The older we get, the less judgmental we tend to become

When we’re young, we believe that people marry out of love and that other people don’t play into it for whatever selfish or egotistical reasons they may have. We believe people tell the truth and live by the truth, and that manipulation isn’t something that happens a lot. Then, we find people who have never believed in true love, not even when they were young, that there are people who take love for a game of thrones of sorts, marry for ego, money, or status, and don’t care whose toes they need to step on to get a status partner. We get a little older, we fear we’re the one after a status partner, marry down, and that’s where things get sad.

There are people who have a “public partner” and side hustles for every weekday. People who have spent their entire life without ever falling in love with anyone, except maybe their own mother, sister, or their best friend. People who were even more naive than us and wound up married when someone tried to use them to make another person jealous, and that person got a stroke of conscience and married them out of guilt… Not wanting to burst their bubble. We realize that the way people partner up is a terrifying happenstance, and have very rarely to do with true love at all. Some of us forget about such notions altogether, while others try to spend whatever days they’ve got left grabbing onto some of the excitement of feeling in love… Cheating on their partner, or divorcing their partner when they realize they never should have married them in the first place.

There are people who were manipulated into their marriages, who truly didn’t want to marry that person but did so out of guilt or religious beliefs, or broken-hearted being told that was their only option. Who are we to judge people who wound up married against their own true will, or over their will to be a good person over their will to marry who they love?

Eventually, hopefully, we find the maturity to not be too quick to judge. Maybe you always knew you were not at the top of the draft list to marriage, and you decided to play dirty. Many of us fear being naive so much we risk being unhappy instead, anything but naive, right? Maybe we married when we were heartbroken and decided to just go for it, and once wounds are healed, look at the mess we made while feeling down and seek to fix it.

Who knows. Everybody has their story, and we just need to learn to navigate through everybody else’s fears and hurts on top of those of our own.

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