My grandmother’s second husband was just an offgenic: kind, reliable, smart. They met with their grandmother when they were about 50 years old: Grandma was widowed shortly before, and grandfather was divorced. The story of his divorce from his first wife I heard as a child, but, honestly, I didn’t believe it. And then, at the age of 15, I faced a situation that made me think: suddenly it was the truth.
His first wife was a perfectionist and a cleaner. He loved it and tried to match it: to wash the cup there, not to leave garbage, etc. But quarrels on this ground still occurred periodically: he worked in the factory and sometimes was too tired to watch if he forgot to remove the plate somewhere in the dishwasher or to twist the toothpaste cap. The quarrels exhausted him, but he thought that once everything else was fine, these little things could be tolerated.
But it turns out that even small things can become critical. His wife threw him out of the house, you can’t believe it. After a change in the factory, he fell asleep in front of the TV with a glass of tea. When she saw on her favorite carpet, which she always so thoroughly cleaned, an unwashed cup of undrunken tea, it was as if the devil had settled in her. This is the end of family life. It’s hard to believe that an unwashed cup can be a cause of divorce. At least I did not believe. Then the following incident happened to me.
We were on a train to the Olympics in another city – I, my girlfriend and another schoolgirl. The boss has gone somewhere, and we are sitting three in a coupe: a girlfriend hangs, a girl drinks tea, I relaxed looking out the window... Well, the nature is beautiful, the air is fresh, the wheels measurably knock... By the dreamy look of the girl with a cup of tea, it can be seen that she is feeling about the same. But it was silence and grace only for us two, and my friend's eyes were bloody all this time. A few minutes later, it just exploded, and I had never heard a man speak like this. The reason: when a girl drinks tea, she becomes sick.
Do you understand? That is, we both sit relaxed and don’t even notice these sounds, and for my girlfriend it turned out to be a real torture. Moreover, the girlfriend is not inadequate for any, absolutely normal person, we at that time have been friends for three years: polite, friendly. She endured for quite a long time, though for her these sounds were worse than the sound of the iron scratch on the glass. And when my patience reached the peak, I just couldn’t cope with myself. The girl with tea is sad, of course: I will never forget her eyes when she sits so relaxed, and here suddenly such a stream of aggression is unclear for what.
Why am I writing all this. Sometimes what is small for one is unbearable torture for another. It all accumulates, accumulates, and then follows an explosion. And the main reason for the misunderstanding is that the first seems like everything is okay. Now I regret being sardonically laughed at my grandfather’s story about this unwashed cup, although there was a sincere misunderstanding in his eyes and it was evident that he wasn’t lying. She still thought, "I brought my wife something else, and now lying about the unwashed cup." Sometimes it can be such a little thing.