A photo of two men is going viral, holding the top spot on Reddit and racking up over 121,000 retweets.

Why? Because of the message one Reddit user attached to the pic.

"It's just a phase."

That's the tongue-in-cheek title attach to the photo on Reddit and Twitter, which shows a before-and-after of a relationship between two men.

As the photo shows, it was clearly more than "just a phase."

"That was not our comment," Nicholas Cardello (left) told ATTN: via Facebook message. "I think the person who posted that was trying to make a point and was being facetious (it's not just a phase). I think parents tell themselves this when they find out their kid is gay."

His photo has also gone viral on Facebook, with over 24,000 shares and 600 comments, including "Love is love is love is love is love" and "goals af," which Cardello finds amusing. "There have been so many supportive comments on the post, such as: 'Relationship Goals', 'wow they have been together longer than I have been alive,' 'Look how old they got' (which I laughed at, because we were 30 years old in the first photo and 54 in the second, and we were thinking 'yes you too will get old!'"

The comments also made us keenly aware we cannot take what we have for granted. A loving partner can be a difficult thing to find, once you do you must protect it and nurture it.

"It was at a suggestion of a friend of ours to recreate the photo 24 years later," Cardello explains.

"We didn't think a whole lot about posting the photo because most of our friends have been in relationships just as long, if not longer, than ours. We just posted the photo on my Facebook page, other people posted it on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. We were surprised how many people were responding to the photo on Facebook and it wasn't until our friends started sending us links to where it appeared on other sites that we realized it went global."

The first photo was taken in 1993, a time that wasn't as progressive for gay rights.

It was from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation on April 25. Nadine Smith, of Huffpost, also attended the event, and reported "the D.C. police estimated that there were between 800,000 and more than 1 million attendees."

Elvert Barnes Photography/Wikimedia Commons - wikimedia.org

Some of the demands from activists included "passage of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights bill and an end to discrimination by state and federal governments including the military; repeal of all sodomy laws and other laws that criminalize private sexual expression between consenting adults" and "massive increase in funding for AIDS education, research, and patient care; universal access to health care including alternative therapies; and an end to sexism in medical research and health care."

To put the March in a wider perspective, this was still five years before Ellen DeGeneres came out (and got backlash for it).

Perhaps the biggest demand was for "legalization of same-sex marriages." That finally became a reality in June 2015.

Of his internet fame, Cardello says "we could never have imaged the incredible response to this that we received." He adds, "we were deeply touched by people's personal stories and comments from around the world about the challenges that they experience in their personal lives and in their particular cultures. Many times we have been moved to tears by reading the comments."