The thing about marriage is that it’s full of promises.

You start with a blank slate and you fill your early days together with hopes and wishes and assurances. You look at couples that don’t seem happy or couples that have split up and you think — never. That will never be us because we are so deeply, crazy over the top in love. Our love is so goddamn strong that we will simply be immune to the chaos and hardship that life will bring. We are brilliantly defiant to that hardship early in relationships — most traditional marriage vows include something to the effect of — for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health — TIL DEATH DO US PART. Death — that is the only thing that will separate us. It is basically a veiled threat to things like illness and financial troubles and other serious shit that happens as you grow up. Bring it on.

Then life settles in and that blissful, bright new love settles with it, filling the cracks and crevices that eventually develop in your life. For me, that love morphed and transformed into something that I could really never imagine had I not lived it firsthand. And marriage, I have learned, is not something you just celebrate one day a year with shiny pictures of your beautiful day and not something you engage in just because you’re in love. It is a partnership, it is your community, it is your home. It becomes the foundation of everything that you do.

I hesitate to say that I’m lucky — though I am grateful to have found the woman I married, in a very implausible and ironic kind of way. But it felt kind of like luck, when we both agreed to go out with other people and I found myself sitting tucked in the corner of a booth in this local bar, across from this person who I could not take my eyes off of — someone who was someone else’s date.

And that one night, that led to many nights and days and dreams since then, also led to the very night that I gave birth to our son. A boy, part of whom had always been inside me, would have never come into existence if not for the exact timing of that meeting in that little, insignificant bar. Call it luck, or fate, or irony. For me it is the moment the life as I know it began.

But to display the romance of the beginning as a perfect swig of fate isn’t enough because it doesn’t capture the work that goes into building a marriage. Work — not because there isn’t love and not because there isn’t a deep, deep bond — but because there IS. Because loving someone and winding your life around someone so profoundly means feeling both proud and happy in the moments when you are lifted up and also feeling disappointed and torn when you fail yourself and you fail them in the moments where you feel angry and vulnerable and afraid.

As I approached my 30th birthday this summer, I was on a bender of sorts to weed out things that I think are keeping me from doing the things I want to do. Things like eating better, being healthier and giving myself more time to write and be a writer are all on that list. This bender has produced more than one night in bed upset, overwhelmed and at times anxious about the future. I expressed my frustration with my bad habits and desire to be more mindful, especially with writing and brainstorming and reading. She suggested I get a small notebook and put it next to my bed, so I don’t resort to my iPhone to type quick notes and then inevitably get lost in the digital junk ass world of email and Twitter and texting. It’s a good idea, I said and made a note to grab one next time I went to the drug store.

The next night, I made my way quietly into the bedroom after tucking in our two-year-old. There on my nightstand was a small notebook, with a pen.

I am sure I will have a thousand more thoughts on love and marriage in the next fifty years. Today I know this: I married the very best person. The kind of person who holds my hands, lifts me up, shakes my fears, breaks through the hard things, clears my fog, loves me without condition. Loves me in the every day, loves me with the smallest of gestures.

The only promise that really matters in marriage is that: to love each other, even when you don’t like each other, even when you’re exhausted, even when you’re lost. Especially when you’re lost.