For Love? For Money?

My family is not wealthy. We live somewhat comfortably, but we don’t have money for everything we want. Living expenses are high and my parents sometimes live paycheck to paycheck. So one thing I have always been told is “Marry for money, you can fall in love later.”

What kind of advice is that to give to children? The only real example of marriage any child has is the one of their parents. Now how am I supposed to feel when I am told that love is stupid? Am I to believe that my parents’ marriage is a sham? That they don’t really love each other? Or that they think they’re better off apart from each other so they would have more money?

I don’t believe in love anymore. My parents have been married for almost twenty-five years, and the only thing I have seen recently is fighting and yelling. (It doesn’t help that I am an adult that has my own opinion about how things should go down and happen.) it gets to the point where I just want to leave and find somewhere else to get an example from.

Then I see these “romances” on TV with shows like The Bachelor/ette, and it really grinds my gears when we’re supposed to believe that true love can happen after only knowing someone for 8 weeks. It’s like producers want people to think the contestants are in some fairytale Disney movie. Yeah, it works sometimes, but how many of these couples break up after all the taping is done, and they really learn what the other person is like?

Let me clarify, I’m not bashing the idea of “love at first sight.” I’m bashing the idea that “love at first sight” is going to be the only thing that matters in any relationship. Sure, I may be a baby in some people’s eyes (yeah I’m young, I couldn’t possibly know what love is, right?), but I know a relationship is based more on the original attraction.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing this blog post, and I guess I have no real point to this. I guess it was more just a plea. Is there anyone out there that can prove me wrong? And I don’t mean somebody telling me “[their] grandparents have been together for [X] many years and have never left each other’s sides, and still love each other as much as the day they met.” I mean someone that can tell me they wanted to learn everything about their significant other the moment they saw them, and while person A learned everything about person B and vice versa, they found that it didn’t matter to either of them and each quirk made them love the other person more. Or maybe even someone that can look at my picture, and say they would actually want to get to know me. I mean, it’s not that anyone reads these posts and will actually notice these requests.

I just don’t want to feel so alone.

That’s it for this post. Until next time, I’m Charlotte Carmichael and thanks for reading.