I had no idea what marriage entails. Marriage, like everything else in life, cannot be taught or understood before it is lived. It needs to be felt. Sometimes it feels joyous, sometimes it hurts. There are married couples who claim they are still madly in love. For them, marriage doesn’t require major adjustments or sacrifices. They naturally know how to keep each other happy, how to live a perfectly balanced and harmonious life. But for us, we struggled with such concept of a perfectly harmonious marriage because ours’ was far different from it. I even thought something was dreadfully wrong with our marriage by comparing our relationship to other people’s. I thought we were an anomaly. We used to swim through turbulent waters ineptly. We even survived a few tsunamis together. Despite such accidents, we swam gawkily and rose above the surface. It’s certainly not the prettiest picture of marriage but perhaps the most realistic, the one that helps marriages last a lif...