“That studio in Echo Park was a mistake.” My husband said it casually, as if he were telling me that eating a bowl of cereal each night before bed was not good for his weight loss plan. But that studio was one of the few straws that almost broke our marriage.

Three years ago, on a Saturday morning, I sat in my car, parked outside our apartment, in my pajamas, crying. The Fisherman’s Wife was on the other end of the cell phone line. I didn’t want my husband to listen so I got up early to call her from the car. “You can’t let him have that studio,” she said, over and over and I knew she was right. We were moving from a one bedroom apartment with a closet as his editing room to a one bedroom apartment with a corner of an already cramped living room for him to work.

The rent was cheap, which we needed, but he said he’d have no place to work. He wasn’t working anyway. He was having a life crisis and crying most of the time. He thought we never should have gotten married and was relating more to his female therapist than to me. He wanted space and less pressure. He wanted to be left alone. I didn’t know how to make our marriage work again. I didn’t know how to make him love me, but I did know how to sign my name on a one-year lease to a studio space in a beer-soaked recording studio down the street from our new apartment. The Fisherman’s Wife told me it was a mistake. “You’ll regret it,” she said. I knew she was right and I did it anyway.

The studio is what I think about when people ask me why The Accountant’s Wife and her husband adopted a child and got pregnant when their marriage was in crisis. If they knew their marriage was falling apart why did they want more kids? People ask it condescendingly, as if marriage is a rational thing, as if doing the sane thing is always the right choice and how dare The Accountant and his wife do otherwise. But marriage isn’t black plus white equals gray. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s black plus white equals yellow or purple or strawberry. Sometimes what saves a marriage is the very thing that looks like some messed up, crazy shit to everyone else.

The studio was a financial mistake, sure, but signing the down payment check on that studio told my husband that I still believed in him. Signing that lease let my husband know that I was with him, that I wanted to give him space, that I wanted him to have what he needed, even if it turned out that he didn’t want it once he had it. The studio meant that we kept trusting each other, that we believed in the power of us, and that black plus white equaled married instead of separated or divorced.

So my husband, three years later, says the studio was a mistake. He means financially. I agree with him. It was a mistake. We’ll be paying for that musty, high-priced storage unit for years to come because of the school loans we took out to pay the rent. It was a mistake for sure. I knew it then and I know it now. And I cannot tell you how happy I am we made that particular mistake together and that we’re still together to make a whole lot more.

Secret Forty-Five, Revealed. When it comes to a successful marriage, failing together really is a lot better than being rational, right, and emotionally far apart.