My girls did this in elementary school at more local events. It didn’t matter that they didn’t go far- meeting with friends in strange places and singing in front of crowds was a joy! They quit choir soon- the older one for visual art, and my oldest and youngest for band- but the memories were priceless, and now we have band fun!
I mean, it depends. My parents tried, but I think they stopped being happy around 5 years in. They were married over 50 years (I did the math) when my father died and nobody celebrated. It was sad. The marriage counselor asked me (age 14) if I thought they should divorce. I did, but couldn’t say it. They lived another 30 sad but dutiful years together. I guess you can work at it with therapy and determination and still be unhappy. Or you can be lucky and its OK. But staying together isn’t always great, laws or none.
I thought that was weird even when I was young. I know I was in late elementary school and friends were talking about wedding dresses and thinking boys were cute and I felt lost because I had no interest in boys until about 8th grade and no interest in marriage until I had met a guy and wanted to spend life and have kids with him (26 or so), and even then I was conflicted because happy marriages don’t run in my family, at least back to my grandparents (3 sets were divorced in the 1940s, hence having 4 sets, goodness knows what happened in previous generations because we don’t talk about family history due to that mess. It didn’t really improve much since then)
Pretty sure at 12 they knew if their good friends liked boys or not, and in the case of these 2, they did. I wouldn’t make an assumption for a whole group, but I’d know who my friends liked.
That could be tomorrow. I don’t know. For our family, usually the letdown of the house, dinner situation, recent showering, grades, etc. comes fairly soon after the joyful reunion, but it does always come! One hopes the house was tidied at least enough that it didn’t cast a pall on the celebrations.
My girls did this in elementary school at more local events. It didn’t matter that they didn’t go far- meeting with friends in strange places and singing in front of crowds was a joy! They quit choir soon- the older one for visual art, and my oldest and youngest for band- but the memories were priceless, and now we have band fun!