An Old Opinion I Still Have

 Re: Last year's popular Instagram comments saying on other peoples' posts about overcoming challenges of being newly married, "if you had a first hard year you married the wrong person"

I like the denormalization of hating one's spouse, but I do think there is a little bit of hauti ess to the way some people execute this. 

Just because something, say a relationship, isn't easy, that doesn't mean that it was a mistake: that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. 

It's true we must select our spouse wisely, and the jokey norm of hating one's spouse is not a good thing at all. However, sometimes valuable things take work, and that is okay.

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Also, this isn't something new to me now that I'm married. As a child, one of my earliest memories of what I heard at a religious convention that I questioned was about something like this.

The speaker said his own opinion, something like "if you are dating someone and already have difficulties, the marriage is doomed to fail." I was extremely young and I think only recently had any concept of marriage. I thought about what he said for a while, and then later told my mom I didn't like what he said.

She asked me why, as he is trying to take pressure off people who are dating to get married even if it's not going well, since sometimes people will shame people for not marrying their first boyfriend or girlfriend.

I said it's not nice for him to say it like that, because out of the thousands of people there at least some of them probably married to people they had a hard time with when they were dating, and he's going to make them feel like they're hopeless. 

My mother thought about it, and said she didn't think of it that way but I'm right. She understands he probably wasn't trying to make people feel that way, but wasn't really thinking of everyone's feelings.

I think I was about seven years old at that time. I wasn't disagreeing with him that people should be careful about who they marry, but I didn't think he should announce it so extremely like that, especiallt to a bunch of people who all have different situations. The man was probably in his late 40s or early 50s. I remember thinking it was so weird that someone who is so much older than me wouldn't think of something so obvious.

Now that I am older and have access to the internet, I now have those same feelings all the time. On the internet, literally anyone has a platform to say literally anything, even if it's stupid or mean.