Cultural Misery and the Projection of Relationship Failure

Misery loves company but you don't need to hang out with it

The first public backlash I received was when I went on a podcast & talked about how I was engaged to be married years ago: that's when I felt the brunt of miserable people.

It's only gotten worse with recent focus on Simone Biles & Pierce Brosnan's marriage.

When you become a public figure, especially in the cultural and political area, being criticized comes with the territory but the reaction to my appearance on Suzanne Venker's podcast was dumbfounding. A sizable portion of the comments weren't upset with my words but actions.

Out of all the potentially controversial things I said, they were upset over my engagement with my now-wife. Strangers were upset about my personal decision that didn't affect them whatsoever and made it known how they disapproved of my choice to marry the woman I love.

In response to this, I decided to write an article to address why I believe in marriage and how I'm perfectly fine with the choice to get married. I naively thought my article could encourage a positive conversation surrounding marriage but it only enflamed their animosity.

I would later realize that we aren't dealing with people who are possibly critical of the institution of marriage and wanting to dissect its necessity but instead, I was encountering miserable people who are incapable of being happy for someone who is happy.

I know this is the case because their comments were directed at me with shaming language like calling me a "simp" and a "sucker" for wanting to spend the rest of my life with one person and initiating this union in a house of God, which is something I always wanted to do.

We've gone from playing Monday morning quarterback about a failed relationship to predicting the doom of a happy relationship and wishing for its demise: this is the progression of cultural misery.

There have always been miserable people but now they have a way of congregating from all over the world to find or invent an ugliness of anything beautiful or sacred in this world. They now manufacture digital rain for your halcyon parade hoping your happiness gets washed away.

They are allergic to someone else being satisfied with their existence while they are currently unfulfilled. However, miserable people are born but instead created by disappointment and they've abandoned the core of what motivates us all to seek happiness: Hope.

Many of the people in the comments section who were ridiculing me for going down this path of marriage self-professed to being divorced at least once. Their relationship downfall and tumultuous ending shredded to pieces the hope they carried with them into their marriages.

They were the ones who were vulnerable enough to proclaim love for someone else through marriage & faced disappointment, so now they project their hopelessness for the longevity of everyone else's happiness. Or worse, they behave like a nihilistic Nostradamus predicting its ruin.

At the root of all of this is fear and envy: they are fearful of making themselves vulnerable again and are envious of our bravery to seek satisfaction despite the risk of failure. They call happy people naive because we still embrace hope and refuse to exist with empty arms.

Only a truly miserable person would look into the face of a joyous person and find something wrong with it. Their reasons for wanting the destruction of joy is so you can be just as lonely as them, internally and externally: misery loves company.

Their pessimistic public proclamations for the death of a union between two people who love each other are a cry for help that they'll inevitably refuse, leaving them stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy of a miserable existence.

So, if you're secure in your happiness and want to stay this way, you must avoid these people. They will bleed you dry of any positivity and will pounce on any given opportunity to drag you down into their pit of misery so for once they aren't alone.

Many of you have a "friend" who only comes around when the times are hard but never celebrates the moments when you're genuinely happy. That's because hope and happiness are like kryptonite to them and the only way they survive is by remaining in environments that lack both.

At the end of the day, they want what you have but have no confidence they'll ever receive it.

Misery loves company but you don't need to hang out with it.