When recollecting the incidents having certain impact on my life, I remember the one which actually changed my perception of reality a lot. That was not the one happening to me, but I was a kind of involved in it, observed it from the outside, and eventually it influenced me greatly.

I used to have a friend of mine a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, she has moved to another state and we do not see each other often nowadays. Christine, – let me call her that way in the present narrative, – has always been a really nice person. She has always been responsive, sincere, smart and talented; she has also always been understanding, carrying and supportive. She used to be different from many other girls of same age. She used to have few friends, never being too much concerned about finding the new ones. Christine felt perfectly fine both when being in a company and when being alone. It was not because she was closed or unsociable; it was more because she had a really nice family and loved to spend time with her relatives.

We were really close at those times, so I used to spend a lot of time at her place, communicating regularly with her parents, her sister and her grandparents. I need to confess: I was extremely jealous of her having such a great family. They all were just wonderful. It is not that I don’t have a good family of my own, it is just that they were absolutely amazing. They were all as close as best friend, with the differences in age and gender being completely ignored. I understood Christine perfectly well when on the Saturday night she preferred to be with her family instead of visiting some sort of a party. I had always readily accepted her invitations to spent time with her and her family when I got one, and always had a great time indeed. Their relationships were amazingly natural and easy. I cannot remember their having some serious quarrel for even once. They were all equal in their little world of mutual trust and understanding. The idyll I observed when visiting Christine’s family served as a proof of the existence of perfect families, where betrayal, unfaithfulness and mutual condemnation were impossible.

And then one day everything changed. I remember starting to see Christine with her face being tear-stained and unnaturally pale. She was obviously depressed. I was getting invitations to visit her place no more. I didn’t want to put additional pressure on her by asking annoying questions or by being irritatingly inquiring, so I just waited till she had a need to talk to someone.  Once, on a party, late at night after everyone had already went to bed, we were sitting and chatting, and she told me everything. It turned out that she had occasionally run across suspicious messages on her father’s cell phone. It seemed to her like he was communicating intimately with some woman. Christine didn’t tell her mother anything, trying to persuade herself that she could get it all wrong. Eventually it turned out that she hadn’t.

Those messages were from the one woman with whom Christine’s father had had sexual relationship for two years up to the moment when my friend discovered them. Somewhat in a week after Christine’s finding the scandal broke out. It turned out that Christine’s mother was for a long time suspecting her husband of being unfaithful to her by then. In no more than a week a perfect family turned into the one experiencing a damaging power of betrayal.

No need to say I was shocked by what I had heard. I just couldn’t imagine things like that happening in the family being so close to ideal. I realized how my friend was completely miserable going through situation like that. Even I, who was in no way a member of the family, was rather wretched. I was unhappy to discover that there were no perfect families. I concluded that even if in family like that bad times happened, there was no chance to create a fine family with problems like that excluded. Naturally, the impact the trouble had on Christine cannot be compared to the one it had on me. However it had a surprisingly significant influence on my views of life, family relationships in particular.