Buying a gift for my wife on Valentine's Day, my card was declined at checkout, and her words left my eyes brimming with tears

I went to buy a gift for my wife on Valentine's Day, but my card was declined at checkout; after hearing what she said, my eyes brimmed with tears

Does love have a form? Some love is passionate and grand, some love is plain and ordinary. You can say roses and perfume represent love, but you cannot say that daily necessities like firewood, rice, oil and salt are not love. As long as you deeply love each other and think of each other with all your heart, then love will exist in every little detail of life, and it will be so pure, just like the way my wife treats me.

My family's circumstances were poor. My father passed away early, and my mother raised me and my younger brother on her own. Because she suffered too much hardship and toil when she was young, my mother's health is not very good, and she needs to take medicine year-round. My younger brother is still in school, and the money my mother earns doing odd jobs for others is nowhere near enough to cover the household expenses. Although I know that after getting married I also have my own family, and I cannot consider only my mother's situation in everything I do, my mother worked so hard to take care of me, and seeing her suffer is something I simply cannot accept.

So I often sent money back home, and my wife often quarreled with me over this. My wife said: "It's not that I won't let you help your mother-in-law. I know that as a son, helping your own mother is only right, but there should be a limit to everything. If you keep helping like this, do you still want your own family or not?" Faced with my wife's questioning, I always felt so guilty that I had no words to answer. Since we got married, we still don't have a house of our own and have been renting the whole time, and the family's finances are rather tight, so I have had to ask my wife to scrimp and save, but I truly cannot let go of my own family.

Later we managed to save up some money, so my wife wanted to buy a house. I had already promised her, but recently my younger brother was short of funds for starting a business. I looked at his project and felt it had a very high chance of succeeding, and this was a turning point for our family's financial situation. Once it started making money, my younger brother could shoulder the burden of the family. I wanted to lend the money to my younger brother and patiently explained it to my wife, but she refused no matter what. In the end we parted on bad terms and kept giving each other the cold shoulder.

I knew my wife had it hard, but I also knew our family could not miss this opportunity. Wanting to please my wife and ease the tension between us, I went to a big shopping mall to buy her a gift. After looking around for ages, I finally found the diamond ring she had been going on about. But when it came time to pay, I discovered the balance on the card was insufficient. I thought, how could my wife do this, secretly buying the house behind my back? My heart went cold. But things had come to this, so why go and quarrel with my wife again?

On the way home I tried my best to adjust my mindset, but when I got back I hadn't even taken out the gift when my wife told me first that she had given the money to my younger brother. Knowing my difficulties, she said she had thought it through and didn't want me to be put in a tough spot. Instantly my eyes brimmed with tears. My wife treats me so well and thinks of me so much, yet I had thought of her that way. I held my wife tightly in my arms and vowed that I must give her a good life.

(From a reader submission; the images in this article are from the internet)