Dr. Bonnie Comfort knows a thing or two about being married.

Comfort, a Portland-based psychologist, has been practicing marriage therapy for more than 30 years. She was also married for 33 years – a marriage that weathered many storms and only ended with her husband’s passing. Those stories are woven together in “Staying Married is the Hardest Part: A Memoir of Passion, Secrets and Sacrifice,” now available from Simon & Schuster.

“I really felt compelled to write a memoir about our relationship and what I thought people could learn from it,” Comfort said. “Also, it was necessary for me to kind of process my grief and my feelings about my marriage.”

Comfort grew up Jewishly and said she still feels deeply connected to her Judaism but does not practice religiously. This proved a good fit for her husband, Bob, who’s fundamentalist Christian childhood led him to reject anything religious. As a comedy writer working in Los Angeles, where the couple met, Bob was well-acquainted with Judaism and even got Bonnie’s mother’s stamp of approval.

“My mother, when she met him, had been obsessed with me marrying a Jewish man,” Comfort recalled, “she said to him quietly. ‘Bob, I know you’re not Jewish, but you have a Jewish heart.’”

There was a lot more than that which made their relationship so special.

“From the first night we were together, we felt very in tune with each other. We had, in an odd way, a lot in common. He was soulful and insightful and in a lot of ways. He felt very familiar to me in that Jewish way of being interested in philosophy, interested in reading, interested in truth, and in honesty and devotion,” Comfort recalled. However, it was not perfect – the pair had major conflicts that had them on the verge of splitting up, including where to live and sexual struggles that manifested in different ways over the course of their relationship in ways that were painful for both of them. But their ability to weather those challenges was what made their marriage last, and it’s what drove Comfort to document her experiences.

“We had conflicts that were difficult to navigate and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the memoir, because I saw through experience and through my work with couples that even if you have serious incompatibilities, you can bridge those incompatibilities, if you are respectful, if you offer kindness and empathy to your partner,” she said. “That helps you in some ways over the rough times.”

While much of her work, both with clients and in her own marriage, focused on the challenges that are internal to relationships, many of the same tools can be used to tackle external challenges. The Comforts had those challenges, too; the largest of which was Bob’s diagnosis with Lewy Body Dementia, from which he died in 2010.

“Sometimes the external events influence your relationship in ways that are sometimes a challenge,” she said. “If there’s a resilience in your relationship, you can weather those things, and I believe that empathy and kindness are the magic bullets that can repair a rift in a relationship in a marriage. But I also think that the marriage has natural ebb and flow; times when you’re distant, times when you’re close, and that it’s important to expect that.”

Comfort makes a point to discuss the importance of women speaking up for themselves – a dynamic she saw play out in her parents’ marriage to positive effect – and for men to be willing to be open about their feelings – something she has seen to be less of an issue for Jewish men, she noted. The book is an entirely new way of writing for Comfort, who has previously published a novel, “Denial,” but is venturing into nonfiction for the first time.

“I have tried to look for the universal in my particular story: recognizing the rhythm of being farther apart and closer together, women encouraging women to have more courage and being outspoken about what they need because even though we’ve come a long way, women are afraid to disappoint their partner. I believe that in order for you to really be yourself, you have to be able to tell your truth to your partner and do it in that kind way,” she said. “But I also wanted to talk about sexual shame, because Bob and I both struggled with that.”

“Staying Married is the Hardest Part” is available from Powell’s Books, Barnes & Nobel, Amazon and other retailers. Learn more about the book and Comfort’s other work at bonniecomfort.com.