Thomas Rhett‘s wife, Lauren Akins, just released her memoir, Live in Love: Growing Together Through Life’s Changes. The book details both the highs of their lives, including their dating, marriage, growing their family, as well as the lows, including a time when Lauren really struggled in her relationship with her husband.

Lauren went to school to be a nurse, but found that, as her husband’s career was taking off, it was impossible for her to balance a career with his busy schedule.

“A little bit of my light would just dim a little more each day. I got to a point where I realized I don’t recognize myself anymore,” Lauren told The Tennessean.

The mother of three recalled one time when her husband, who had just gotten off the road, was taking her to a Bruno Mars concert, when all she wanted to do was stay home — and he was then painfully late getting ready.

“What is it?” Thomas asked when he saw her anger.

“Honestly?” Lauren answered at the time, “I think I hate you.”

In Live in Love, Lauren recalls how frustrated she felt in the beginning of their marriage, when instead of being a nurse, she was spending her time with her husband as he built his own career.

“I kept asking the tour manager and the assistant tour manager, anyone who would listen, for a job. … ‘Can I, like, do something? I’m kind of losing my mind,” she said in the book. “You don’t have to pay me, just give me something to do!’ They never actually listened. They just laughed.”

Part of the purpose of Live in Love was to show people that, even though theirs may seem like the fairy tale romance, their relationship is a lot of work, and it is far from perfect.

“There’s a lot of pressure to portray that you have a perfect life, and family, and marriage, especially on social media and in the public eye,” Lauren told People. “I think the quicker that I’m able to just get on the table that, ‘Hey, we struggle just like every other married couple, we struggle just like every other parent, we struggle just like every other human,’ it takes that pressure and weight off our shoulders to have to be a certain way. It gives the green light to be us.”

Lauren, who has 2.4 million Instagram followers, while her husband has 4.2 million, knows that it is easy to portray a perfect life on social media, which is why she hopes Live in Love dispels some of those myths.

“My hope is that people can find themselves in the pages, and they’ll be able to realize that deep down, every human heart has the same wants and feelings,” she said. “We want to be known, we want to be loved [and] we want to have people to love. I hope that those walls will be pulled down.”

“I think it’s easy to look at filters in the world, and social media, and look at love that seems to be perfect,” Lauren continued. “But that’s not reality, and it’s a lot to try to live up to. So I hope that people can see the imperfections of our life and find themselves in those imperfections, and feel a sense of hope, encouragement and ultimately love.”

Live in Love earned the hearty approval of her husband, even if parts of the book were painful for him to read.

“It’s hard to read in the best way,” Thomas admitted. “This book really gets into severe detail of the adoption process, of what it was like when we first had kids and what it was like when I first got on the road and she had just graduated from Tennessee with a nursing degree and didn’t use her nursing degree. [She] talks about her childhood and what shaped her into the person she is now. And I mean, it’s a memoir. So you have to be really invested to know that this is a story of her life.”

Live in Love: Growing Together Through Life’s Changes is available for purchase at LaurenAkins.com.