Another wedding

We were preparing for a silver wedding. 25 years of marriage is no joke!

We were preparing for a silver wedding. 25 years of marriage is no joke! Mikhail himself wanted it to be a magnificent celebration. We decided to call all the relatives and set a big table. We planned to celebrate on a grand scale.

Preparation
Preparations began almost a year in advance. I like everything to be carefully organized. I asked an entertaining friend to write the script, found a local group that agreed to perform at the celebration, and since the summer I stocked up on a huge amount of all kinds of pickles and preserves. I even decided on a white dress! Relatives, of course, were surprised, but for me it was important. We didn’t have a wedding as such. At that time we were poor students. Not a penny to my name. I even borrowed the dress from my roommate. We set the table in the hostel, sat for a couple of hours and then left. That's the whole wedding! And now that the children have grown up, I dreamed of doing everything for real. May there be a great feast!

That's the news!
So, I especially wanted to buy a beautiful dress. I asked my husband’s sister, Antonina, to go with me to the wedding salon. We found the dress with great difficulty. After all, everything looks like young, slender girls, but I wanted something classic and discreetly elegant. In the end, I chose the appropriate option. But the dress turned out to be very expensive. While I was spinning in front of the mirror and deciding whether to buy it or not, Antonina walked around me and kept groaning:
- You're crazy! - she threw up her hands - Beautiful, of course... But how expensive!
- Tonya, we’ve been together for so many years! Didn't he deserve it?
- No, I wouldn’t do something like that for my Grishka’s sake...
And then I blurt out that for Grishka’s sake I wouldn’t arrange such a thing either, because he likes to go left. Antonina, apparently, was greatly hurt by my words.
- Do you think your Misha is not like that? And you ask him how he relaxed at the sanatorium that time! They are all the same!
It was like a tub of cold water had been poured on me. What did she mean by this?! Misha cheated on me?! I immediately didn’t want to buy a dress. I pinned her against the wall and didn’t let her go until she confessed. It turned out that Mikhail really cheated on me. This happened almost 5 years ago, he was vacationing in a medical sanatorium and met a woman there. What and how they had, Tonya doesn’t know, only somehow, while in a drunken state, he shared his experiences with her. According to her, he cried and swore that this was the first and last time.

Parting
There was no question of any celebrations after this. I didn't even want to see him. Returning home, I packed my suitcase. She left without saying goodbye while he was at work. I didn’t know where to go and already at the station I decided that for now I would live with my sister in Kaliningrad. I didn’t want to tell anyone about my decision, not even my children. It’s good that they are already adults and independent. There was a feeling of complete emptiness; it seemed to me that life had lost its meaning. I needed to think things through. You see, I always believed him. I knew that almost all men cheat, but I thought that this was not about him. We had a real fairy-tale love. All our lives we walked hand in hand and supported each other in everything. Until that moment, I had not even had the opportunity to doubt his honesty. I know that many envied us and called us an ideal couple. But at that moment I didn’t understand anything. “Do I know the person with whom I lived for so many years? – I asked myself. “What if he always lied to me about everything?” These thoughts made me want to cry. My sister had to tell everything. She was also stunned by this news. But I forbade her to tell Mikhail that I was with her. For a week I lay there, burying my face in the pillow, and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed... Then I began to calm myself down and persuade myself to sort out this situation. My sister was very supportive of me. “There are crises in family life,” she told me. - The demon got me wrong. What can you do? Maybe he was afraid that he was getting old... Or maybe he was just not himself. He loves you!” This is what I didn’t know. Does he love me? And do I still love after all this?

Shall we try again?
Almost a month passed, and I realized that I was almost ready to forgive him. I really wanted to go home, and I missed him a lot, although I was angry with myself for it. After all, we have never been apart for so long before. One day I woke up because someone was persistently ringing the doorbell. The sister, apparently, was at work. I opened the door and first saw a kitten, a bouquet of forget-me-nots, and then Misha. It took him a long time to start speaking. And then he began to talk about the kitten, that he found it in the entrance and that he was probably very hungry. I felt bad and good at the same time. I took the kitten and pressed it to my chest, and Misha knelt down and began to ask for forgiveness. He said that he was even glad that I found out about everything, because for five years he woke up in a cold sweat and hated himself for what he had done. I read in his eyes the answer to all the questions. Yes, he loves me. Yes, I love him. And I forgave. I forgave, although it was not easy for me. We celebrated our wedding anniversary on the 26th wedding anniversary. There was another significant date: the year since we made peace and started all over again. And I still wore a white dress!

Elena, Murmansk.