’s the thing we need to make really, really clear. Hard isn’t bad.

Did you get that?

Hard isn’t bad.

Just because marriage is hard, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean you bail out, give up, move on. It’s just the opposite. You press in, you give more, you hold on.

And when hard happens, it can lead to great.

There was a time when I thought my marriage would never be “great”. Sure, we’d stay married, we’d raise babies together, walk through life together. But I wasn’t sure that in ten years we could look back and say we had a great marriage.

Then all hell broke loose. We spent 8 months wrapping our heads around our new life. Our hard life. We dealt with depression, with anger, with loneliness, with guilt, with all the feelings you can feel. And it was HARD. Like, super hard. Yet, somehow, in that hardness, in that anguish, our marriage came back. We started talking again. Like, really talking. We started opening up, started praying together. It was as though we started fresh, but with this whole beautiful, messy history to look back on.

Slowly, things got better. Sure, we still argued (let me rephrase that, argue), but things are different. Now it’s a whole lot less arguing about each other, and a whole lot more arguing for each other. For the first time ever, I think Jonathan and I are playing for the same team, going after the same things, holding each other up. And it’s beautiful. And it’s wonderful. And it’s still hard.

But, hard it’s bad.

Because when things are hard and you fight even more for it, you realize just how much you want that one thing. Just how valuable that person is to you. It makes the hard not bad. In fact, it turns it into great.