“The road ahead is long… you can walk fast, you can walk slow…. but more importantly, as husband and wife, we need to walk side by side at the same pace, helping each other along the way, never letting go.”
On Tuesday, we woke up to what we thought would be a usual work day.
Then our phones kept buzzing. Friends were sending us screenshots of the post “My imperfect husband” which kept appearing all over their Facebook feeds.
Yay, it had gone viral. Which blogger didn’t hope that their blog would go viral? Still, I was having a nagging feeling at the situation. It was a blogpost from April after all. Why did it suddenly spin off?
I guess it got shared so much to a point that it got into the wrong hands. A friend alerted me to a screenshot of a certain trashy news site in Singapore (let’s not drive more traffic to them, since that was their purpose in the first place, with ads plastered all over).
We’re talking bad headline, accompanied by trashy photos (of a woman in some ridiculous skimpy dress sitting on a man. Sorry, those people don’t look half as good as us IMHO). And we started to see people scolding me and calling me names online both on that page and in comments posted to my blog.
I asked Papa Long, “How?”
Because we were at work, I turned off this blog. The amount of notifications were just too distracting. Friends were asking me if I was okay and rallying around me while concurrently, strangers were condemning me because they missed the whole point of “My imperfect husband”.
Too much buzz around me. I tuned out and concentrated on work.
After work, Papa Long went for dinner and drinks with his buddies. The boys posted a group shot of themselves having coffee together with the caption “Dinner with kakis. We are all imperfect 😛”
They sure know how to spin a positive note to the whole situation. I laughed out loud to myself in the darkness of our bedroom while Little Foot was soundly sleeping when I saw the photo and the caption. And I’m sure all the wives at home were laughing too.
When he got home at night, we chatted about it. Logical as usual, Papa Long said “you shouldn’t have made the blog private. It just made people searching for the article go to the trashy site, and gave them more traffic! And they see the distorted version!”
I asked him how he felt. Was he sad? (Since that was the question people were throwing at me online, that I had shamed him and he would be sad that I badmouthed him publicly) He laughed and said “Those people missed your point. It is all about not staying angry and moving on so that you get a better outcome”. As usual, he was never one to make a big deal out of anything. He also happily showed me a photo of one of his buddies who took a photo with our car, as it was now the “celebrity car”.
In the end, he always reads me best, and he’s always the chill one. When I’m unsettled, he provides an anchoring point and clarity. He took the situation, removed the emotions, evaluated it, then presented it in plain simple terms. Then figure out the next steps.
Perhaps that’s all there is to it. Where I am lacking, you fill in those gaps. Where you can’t do well, I help you along. We are all imperfect, but we complement each other.
The road ahead is long… you can walk fast, you can walk slow…. but more importantly, as husband and wife, we need to walk side by side at the same pace, helping each other along the way, never letting go. Along the way we will continue to have debates and bickers e.g. whether we should have ice cubes in our freezer again, or whether organic foods are just a marketing ploy to cheat our money (I still buy organic veggies for Little Foot).
The important thing is to keep walking together, and be good role models for Little Foot.
And we hope that when we reach the sunset at the end of the journey, it would have been a meaningful walk together… then we could sit down, pat each other on the back and say “I guess we didn’t do too badly”.
P.S. We won the battle in some way as the post of the offensive article was removed from the trashy site’s Facebook page on Tuesday afternoon (thanks to strength in numbers), and the article was removed last evening.
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