I’m over the people who are over the “love your spouse challenge”.:.

For the love, people…

There was the Love Your Spouse challenge where each day for 7 days you posted a picture and something good and/or loving about your relationship.

And then there was the backlash.  “Marriage is hard!” (DUH!) and “This is all fake!”  and on and on with the various atrocities people could spew over something as simple as taking a minute each day to climb out of the trenches of marriage and recognize what actually keeps you together.  SERIOUSLY???

I have been married 17 years as of next week and do you know that I got a new wedding band at the 10-year because the first 10 were so hard, I didn’t want to remember them when I looked at my ring.

I GET THAT MARRIAGE IS HARD.

We are two people with PTSD that went untreated for years. My family does not exist in our lives (literally) and his has hated me from the day they met me. We have been through special needs parenting, losing 2/3 of our income, foster parenting, and a horribly botched relocation just to give you the highlights. 

Yes.  Marriage is hard.

So I have been tagged in this challenge and haven’t gotten to it yet.  I’m actually ASHAMED of that as I write it.

Marriage is hard.

But why can’t I find the time to take a few minutes each day for 7 days to look for and publicly recognize the things that keep us holding on?  Why is it that someone would criticize me (or anyone else) as “being fake” because in the midst of the hard we are able to recognize the good?  

When did life become so black and white?  When did we become liars and actors when we recognize the good as well as the bad?  When did Facebook become everyone’s barometer for happiness (or achievement)?

Since when do people think they know the complicated, Impressionist painting of our lives by way of Facebook???  Do people really think that they have the whole picture just from social media?  Is this a Millenial thing?  Or maybe a GenX misunderstanding of the place this technology has in our lives??

I mean, even in person: how much are you showing to people who are not part of the inner circle?  Not the whole kit and kaboodle. Yes, we have all made that connection with someone where we can’t believe the level of depth we’ve shared on a specific aspect of our lives when we’d just met. It happens. For me, it used to happen a lot. But by and large, we don’t expose everything to everyone we meet.

But we will quickly “friend” them on Facebook.

Marriage is hard. I don’t share all of the “hard” with everyone. For you to believe that my social media connection with you makes you privy to that level of intimacy means you need to check in with reality.

And for you who know me and know the hard to believe that the hard means I’m incapable of trying to see the good in my marriage or recognize what keeps us together without it being a lie… well, unfriend me.

Live and let live. Love to you, mamas.