God only knows how disheartened I’ve been and how angry I’ve become at what I’ve seen called “love”.

In the younger generation depraved, perverted men lusting after a woman’s body convince her that they “love” her and they need to be together – this is the way he proves his love. How gallant, unselfish, and humble!

The women do all in their power to attract the eyes of men. Flirting, exposing themselves, and aggrassive behavior they use to try to draw the lust of the opposite sex. Hoping to draw “love” they give of their most valuable posession. How virtuous! How beautiful! How honoring!

I gasped at the results. Broken hearted/mental children, unclaimed children, adulterers and adultresses and alas, even suicides.

Surely if love was not in this new and younger generation, I would find it in the old. I had to go several generations back in time because I found that even of those in my parent’s era, many were divorced and living in or else on their third or fourth spouse.

So finally I went back nearly a century in time which found me in my grandparent’s age.  I marvelled. Surely this was love; these old-timers had stuck it for an utmost of sixty years!

I watched them, I listened to them, and I was confused. I didn’t know what to make of it! I had been taught that love was a decision – for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, ’till death did part - and truly this was the case, but man! did these lovers quarel! A good friend of mine, an eighty-plus year old woman who was in her seventh year of caring for her invalid husband told me, “I hated him then, and I hate him now!”

After being several days in the home of couple who bickered and fought constantly, non-stop, I almost gave up hope.

I determined that in this generation marriage was sixty years of misery, in the next generation it was heartbreak and divorce, and in the younger it was trial marriages and polygamy.  What did people find enticing about marriage?

Well, soon thereafter I came to know a pair of heavenly beings who walked the face of the earth. I have never in my life come in touch with such a holy and sanctified marriage! This couple was in something like their sixty-first or sixty-second year of marriage and you would have thought they were on their honeymoon. He honored her, served her, and adored her. She deferred him, revered him, and worshipped him. It was beautiful!

She’s gone now. She went Home after a long fight with cancer, and he has no reason to go on. She’s the only thing he’ll speak of along with their sixty-four glorious years of marriage. O, for more marriages like this one!

Anyway, all that (sorry for the long wind) to say that I thought this article was so sweet!

When Anna Kozlov caught sight of the elderly man clambering out of a car in her home village of Borovlyanka in Siberia, she stopped dead in her tracks, convinced her eyes were playing tricks.  

There, in front of her, was Boris, the man she had fallen in love with and married 60 years earlier. The last time she had seen him was three days after their wedding, when she kissed him goodbye and sent him off to rejoin his Red Army unit.

By the time he returned, Anna was gone, consigned by Stalin’s purges to internal exile in Siberia with the rest of her family as an enemy of the people.  They left no forwarding address. 

Frantic, Boris tried everything he could to find his young bride, but it was no good.  She was gone. 

Now, more than half a century later, they were reunited, an extraordinary coincidence leading them both to return to their home village on the very same day.

“I thought my eyes were playing games with me,” Anna said. “I saw this familiar looking man approaching me, his eyes gazing at me.  My heart jumped. I knew it was him. I was crying with joy.”

Now 80 years old, Boris had returned to visit his parents’ grave.  As he stepped out of the car, he looked up to see Anna standing by her old house, where they had lived for the few days after the wedding.

“I ran up to her and said: ‘My darling, I’ve been waiting for you for so long. My wife, my life…’”

They stayed up all night, talking about everything that had happened to them and the cruel circumstances that tore them apart. They met when he was secretary of the Young Communists and had to make a speech in the village. 

Afterwards, she was standing there in a circle of friends, but he had eyes only for her.  Her father had been purged by Stalin before the war for refusing to work in a collective farm, but Boris did not care.  She was too beautiful for words. “I loved her and would always defend her,” he recalled.

So the romance blossomed.  When he came home from the front, she was always there, waiting.  In 1946, they married.  It was a hasty wedding; there was no time for anything else and they could not afford anything grand in those hard years after the war. 

Three days later, he had to return to his unit.  “We kissed goodbye – but I never expected we wouldn’t see each other for more than half a century,” Anna said.

A little while later, the state caught up with her.  Like her father, she was branded an enemy of the people and forced with the rest of her family into internal exile in Siberia. 

“I threatened to commit suicide rather than go because I couldn’t live without him,” she said, “but in the end I was forced to go. It was the most miserable time of my life.”

On his return, Boris was distraught.  “She was always waiting for me when I came home, but this time there was no sign of her,” he said.  “Nobody knew where they were, or what had happened to Anna. That’s how we lost any track of each other”.

In their new village, Anna’s mother resolved that the girl should remarry.   She told her that Boris had remarried.  “She said he had forgotten about me – that’s why no letters came.

“I didn’t believe it and I longed for him so much. But one day I got back home from work at a timber plant and my mum had burned all his earlier letters, poems and pictures – including our wedding photographs.

“She told me this other man was coming to meet me – and that I should go out with him, and if I was lucky, he’d marry me.  I burst into tears and rushed into the yard. The world turned black for me. I wanted to die and I got a clothes line and went into the hayloft intending to hang myself.

“My mother came in and slapped me in the face and told me not to be so stupid.  She persuaded me to go out with this man, Nefed, and gradually he and my mother persuaded me that this was where my future lay.”

Boris, too, finally gave in and re-married.  He became a writer, penning a book dedicated to the woman he’d married as a young soldier but only ever spent three nights with.

In time, their respective spouses died.   With the demise of the Soviet Union, Anna was once more able to travel home.  Then came the chance reunion.  “I felt the same  when we met last year,” Boris said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her.  Yes I had loved other women when we were separated. But she was the true love of my life.”

He suggested they marry again.  Anna resisted, but says he talked her round. “What’s the point, I said, we can just live together they rest of our lives? But he insisted. I never thought I’d be a bride at my age but it was my happiest wedding.

“Since we found each other again, I swear we haven’t had a single quarrel. We’ve been parted for so long and who knows how much is left for us, so we just don’t want to lose time on arguing.”