Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

People can only listen to what's said - when I read your posts I feel like you want me to guess all the stuff that's unsaid. I wonder if your wife feels that too?

A couple of great messages. Thank you. I have only a few minutes this AM to address any of this, so let me address a couple of brief items.

I think I included my wife's hysterectomy in the first post. This ultimately was not elective surgery as her passage through menopause did not "resolve" the fibroid or the cycst.

I did write that my wife is a therapist (though I wonder if I edited it out in my posts where I included her diagnosis of being "passive agressive" and the first post where I discussed our counselling). As I mentioned, stories are like maps, they provide you a general layout, but not necessarily the fine detail.

Finally, my comment where I say: "Ultimately, I would have been better off never getting involved with anyone else after my first marriage ended, concentrated on being the great father that I did become and just left it at that."

Let me state this briefly. For all intents and purposes, my life became celibate after September 1980. I've attempted to avoid comparisons of my sex life with my first wife (which was wonderful right up to the time our son was born) and the sex life that developed between my second wife and I up to 12 years ago. Although the two were "adventuresome" in different ways, simply put, the sex life with my second wife (in aggregate) never matched up with the experiences with my first. I know they are different people, different ages, with different experiences, and with different physical limitations and that this comparison is fraught with danger, but that is my experience.

My statement that you quoted, however, comes from this: for a period of about 15 years, I went away from my "trust" of my own intuition. I really can't say why. In retrospect, that intuition proved correct (or at least mostly so) and I ignored it at some great cost to myself.

So, my intuition told me (and I wrote it down at the time as I can read it in my own journals) that I probably should not have gotten involved with anyone else. I was a father and focused on that, a good one. To think that beyond being a sperm donor (and a name on a piece of paper to give "legitimacy" to offspring), that there was anything else I had to offer to some other woman was a "fool's hope."

At this stage of my life I realize that certain experiences would not have occurred (or occurred the way they unfolded) had I kept with my intuition. But I also recognize that I had I followed my intuition in my first marriage, I would not have told myself "you are just being paranoid." That marriage may have still crashed and she might still have been a WAW, but I would not have had to deal with the wondering for almost a year and a half before she revealed her affair.

There is an observation I have made (about myself) about when my life goes the smoothest, but I wan't to reconsider it before I share that here. I just note it in this message so I don't forget it in the future.