{"id":1181,"date":"2016-07-20T10:27:30","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T17:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2016-07-20T10:27:30","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T17:27:30","slug":"is-marriage-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/?p=1181","title":{"rendered":"Is Marriage Everything?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/>I got to thinking about marriage. Is marriage everything? Is your relationship not real if you&#8217;re not married? Is it any less loving, important or special without marriage? Sure, in the eyes of the law, it doesn&#8217;t matter. But I am not talking about the law; I am talking about public perception.<\/p>\n<p>Recently I noticed that marriage seems to be more important to those around me than a committed, long-term relationship. It&#8217;s not even a level playing field. But why is this? Why can having a child out of wedlock be the norm these days, but God forbid, if you don&#8217;t get married (without children), you&#8217;re suddenly a barbarian? This thinking confuses and slightly angers me. I do not love my longtime boyfriend any less just because we aren&#8217;t married. We aren&#8217;t any less committed. So, please, stop saying that we are not. And stop forgoing any inclusion of &#8220;family&#8221; for us. This is real. This matters. Please acknowledge that.<\/p>\n<p>Marriage isn&#8217;t everything. Relationships and love are everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got to thinking about marriage. Is marriage everything? Is your relationship not real if you&#8217;re not married? Is it any less loving, important or special without marriage? Sure, in the eyes of the law, it doesn&#8217;t matter. But I &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/?p=1181\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1182,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/carolineadejong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}