I am a stubborn man. Truth be told, I sometimes walk a really thin line between stubborn and stupid.

A few years back, that line became really blurry when I injured myself during a canoeing trip.

I wore flip flops on that fateful day, which any experienced canoer will tell you is not smart. A dry summer had left the water so low that I frequently found myself outside the canoe pushing or pulling the vessel through low points in the river.

With my flip flops continually slipping off my feet, I tossed them in the boat and went barefoot.

You can probably guess what happened next. A couple miles into the trip, I gashed the bottom of my foot on a broken bottle.

This was no surface wound, and most of my friends cringed at the seriousness of the cut. Everyone advised that a hospital visit should be in my very near future, but I had a different idea.

You see, I have a stubborn (some may say stupid) aversion to seeking help from medical professionals. And frankly, I didn’t want to endure the pain or cost (in money or time) of getting stitches.

Although basic sense told everyone else who looked at my wound that I needed stitches, I was sure it was nothing a Band-Aid and some Neosporin couldn’t handle. After a week of cleaning and bandaging, my foot still hurt a lot and wasn’t healing well.

But I was already learning to live with it. I changed my walk to avoid putting pressure on that area and began to accept that I might always have some pain when I walked.

One night while cleaning my wound, I decided to look deeper into the cut to see how the healing was going on the inside. That’s when I discovered that there was still a piece of glass in my foot that I’d been walking on for well over a week.

Goodbye stubborn, hello stupid!

Now I can look back at this incident and laugh at what a fool I was, but it was far less funny when I realized I had been doing the same thing in my marriage. Over a decade, my marriage slowly drifted from the honeymoon phase to complacency to contempt on our worse days.

We were suffering from a wound that we tried to ignore and slap Band-Aids on, but there was something below the surface we were failing to address.

In my mind, I explained the complacency away and learned to live with the pain as we gradually adjusted to this existence. Our marriage was never terrible, but it was far from great.

My wife (Jody) and I both eventually settled for a state of quiet desperation. Tragically, more marriages exist in this state than you might imagine.

As Jody and I have been sharing our story with others and attempting to use our nearly-failed marriage to bring healing, it has become apparent that this quiet desperation is an epidemic.

When the shininess of marriage grows dull and the veil of illusion is lifted from our spouse, many of us find ourselves living in mediocre, unfulfilling marriages…and we just accept it.

At this point, there are three basic paths one can take: get divorced, accept mediocrity or start fighting for a great marriage.

Divorce seems like an easy out when the going gets tough.  While many of us just keep plodding along, choosing to live with the pain instead of seeking to identify and eliminate the source.

When discontent eventually led me and Jody to the brink of divorce, we decided to start putting in the hard work to make our marriage better.

This road is not easy. It calls for a great deal of humility to really assess one’s flaws as a spouse and as a person. The honesty required to chip away at years of half-truths and niceties can be extremely painful. And maintaining open, meaningful dialogue on a regular basis is downright hard work…especially for men.

We sought professional counseling, read numerous books on marriage, dedicated one night a week to talking and basically absorbed any information we could find on how to become better spouses.

The thought of all this work and the potential pain that comes from looking into our wounds is enough to keep many couples living on the surface, trapped in mediocrity. I know it kept me stuck for more years than I care to admit.

My encouragement for anyone who finds themselves in this kind of existence is to choose the narrow path. Begin to do the hard work to transform your relationship into the marriage that God intended for you to have.

Don’t let fear or comfort keep you stuck in mediocrity. Don’t ignore that feeling that your marriage isn’t what it should be. And don’t let stubbornness keep you from seeking help.

But don’t be stubborn and stupid like horses and mules who, if not reined by leather and metal, will run wild, ignoring their masters. – Psalm 32:9 (VOICE)