Marriage

Stipulation: If you read the below, keep in mind that I am not judging or criticizing anyone's choices, I am simply stating my opinion and experiences. I love everyone, even if they completely disagree with me.

So during my days at work, I can sometimes (almost always) be found looking at stories on the internet. I usually start at CNN and work my way around the circuit of various headlines/blogs/twittering/flickr, etc.
Sometimes there are stories and things I send to Joe or my dad and say "This is interesting" and move on. But this one caught my eye as something I could blog about (I've been wanting to blog about something) http://tinyurl.com/653hfw mostly because I am irritated with it. From this article I get the feeling that marriage is a bad word. I don't think that divorce is or isn't the answer, but I do think a lot of people enter marriage for a lot of wrong reasons and don't realize what it means to be married. Marriage does indeed take work, it can be really hard some days and really easy other days, but I do think that if someone constantly has the "out" of divorce in the back of their mind, what would make them work hard at keeping their marriage together? Like in High School, knowing that I needed a C to pass, why would I put myself through the trouble of getting the A (or any other similar metaphor).
Marriage is a commitment, for the LDS peeps, for time AND all eternity. Shouldn't people want to marry someone that they could work hard with and love a lot?
So all those wrong reasons that people get married for? I'm not going to list all of those reasons, but I will say that marriage is important and that it's importance will never go away, even though the lady in the article thinks it will.....
I think the excuse of "I'd be happier if I were married to so-and-so instead of my current spouse" is a bad one. I was talking to Stacy about this, and I've thought about it before: There were other guys I could have married, and plenty of them I could have had a just fine marriage with, however, it would have been different and probably not as fun as it is being married to Joe. My point is, regardless of who you marry or divorce and then marry, you will always have problems and issues, and things that bug you; there's no "perfect" marriage, because as we all know, we can never be perfect while on this earth, but we can try to be perfect and we can try to have a perfect marriage. When we are trying to make our spouse happy vs. just making ourselves happy, perhaps then we will see that our marriage can survive and that we can continue to work things out. I know I need to work harder for Joe.
Marriage also involves a lot of sacrifice, and I know Joe and I have both sacrificed, in our different ways. And instead of dwelling on those sacrifices and wishing that maybe I hadn't given this or that up, I have to focus on why I chose to sacrifice those things, like my career for a family; sometimes it comes down to what is more important to me, and then also, what is more important to our marriage and our future.
So to those who are thinking about getting married or getting really close to being married (Ian & Tykena), just know what you are getting into. Marriage is awesome, but marriage also means hard work, sacrifice, struggle, hurt, pain, disappointment, broke($).....etc, etc; you can't have the ups without the downs, or the rainbows without the rain :)
Ultimately, I want everyone to have a happy marriage, I love my happy marriage, but I also want everyone to know that being married does not automatically equal happy marriage.
Soapbox over.....for now.