I’m not going to lie and say this will be easy. There will be blood, sweat, and tears. Even if you survive to the end, you will never be the same. You will suffer. You will beg for relief that will not come. But the victory ahead of you is unparalleled, and if you can overcome the relentless impulse to quit, you will emerge. . . still married.

Welcome to the Thunderdome, where 100 couples enter the arena, and only 60 come out intact, according to current estimates. For those on their second marriage, their odds sink to 40%. Around one in four survive round three. These days, the mere mention of the word “divorce” sends many young people into panic mode the moment they meet someone who is “marriage material.”

What if I love them and they leave me? Is it even worth the risk?

Think of marriage as a relational Tour de France or a Himalayan hike. Is it for the faint of heart? No. But how does one become a marathon runner? By completing a marriage---to the end. The same is true of a long marriage, except you use your heart instead of your feet. You become the kind of person who can sustain a long marriage by being married for a long time.

But why listen to me? I’m just a newlywed still learning how to share a bank account!

That’s why I turned to experts— time-tested specimens of marital endurance—to uncover the secret sauce that flavors a marriage throughout a lifetime.

I turned to my grandparents, my neighbors, and friends. I’m tired of the “data-driven” romance advice the internet wizards and Ivy League social psychologists love to dish out. It's time for the real experts to tell us what's what.

If you're like me and the starting gun just went off, or maybe you're about halfway through the race and growing weary, here's some hard-earned wisdom from people who've been where you are and lived to tell the tale.

LESSON 1: PUT A RING ON IT (BUT NOT IN A DESPERATE WAY)

Our first expert, a titan of eternal love, married for 63 years: my grandmother, who the family affectionately calls “Grandma Puggy.”

“I wouldn’t recommend this to my grandchildren,” she smirked, “but I asked Grandpa out.”

Funny enough, I replicated that in my life when I sat my now-husband down in his college dorm and told him: “Here’s the deal—we’re basically already boyfriend and girlfriend, so let’s just be official.” Would I recommend it to my future grandchildren? Only if they want to snag a freewheeling hottie like their grandpa.

Asking my grandfather out was the absolute limit of how forward my grandmother could be. Their first date was a hayride, and when they looked around, every other couple was making out. Not my grandparents. My grandpa was an altar boy and Grandma knew darn well that girls who kiss on the first date have “bad reputations.” That’s no way to behave if you want to be marriage material.

But what makes someone marriage material? How do you pick the right person?

Grandma advised, “If he talks mean to you while you’re together, just get rid of him . . . throw him away and never see him again.”

In my own slightly indoctrinated-by-the-sexual-revolution brain, I wasn’t sure I was “ready” to get married. Had I lived enough of my life on my own? My grandmother, on the other hand, married at 19.

“Should people today marry that young?”

“Depends on if they’re spoiled brats or mature adults . . . If you find yourself a good man, don’t wait. Go for it.”

You heard the woman. Are you going out with someone amazing who you would love to live with? Put a ring on it! This is the sign you’ve been waiting for.

On the other hand, this is where Grandma Puggy’s sage wisdom diverged from the guidance of another pair of matrimonial mammoths—an elderly pair of dynamos I’ve known since childhood—Ron and Shelby.

Courtesy of Mikayla G. Hedrick

LESSON 2: TIMING ISN’T EVERYTHING

When asked to describe their marriage in one word, Shelby said “fun,” and Ron said “friendship.” Nestled in assisted living, the couple, 60 years strong, can often be found schooling each other in a game of Rummikub.

When I asked them about waiting to get married, their collective wisdom was, “Wait until you’re older and more settled. You need to know who you are before you blend with someone else . . . you can’t be happy with someone else until you’re happy with yourself.”

I knew then that the secret to a long marriage didn’t lie in the timing. But was there something in the early years that was a good predictor of a lifelong union?

Enter the third pair of monogamous heavyweights, my neighbors. Gary and Kathy have been married for 50 years and have 13 grandchildren. They only had one date before they were married.

Gary was Kathy’s “good lookin’ boss,” and she knew right away he would make a good husband because he was “honest in business,” “didn’t lie to the customers,” and never asked “the help” like her to do anything he wouldn’t do. Gary had a “laundry list of qualities” he sought in a wife. When he saw Kathy, he “threw the list away.”

