‘Love Your Spouse Challenge’ Fills Facebook With 7 Days Of Photos — And A Bit Of Backlash

There’s a “Love Your Spouse Challenge” that has been going around Facebook that has traveled to Instagram and Twitter, as well. The “Love Your Spouse Challenge” has several versions, but the general premise is that the challenge would celebrate love between married couples by showing marriage can be a good thing by posting seven days worth of happy pics on social media. After being tagged in the spouse challenge, the person tagged could then nominate others for the 7-day spouse challenge.

To see how popular the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” is on Facebook, simply typing the words into Facebook’s search engine not only reveals about 4,000 people currently talking about the challenge — but shows updates coming in by the hundreds about the topic.

While the challenge helped some people dig out old photos with their spouses — or take new ones to upload onto Facebook — it was inevitable that some folks would kick back against the challenge. As reported by the Kansas City Star , Sherry Kuehl got tagged on Facebook to participate in the “Love Your Spouse Challenge,” but she politely declined.

After declining to post seven days worth of photos to Facebook for the challenge, Sherry wrote that she began receiving Facebook messages asking her if everything was good with her marriage. Kuehl discovered she and her husband had been placed on a couple of prayer lists — all because she didn’t feel the need to participate in the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” like some other married folks.

Sherry quipped about all the Facebook Messenger messages asking her if cheating was leading to the demise of her marriage. Despite Kuehl simply stating she didn’t want to be a part of the “Love Your Spouse Challenge,” some of her Texas friends still took it as a sign of trouble in her marriage. Sherry wrote that she thought back to some of them and to their experiences in church — such as the one woman who had an affair with a youth pastor and then married the head pastor one year later. Sherry joked if that was some sort of Scriptural version of “marrying up” as a way to bring absurdity to it all.

The writer felt that she didn’t need to post public displays of love in the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” as a way of proving her love to her husband or anyone else. As a joke, she changed her Facebook status from “married” to “in an open relationship,” because of all the questioning she received. Sherry quipped that her husband didn’t even notice — and that in and of itself was one of the many reasons she loved him.

I'm tired of the love your spouse challenge so I'm starting the love your cat challenge. pic.twitter.com/jVqNebaswX

— Pam Pho (@NerdyPam) August 2, 2016

Others feel the same way as Sherry. While some participate in the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” as a cute challenge going around that isn’t as dangerous as some of the challenges that kids have floated around social media, others realize they don’t need to post photos to prove or display their love to their spouses.

Not to mention all the single people posting about feeling like they have been left out of the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” — or mistakenly included — along with those who are posting memes about being divorced and feeling left on the sidelines.

A sampling of the reactions to the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” from social media can be read below.

“Ladies make sure the man you’re posting the love your spouse challenge with is your husband ok…They’re stealing husbands out here!”

“I guess I don’t understand why we need 7 days of pictures to show you love your spouse. Isn’t that a given?”

“People are doing this ‘love your spouse challenge day’ thing on Facebook, but isn’t every day a challenge to love your spouse?”

On Instagram, the #loveyourspousechallenge hashtag currently has 22,128 posts.