Bonnie Comfort's book is available on Amazon.com. Courtesy photo: Bonnie Comfort

Lake Oswego author Bonnie Comfort wants you to know that marital challenges like conflict and resentment are normal. Despite being a psychologist who worked with couples for decades, she faced her own set of difficulties in her marriage to screenwriter Bob Comfort before he died.

Comfort detailed her experience grappling with the joys and challenges in her own marriage, as well as her professional expertise, in her memoir “Staying Married is the Hardest Part.”

“Therapists are people like the rest of us and have flaws,” Comfort said.

Comfort, a Lake Oswego resident of 22 years, previously authored a psychological thriller and wanted to write the memoir as a way to process grief and loss associated with Bob’s death, as well as the anger she felt toward certain aspects of her marriage. Her writings morphed from raw and revelatory journal entries into a narrative.

“The book is a personal memoir about my marriage and what I have learned about marriage and long-term marriage from the couples I worked with for many years at a time. I have a lot to say about it,” Comfort said. “I think there is great value in long-term marriage. I think humans were meant to be connected with each other. The challenge of living together over decades of time requires being smart about it, realizing there are ups and downs, times we are close and times we are far apart and there is conflict. All of those things are normal in a long-term relationship.”

However, Comfort said she sees two recurring characteristics among couples who can’t reconcile their differences — defensiveness and blaming.

“Those things don’t bode well for being able to solve marital problems,” she said.

The first half of the book revolves around the sexual conflicts she and her husband had; she said her husband pressured her to engage in sexual activities she wasn’t comfortable with.

“I had a wonderful marriage and I adored my husband; he was a successful screenwriter and he was hilariously funny and we laughed every day. And we were very hot for each other. But that was a major source of conflict, in addition to the fact that he wanted to leave LA and I didn’t,” Comfort said.

The second half focuses on the deterioration of Bob’s health due to Lewy body dementia. Bob lived for 10 years after the diagnosis and the last couple were especially hard. However, Comfort said Bob’s medical decline and his apologies softened the resentment she had felt and they had many tender and loving moments in his final few years.

“I think some of what is in my book is a message for women to be braver about advocating for themselves in a long-term relationship,” Comfort said. “I think we have been trained to be nice, to be pleasing and in some ways to be self-sacrificing to do too much of the emotional labor in a marriage.”

The book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Staying-Married-Hardest-Bonnie-Comfort/dp/1647429447.