Every Monday I release The Monday #MoodUp and there’s always a blog that goes along with it…just incase you’d rather read than listen to me bang on about stuff. Fair enough. I’m not taking that personally. This one is a little late this week. Apologies.

So, this week, I want to reassure you that love and marriage and relationships are not Hollywood movies. Just in case you ever look at a film or a TV show and feel like your relationship sucks in comparison. Just in case you fall down the rabbit hole of thinking that everyone else is organising extravagant romantic gestures, ripping each other’s clothes off on the regular and having long, intimate, conversations after they’ve put the kids to bed about current affairs while they lounge in cashmere, listening to a jazz record (on vinyl), in front of a fire roaring with a glass of red wine…they’re not. And that’s not what a good relationship is.

That? That is bullshit. It’s a scene from a Hollywood movie and just like the advertising industry has done to body image, Hollywood has fucked us all up when it comes to our expectations of what a relationship should look like.

This picture you see above? That’s a wedding. It’s not a marriage. A marriage or a relationship is a decision you make every day, especially on the days you really don’t want to be married or in a relationship. Love is a commitment. It’s not a feeling. It’s a choice. It’s easy to make the choice to be in love when things are going well but when things are not going well…that’s when it really kicks in.

Of course, through terrible luck, you could find yourself married to or in a relationship with a total cockwomble who makes you feel small and insignificant, who beats you down emotionally on the daily, who refuses to appreciate you and accept his/her own shit. If that’s the case, this is not the time to sacrifice your own good health, your self esteem, your worth and double down on a crappy human. You’ll know if you’ve done all you can do - marriage and relationships are always 50/50 on the effort level and if they’re not then unless that person commits to change, you have to make some serious decisions.

But if you’re partner is a good human, a human that despite everything you STILL want to make it work with and if that human feels the same way then, even if you can’t stand to be in a room together right now, you have a chance. It’s when it’s hard, it’s when you’re over it, it’s when you’re struggling, that’s when the marriage kicks in. That’s when you both have to make the choice to be married, to work as a team. It’s seems simple but honestly, we get so bogged down in the daily humdrum of life that we end up coasting along. We end up accidentally coparenting and the relationship falls by the wayside.

It’s so easy to fall into this and when that happens you get resentful because while you’re both thinking about work and money and the kids and the house and everything else, you’ve forgotten to keep each other in mind. Because you’ve committed, you think that ring on your finger, or the family you’ve built will just, somehow, magically keep you together. But it doesn’t. You have to do that everyday and it’s not easy and it’ll feel too much at times but that doesn’t mean it’s over, it just means that you’ve forgotten to stop, look at each other and remind each other why you started on this crazy journey in the first place.