One woman was planning to get married. Her friends had been marrying for a long time, like sweet-voiced birds singing in her ears about the first times of their happy marriage, yet she couldn’t meet her betrothed, so she could start building her family nest.
And the applicants for that important role were all swirling around her, yet she kept turning up her nose. Quite often some suitor did not satisfy her with his look and face, or by his public influence, or by the dates of his past, or even by the thinness of one’s wallet. There was no one among them who would embody all the positive qualities in her understanding all at the same time. No sign of an ideal contender for her unblemished “princess-likeness” in this sinful and wrong world.
The third decade of her earthly years has already started, yet the prince on a white horse or a black Mercedes still did not want to come with an offer of both a horse, a purse and a palace of his impressive promises to love to the death or to the last will along with his heart in addition to all that, most assuredly.
But her fate was merciful one day and gave her a chance to build a happy family. Prince of an ordinary nature, with no palace or a black-and-white-horse to back him up unexpectedly knocked on the door of her fate. And although she was internally dissatisfied with the ordinariness and unpretentiousness of his exterior, yet the burden of unrealized hopes for a happy family life and her mother’s ideological pressure affected her opinion in those days. And she agreed to meet with him, and soon went down the aisle.
And we would like to say, most certainly, that they lived happily ever after, although this rarely happens nowadays, and that they even died at the same time on the very same day – yet we have no right to distort that story we keep telling out of our own willfulness for the sake of wisdom teaching or out of your unsolicited and unspoken desire.
And they did not live long, although they were happy at first times. The wife tried to take care of her husband in every possible way, helping in everyday life, agreeing with his doubts, and supporting him whenever she was able, and the husband carried his wife for this wise attitude in his arms, and spoiled her with gifts. And their joint and family affairs went uphill at first, although not to the Everest, and their souls were satisfied with this turn of their fates.
Yet only her friends, like sweet-voiced birds flying around their family nest, darting through the sky every now and then, looked inside her home time and again, and chattered incessantly about their magnificent princes and their sweet and carefree life. And under the influence of the voices of those deceitful ones, that woman started comparing her husband, given to her by the very fate, with those husbands of her girlfriends and her acquaintances, and thus envy slipped like a black shadow into her soul in those days. And it began to seem to her with each passing day even more and more clearly, that her husband had a strange multitude of flaws, and other husbands living far from her were like those heavenly angels, who, by the grace of God, descended from the very heavens to their wives to serve them daily. And she started to express her discontent, fostered in the darkness of envy, to her lover more and more often. And the warm and affectionate word, called as “love”, which God himself had previously inscribed over the doors of their home, had once disappeared as if in a haze, and another word, firm and harsh, took over its holy place, and that word was “obligation”.
And the husband became totally obliged to his wife from these days to the grave of his life. And it was her whim which decided what he was obliged to on a daily basis. And there was no end to those obligations, and her husband had no rest from them. The words of gratitude and appreciation for caring for one’s beloved were no longer heard in that family, and the cold-endless duty soon reigned. And her husband still tried to match the image of the prince, living in her head, and to fulfill her wishes, cunningly turned into snakes of requirements, as much as he could, yet he could not please her heart any more – for how is it possible to please another, if you owe him by definition?
And that poisonous idea of her great dignity and unworthiness of her spouse has grown up in the soul of the woman we named, and resentment for her unfair attitude in the heart of her spouse gradually grew as well. With their own thoughts, and tongues, and hands, they dug a grave for their family happiness, and buried themselves alive inside it.
And the illusion of their personal rightness and the self-induced feeling of their neighbor’s wrongness in everything and in every way won in those relationships. And the fragile love was crushed under the burden of unaffordable obligations, and demands, and endless discontents. And for many years mutual resentments and reproaches accumulated in their hearts and souls until the final moment. And the Lord of heaven and the lawyer of the earth separated them from each other one day, and they parted ways like sailing ships in the endless sea of life after a sea storm with broken masts.
And at the site of that storm and the family shipwreck, among the logs and planks left from the mutilated ships, a swimming lifesaver soon floated to the surface under the rays of the sun, as if the sign for all navigators. And two words – “gratitude” and “love” – were imprinted on its surface with a semicircle. For it is only in gratitude to one’s neighbor, without any obligation arising, that love lives and prospers.