They locked eyes for the first time, and they got that feeling every rom-com character gets when they meet their future lover. Boom, they lived happily ever after. A first impression like that, I thought, must be a good predictor of a forever marriage.

But that’s not always the case.

Ron and Shelby described their first date as “a total bomb.” There was no spark: “Neither of us were impressed.”

Through the cunning maneuvering of a motivated friend, Ron and Shelby ended up on another date together, but it was a summer of working together and becoming friends that slowly melted their hearts.

LESSON 3: DON’T SETTLE. THE RIGHT PERSON IS WORTH CHASING

Even after realizing Ron was her type, Shelby wouldn’t settle for his lukewarm approach. In short, he wasn’t actively pursuing her. As a result, Shelby found a new boyfriend. By the time Ron asked her on a date, it was almost too late. “I don’t like the way you’ve been treating me,” she said over the phone.

It was a do-or-die moment for Ron. “Do I have a chance?” he asked. Turns out, he did, and he took full advantage of it. I could almost hear him grinning over the telephone as he told me, “It was a challenge. I took the challenge and I won!”

When I was in the dating game, one of the worst lies I told myself was that even the perfect guy couldn’t handle my total honesty. What if that made him mad? What if he left me?

What I would give now to go back, shake my shoulders, and say, “get a grip, girl. If he likes you, he’ll pursue you. If he doesn’t, there’s no amount of accommodations for bad behavior that will make him stay.”

LESSON 4: HIDE THE KNIVES

Say you’ve escaped the raging undercurrent of the modern dating pool and snagged yourself a good spouse. Now, you have to live together. When my husband and I moved in together, he found out that I never fully close containers, hang the toilet paper roll the wrong way, squeeze the toothpaste from the top of the tube, and eat half of a lollipop and save the rest for later. I realized that his clothes never make it all the way into the hamper, sometimes he forgets to flush, and he’s a major sleeptalker.

When I asked Shelby how to survive the early years of marriage without killing each other, she answered, “hide the knives.”

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized how all-encompassing that advice is. There may be other, non-literal “knives” we need to put away to live together. There are other ways spouses can cut each other to pieces—like with our words.

Gary and Kathy taught me that one of the secrets to a long marriage is to “avoid name calling, avoid being the voice of the accuser in your spouse’s life.”

I sank back into the couch and wondered how often I was guilty of doing that. To be an accuser is simple: judge your spouse, turn that judgment into a title, and then hurl it at them.

Sweeping character judgments cut into your spouse’s soul, but isn’t that how you win a proverbial knife fight? But when the fight is over, and you’ve made your final cut, there’s no real winner. The accuser is a loser, too.

Does that mean couples should avoid fighting?

Ron and Shelby answered that question with a unanimous “no.” The secret is “fighting fair.”

Shelby taught me this lesson in a parable: say your spouse does something that seems unfair to you, but you say nothing; instead, you put that feeling into a “gunny sack of ‘just-you-waits.’” With every new infraction, the gunny sack fills up with more resentment. Finally, it bursts and every moment of resentment from the past year spills out. How could your spouse possibly defend a year’s worth of behavior? These are the moments that spiral into talks of divorce.

“It’s amazing what you can do if you stop yelling at each other long enough to talk,” Shelby said.

Besides, one day, you won’t even remember why you were fighting. I asked Grand ma Puggy if she and Grandpa ever fought.

“Well sure,” she said.

“About what, Grandma?”

There was a long pause before she broke out laughing: “Well that shows how import ant it was . . . I’ve forgotten most of the disagreements.”

59% of divorces occur in the first year of marriage because the couples are simply incompatible. If you can train yourself to hide the knives in those first couple of years, you’ll be ready to face hard times as a team.

Gabriel Gigliotti

LESSON 5: EMBRACE CHALLENGES AND RAISE CHILDREN

Just as disagreements don’t have to threaten a marriage, neither do life’s challenges. I used to think that couples needed to wait a few years to have children because, well, children can be a struggle, and struggles weaken your marriage, right? Wrong.

Marriages aren’t like glass, which shatters under too much weight. Marriages are more like muscles: the harder they work, the stronger they get. My neighbors, Gary and Kathy, have the “receipts” to prove it.

This sweet couple had six children in five years right out of the gate! How did their story stack up against all the advice young people pass around to wait to have kids to “get to know each other first”?

