Never Meet Your Hero. Ch.3

According to Frederick Begbeder, love lasts only three years.

For my part, I wouldn’t say so. This thing is purely individual. You can’t measure it with a ruler. In some cases love can live longer. In other cases it can’t even last a couple months.

Take me, for instance. No romantic relationship of mine ever lasted more than half a year. My longest ‘serious relashionship’ began in summer and ended in the winter of the same year. My first marriage lasted a little longer, two years and a half, oh okay, three – if you add to it the half a year of online dating and the other half a year of engagement.

All that being said probably discribes me as a frivolous lady, or, to put simply, DTF. But it’s not true – for none of my relationships ever ended at my own will.

I wished I could marry ‘once and forever’, to the grave, as we say in Russia. Like my grandparents, for example. Moreover, it was exactly the ideal I’d been srtiving for. But it was just not gonna happen regardless of my effort – because all the break-ups were always initiated by the second party.

What can you do when you are just put in front of the fact? Nothing, I suppose.

So it happened this time, too.

Actually, I should have seen this coming a long time ago. To begin with, my first Australian husband had married me by force, only because I had driven him up the wall and insisted on it. As he considered himself an honest man he had had no choice but submitting and giving way to me.

He could never forgive me for that. Quietly hating me for all the two and a half years of our marriage.

He was hoping I would leave by myself. And he was reating all the conditions for that. So it would have turned out as though our divorce would have been my initiative, not his. There is a sort of men who are reluctant to take the responsibility upon themselves and they just wait until things sort out on their own. So they might say with an innocent air: “Well, it was her decision, not mine…”

But I wouldn’t leave. I was clinging nail and tooth to that marriage, even though I felt incredibly miserable and unhappy. I was thinking, I would feel a lot worse alone, that I couldn’t bear being single again. I thought I would rather commit suicide than get plunged into that terrible darkness of lonely life I’d been trying to escape from for so many years.

One day, according to the law of the genre, the thing I feared happened. My husband provoked a fight and, having driven me crazy, nearly beat me up with hatred, and then, interspersing his speech with English swearwords, gave me a piece of his mind. He said that I was a terrible, disgusting, lazy, selfish, spoilt, evil woman. That for all those two years and a half his family and he could barely put up with my presence in their house. That i was not the woman he had wanted to tie up his life with and have kids, and, if I had had at least one bit of dignity and self-respect, I would have got it all long ago and left his house.

Frankly speaking, for the first three days after the break-up I really felt like dying.

I wished the plane I was flying on back home, had dropped in the ocean and crashed.

I couldn’t eat or drink for three days. I was lying in bed like a log. Hopelessly waiting for him to come to his senses and send me a message that he was sorry, he’d been wrong, he loved me and wanted me back in Australia…

But he didn’t text me either in three days, or in a month, or in a year. Because he had made his decision about me. And I had just been put in front of the fact.

I couldn’t imagine my further life without him. Single again. Back to square one.

But, curiously enough, I got over it a lot sooner than I expected. Moreover, I began to feel quite happy. My life gained new colors; I was back home, in my motherland, my dear, beloved Russia. Yes, single again – but no longer having to endure the dogs in the house with their eternal barking and doggy smell, no more excrements on the floor, no more bloody in-laws, no more abuse or humiliations…

And, inspirited with anticipation of my new free life, I bought a train ticket, packed my suitcase and went up the North – after my dreams and the scent of the tundra.