The following is an excerpt from "Dancing in the Kitchen: Hope and Help For Staying in Love"

I am a singer and a songwriter, but I enjoy the expression of art in many forms. From a very young age, I loved to draw and paint. I remember when I signed up to take my first art class. I was fairly good at painting and drawing but as soon as someone else had expectations of me, I froze. The freedom I once felt was gone and I couldn’t create like I once did. I needed to find a method of practicing the new skills I would learn without losing the heart and joy that once came so easily in the beginning. Then I could apply those skills when tackling new and more difficult art assignments.

Marriage is similar. There is immense freedom when we first begin a relationship but as we progress, it takes courage when there are disagreements, disappointment of expectations, and difficult life events. It is easy to forget that people are imperfect. You are married to an imperfect person and so is your spouse. We need strategies to practice skills that once came so easily to get the results we desire. Instead of being filled with self-doubt and discouragement, we really need to remember that this is a normal part of becoming one throughout our lifetime of marriage. And it will change as the years go by.

Your marriage is a canvas, and everything you do and every experience you have together brushes color on that canvas. The resulting painting is a mixture of all of it. You might be thinking the portrait of your marriage is looking very bland at the moment, but you can continue to add color and use different brushes to get different effects as the years go by. You can make it brighter and bolder, but it is a process. You’ll have to change your technique if you want the final product to change.

If you are a perfectionist, like me, you will struggle with the freedom to make mistakes. I always have. The older I get, the more I realize that mistakes—and recovering or readjusting from them—hones our skills in a way that doing it perfectly the first time cannot. If you never have to work at it, you’ll never get better at it. No matter what "it" is. The truth is we will never love our spouse perfectly, but we can get better at loving our spouse as our life together unfolds through the years. We will have wonderful seasons, as well as seasons of heartache. No one is exempt. In the 30 years I have been married to my husband, we have found this to be true.

The beginning of my story, and experiencing results of hard seasons of marriage, starts when I was very young. I was born in Massachusetts, and we lived in Holyoke until I was seven years old. I had a five-year-old sister and a three-year-old twin brother and sister. I had just started the second grade when my entire life was uprooted as we moved unexpectedly from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. We lived with my paternal grandparents while my parents were tirelessly looking for a rental house. Because it took a while, I had to start another school.

Finally, a month later, we moved again. Unfortunately, our new house was in yet another school district. It was the third school in two months and thankfully the last one. This was a challenging transition for my seven-year-old self. Can you imagine?

Life was already stressful just from moving. We lived in this new house a month when late one night I was awakened by someone yelling downstairs. It was my father screaming in a tirade, "I’m leaving and I’m not coming back!" He slammed the front door behind him and left. (I’m sure there are more details, but that is how I remember it.) We didn’t see him again for six months. Mom thought they would work things out. He wasn’t willing. After that we didn’t see him for five years.

So, divorce is in my history and, frankly, not a story I want to repeat. Not casting blame or bringing up details of their story, which is not mine to tell, just stating facts that affect my life and my marriage. My mom was an amazing anchor in our lives though. She handled raising four kids as a single parent with art, football, and dancing.

Fast forward to when I was 15, my mom married a wonderful man after dating him for three years. He proposed after three months! She was certain he had no idea what he was getting into, marrying a woman with four children.

I’m sure he did not. However, after they got married he adopted all four of us and we became a family. I proudly call him Dad to this day because that is who he became to me. He and my mom have been married now for over 35 years. Currently, my husband and I have been married over 30 years. We are ALL learning this dance of staying in love, and it’s a beautiful, messy process. We learn to master a few steps and then we stumble a bit, or so it seems. But every time I stand back and take in the progress of the life we are creating, I like it even more. It’s an adventure. I believe that staying in love is a future and an adventure worth taking even if we do have to learn a thing or two.

A few years ago, I overheard a man say to his buddy in a grocery store, "Yeah, this pro-football season is getting a little like my marriage. I keep hoping it’ll get better, but it never does." I felt annoyed. I was too shy back then to say anything to him. If I could talk to him today, first of all, I would tell him that great marriages are possible, but you can’t sit on the bench and just hope the team gets better, you have to do something about it. In marriage, just as in football, both teams have to do the hard work of practice and building strategy in order to have a chance at winning the game! Paying attention when your team starts to fumble is crucial and training the players not to fumble next time is what will make the victory sweet.

It has been said that happiness is a journey not a destination. The same can be said of a good marriage. It is a journey, and journeys travel over easy, as well as rough terrain. In reality, you will have both. No need to freakout when that happens. It’s normal for all of us. I’ve never known a good marriage to not have seasons of struggle. One of my pastors jokingly shared this insight about struggle in marriage in his sermon:

When you get married, you commit to becoming one. Then you spend the next 50 years deciding WHICH one!

Fairly accurate, I’d say. That guy in the grocery store compared marriage to football. I think marriage is a bit more like dancing. It’s supposed to be fun, but it is harder than it looks, and it requires much practice and patience to get better. It takes hundreds of hours to get really good and that includes mishaps and bruises along the way. By the time you learn the steps to one style of dance, the music changes and there is another dance to learn, all while trying not to step on your partner’s toes. As you learn new styles, you will make many mistakes, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying. Perhaps though, you need to stop occasionally, evaluate your approach, see what isn’t working, and try another technique to synchronize your movements together. After all, this is a couple’s dance and it requires two people moving simultaneously. Most of the time, however, one of you is much more skilled at dancing than the other. The wonderful thing about this kind of dance, though, is that one person can learn to lead their partner in the right direction even if they miss a few steps. When you finally get to the point where the two of you are gliding across the floor, moving at the right pace and in the same direction, it can be the most exhilarating experience you have ever known. Dance lessons anyone?

Debbie Cunningham is a recording artist, author and speaker. She graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance and has spent a more than a decade in the music business as a songwriter and entertainer. She has recorded two albums; the first, a Jazz standards album entitled "The Rest of Your Life." The 2nd, an all-original jazz album entitled, "A Million Kisses."She is also the author of "Dancing in the Kitchen: Hope and Help for Staying in Love."