Kathy laughed. “Until you get up in the middle of the night to change a dirty diaper, you don’t know yourself, and you don’t know him.”

Her answer lined up with Grandma Puggy’s slightly less delicate response: “That’s crap,” Grandma said. “Have kids and you’ll learn even more about him.”

Grandma’s only regret in life is that she didn’t have the ten kids she always wanted because, at the time, they were very poor.

My neighbors, Gary and Kathy, may have taken the same route but weren’t given that option.

“We found out I was ovulating twice a month,” Kathy told me.

When Kathy realized she was pregnant yet again with her fifth child, she sat down under their basketball hoop in the front yard and cried. Looking back today, they see that “part of what kept us together was the incredible load of early parenting.” There was simply no room to consider a divorce; they had five little kids to keep alive. We affectionately labeled this phenomenon “survival bonding.”

This is the same bond that glued my grandparents together. Does she look back now and wish she had fewer children to keep their marriage strong? Quite the opposite. Today, Grandma’s number one piece of advice for young couples is:

“Have more children. First of all, society is gonna need people. Plus, they’re so cute.”

LESSON 6: THE REAL “SPARK” IS TRUST

There’s one challenge that, God willing, every couple faces: aging together.

I find this hard to believe at the tender age of 28, but I've been reliably informed that one day my husband and I may not be as young and hot as we are now, and the "spark" that brought us together in college may not be quite as sizzling.

Melancholic Reddit forums are full of women asking for advice on rekindling the elusive “spark” of their romance past. But what is the spark? Is it emotional? Sexual? If we can’t define it, how can we preserve it?

“How do you keep the spark alive, Grandma?”

“Making myself look good . . . not becoming a sloppy housewife.” She worked out, played tennis, and did what made her feel good in her body and confident in herself. “If you feel good you’ll be more romantic …”

Another way to keep the flame of love going is by not smothering it.

Now is a good time to admit that I’m a recovering smotherer. I'm like one of those lap dogs that follows the people they love everywhere they go.

That is one way Grandma Puggy and I are similar—we love being around people. If we’re not with people, we call people. On the other hand, my grandfather was always delighted carving his model race cars in his man cave. If someone visited him, he was cordial, but if no one visited, he was still happy as a clam.

So, how did my social butterfly grandma and quietly independent grandfather get along for 63 years? In short, they did their own thing. My grandmother played tennis while Grandpa traveled solo to Daytona International Speedway to quietly watch the car crashes, and they were both happy.

This doesn’t mean they never did activities together. I know for a fact that my grandmother made more trips to Daytona than she wanted to, and my grandfather was a fabulous doubles partner. But they still had space to be themselves, and they never worried about the time apart because they trusted each other “100%”.

Grandma told me a story of a young woman who lived across the street from them when they were first married. She would mow the grass in short shorts to at tract my grandfather, that tricky little vixen. But my grandma wasn’t jealous.

“I knew he would never cheat on me,” Grandma said. She knew? The truth is, you can never really know. You can only trust.

Trust, I’ve learned, is not a cause but a consequence. You can’t manufacture trust out of thin air. It takes years of consistent effort.

Trust is built when your husband promises to be home for dinner and is. When your wife confides in you after a hard day instead of coldly insisting she’s “fine.” These everyday acts of dependability and honesty weave together to create the beautiful tapestry we call trust. If you tend to it, trust is the spark that never goes out.

LESSON 7: DON’T MANIPULATE YOUR SPOUSE

Manipulation is the opposite of trust, born out of a deep insecurity about yourself and your marriage.

When I asked Grandma Puggy the secret to a long marriage, she answered simply: “Neither person can be controlling over the other.”

I would have loved to have ignored Grandma’s advice, but I’ll be darned if my neighbors didn’t agree.

Kathy advised young couples to avoid “subtle, sweet, cute ways to manipulate.”

You can’t even manipulate your husband in a cute way!? Kathy says no, and I’m inclined to listen to her. Beyond the fact that manipulating your spouse under mines their autonomy and erodes trust, it’s also exhausting. I’ve only been married for a few years and I can already see how quickly I would run myself ragged trying to control my husband’s every move, even with the best intentions. There’s no way I could sustain the mental load of controlling myself and him for a lifetime, and a lifetime together is the goal.

