I put up with my lazy, insolent wife for twenty years. She was a country girl who came to town to study. She went to all the parties where she met me. She married me after a night together because she was pregnant. I was an honest guy, so I got married without any arguments or attempts to avoid responsibility. At first I even thought I was falling in love with the girl.
She was beautiful, sly, and a very good cook. We got an apartment not without my parents’ help, and while we were doing repairs and raising our little daughter, somehow married life was a pleasure, not a burden. Over time, of course, this changed. My wife wanted to go out again, to go out with her friends, but she left her daughter with her grandparents or with me. She wasn’t interested in Alice’s progress at school and never once in her life was at a parent-teacher conference – I always went. I argued and quarreled with my wife because of this, and she kept threatening to leave me. I myself would have been happy to separate at the time, but Alice needed a mother at least so that the other children would not dare to say that she came from an inferior family.
I approached the divorce very consciously. First, I had somewhere to go, leaving my wife and daughter’s apartment, and second, Alice was already twenty years old and had a good and reliable fiancé, with whom they could get married any day now. My wife and I didn’t have any feelings anyway, and I was really tired of her constantly just walking around, not wanting to work, and messing with my head.
She came with me to sign the divorce papers and kept proving that I was joking and would not sign anything. And after she was convinced I had done it, she went back all the way back to me. That hasn’t changed a year after my divorce. I am in a new relationship with a very nice woman, but my ex can not calm down and intrigues me. She tries to set her daughter against me, or tells our friends what a cheater I am and that is why I divorced, or complains to her relatives that I left and did not leave her a penny, and she does not even have money to pay the rent.
I live in hope that sooner or later she will cool down and mature enough to stop being angry about our divorce.
