It's time we let the spirit come in...

[Daybreak]

It has been a very long time (over four years) since I posted regularly on the DB site but I find the desire to do so again. My original postings were under a different user name and tended to be a bit harsh on my W. In some ways, they were deserved but it is not a path I want to go down again.

A summation of how I ended up here and where I am now:

I am in my late 40s and this is my first marriage. W is also in her late 40s and this is her third marriage (her first ended after about two years when she said her H did not want to settle down and start a family, her second ended after about five years due in some degree to that H not wanting a family either). I met W over 20 years ago when she was separated from H#2 and I was finishing up my degree. We did have a relationship for a few months which continued after I moved about two hours away and was working at another university. W decided to end our relationship and give marriage #2 her last, best chance to work. That lasted less than a week when she decided that she wanted a future with me. She did divorce H#2 and moved in with me. We got married after living together for nearly four years and have two wonderful children (D who is a teenager and S who is in grade school.)

Naturally with children (especially after our S was born), our R started to decline greatly as we focused more and more on our kids. When my MIL started suffering health problems and W was focusing whatever energies we could on her, I felt quite lonely and rather isolated. I did have a few months spell in 2001 when I got hooked on porn from the web and then W found out about it. Naturally things quickly spiraled downward from there.

She demanded (and rightly so) that the porn had to stop and that I needed to seek counseling which I did in early 2002. During the first few months we were both in counseling with the same therapist who thought he could handle all of our needs (hers, mine and the marriage.) It was during this time that she set down some extremely immovable barriers: She did not want sex with me ever again; she did not want me to touch her ever again; her friends would provide her with all of the intimacy she would need; and if it did not involve the kids, she did not want us to do things together. Regrettably, those barriers still exist today to our detriment.

In 2002 I found the DB site and got copies of DB and DR. The support I found here was extremely good and I improved greatly. My relationship with my kids (which was always strong) continued to prosper even though W continued to pass judgment on me. I sought forgiveness from W and did apologize a number of times to her for the hurt that I had caused but she never said that I was forgiven. I also survived a layoff from my job in 2003 and did not give up on myself even though it felt that W gave up on me a long time ago. W has not even acknowledged our anniversary for the past four years which again saddens me greatly.

(More to follow. I thought it best to break this up to prevent one extremely long post.)