LESSON EIGHT: EVERYTHING CAN BE A GAME.

I’ve known Ron and Shelby for as long as I can remember, and that is one spunky pair. Even now, in a phase of life that Ron calls “a season of releasing,” you’ll find Ron organizing events for his neighbors in assisted living and Shelby teaching them sign language. Hardly five minutes could pass on our call together before one would make the other giggle like a couple on their first date. In sickness and in health, for Ron and Shelby, it’s all just part of the game.

Shelby has spent years battling Parkinson’s disease and has lately taken to falling. But not even the slow degradation of their bodies can stop Ron and Shelby’s fun. To prevent her from falling, Ron created a game. The new game rule, he told Shelby, was, “You can’t move from A to B until you let me know and I can go with you.”

Shelby joined the game immediately, asking, “How do I signal you?”

“Whistle,” Ron told her.

Shelby couldn’t whistle, but this was all part of the fun.

They both belly-laughed as Ron told me, “She’s become a much better whistler.”

They never really knew what the pastor had meant by in sickness and in health, but now, in a time they describe as more sickness than health, they finally understand.

Courtesy of Mikayla G. Hedrick

LESSON NINE: SHOW YOUR SPOUSE THEY CAN COUNT ON YOU.

The reason I’ve only written the words of my grandmother is because my grandfather also has severe Parkinson’s and struggles to speak. He needs help with almost all daily activities. For a man of quiet independence, it is not an easy life.

But, like Ron and Shelby, my grandmother meant it when she said, “until death do us part.”

“He knows I’m here. I’m going to stay here and he’s able to count on me,” Grandma told me with tears forming in her eyes. “It’s hard when you see someone in pain. I do everything I can to make his life happy… he would do the same for me.”

Watching couples enter into the “season of releasing,” I was reminded that even the longest of loving marriages are never quite long enough, and, as Ron taught me, “every day is a gift.”

LESSON TEN: NEVER MISS AN OPPORTUNITY TO LOVE YOUR SPOUSE.

When my grandmother tried to come up with the words to describe the bond she and my grandfather share, she stumbled, saying, “He’s as much me as…”

Her whole body spoke when her words stopped. Even before rushing away to help Grandpa into a chair, she told me that the one word that encapsulates their marriage is “blessed.”

As a teenager, I always hoped to grow up and have a marriage like my grandparents’—filled with love, adventure, and family. Today, even watching the hardest season of their marriage, I feel the same way. It’s a love that is patient, kind, trusting, and humble. It’s a marriage full of memories and laced with hugs, perhaps even enough to meet Ron and Shelby’s recommended fifteen hugs a day minimum.

Ron doesn’t miss the opportunity to touch Shelby and tell her she is loved. Even now, when he walks her to and from the bathroom, he always takes that opportunity to rub her back—to love her body in all ways because that is the body of his only love, and he is grateful for every single moment.

This deep gratitude for their spouses was the throughline in all my conversations. I saw it in Gary and Kathy as they told me about hardships that brought them to their knees, in my grandmother as she struggled for a word big enough to describe the immensity of her bond with my grandfather, and in Ron and Shelby when they told me what they say to each other every single morning.

As the sun rises over their home in assisted living, Ron and Shelby roll over and check one another for signs of life. When their eyes meet, they say, “I’m glad to see you made it through the night.”

How, I wondered, could you ever be ready for the death of your spouse?

As the sun peeked through our bedroom windows the next morning, I watched my husband. He was young and full of life. I couldn’t imagine a day I woke up without him. I noticed his dirty clothes sitting on the floor, within reach of the laundry basket but not quite in it. I smiled.

This was my husband.

He didn’t need my control, accusations, accommodations for bad behavior, or shielding from conflict. He didn’t need an easy or perfect life. He needed me, his wife, to be honest, kind, patient, and trusting. He needed to know I was there and always will be, that I loved him and would love him through every phase of life. I’m grateful to be with him forever in this marathon marriage.

He rolled over to face me and opened his eyes.

“I’m glad to see you made it through the night.”

Mikayla G. Hedrick is a writer and producer for nationally syndicated radio host and Blaze Media cofounder Glenn Beck, and the coauthor of the New York Times Bestseller, Chasing Embers. She has gathered and written stories of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine, produced and served as the host of her own podcast series, and performed as an actress on stages throughout the East Coast.