Let me come clean. It’s raining here in New York today (rain always makes me feel nostalgic) and today’s Tie the Knot Tuesday delves into the rainy days of marriage. TTKT will sometimes take on different formats.  Occasionally (like today) it won’t have tons of pretty pictures with fuzzy captions.  Although I lovingly named this site Black Bridal Bliss, marriage is not always blissful. To demonstrate this, I uncovered one of my treasured editor’s letters from writer extraordinaire, Danyel Smith, (Google her. She’s dopeness.) while she was the head editrix at the now defunct Vibe Vixen magazine. In it the famed author bared her soul about a tiff she was having with her hubby who she wed in 2005. Danyel’s vulnerability about love, marriage and everything in between gets no realer or sweeter.

*That’s the Way Love Goes
By: Danyel Smith

I’ve been arguing with my husband more than we like to. Stress is real. People get on each other’s nerves. We all do wrong things and act in wrong ways. In a healthy relationship, folks fight. Folks make up. Then, a few hours later, they realize they didn’t say what they really meant or wanted to say, or they realize that they weren’t in fact understood, so they fight some more. Then they take some silent hours, maybe some silent days, and they finally have a reasonable talk where real things get said, both people slow down and actually listen. There’s this real period of embarrassment for having fought to begin with, then this delicate feeling of hope that you remember from the first day of falling in love, the hope you have in yourself, that you can make it work.

Then the fun part: you do dumb things like listen to a song you both like, or you have wild sex, or you hold hands like we all forget to do, or you tongue kiss like you haven’t in a month, or the person who feels least wronged commits a grand gesture (flying across the country just for one day or washing and ironing the other person’s clothes), then things feel like they’re supposed to again: like there’s a common ground of respect that keeps things fun and sexy enough to weather the bad, sad or even just iffy times that inevitably visit a relationship. That’s love and marriage.

(*Story has been edited from original version for BlackBridalBliss.com.)

I hope you enjoyed today’s Tie the Knot Tuesdays meets Marriage Matters courtesy of Danyel Smith as much as I have over the years. By the way, have you recognized in both Cleo and Lyncoln and Salimah and Ted’s TTKT profiles, the newlyweds revealed hurdles that they faced prior to taking their vows? This isn’t by accident. In each of every TTKT feature, I will dig beneath the tulle and lace to discover the strength and character of the couple featured. Here’s to rainy days.