Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

First, I am not into Tolle (I had to look him up just to know what you are referring to). No, my being present and my awareness of being is a home-grown approach to life that I developed over the years. Part of it is observation with intuition, part of it has been been influenced by various things I've heard and read. It certainly hasn't been something "taught" within my family. I've refined it a bit over the years, reorganized the tools I have in my toolbox from time to time, and my view is not based on any particular approach by any particular person.

Do you love your wife? (whatever love is?)

Are you prepared to have an affair - and if you do will you tell your wife - or deceive her?

If you are in life transition and you plan to leave your wife, on the basis of a conversation about sex you had several years ago is that really fair to her in the here and now? (acknowledging it wasn't really fair for her to ask you for the no sex rule to start with)

The short answer to your first question is "yes." I was considering this while I was away at my conference. My love for her has never felt (to me) as "strong" as it I felt for either my first love so many years ago (the first woman I gave serious consideration to asking to marry me) or for my first wife.

Still, when I look at my wife, I still have affection for her, there is still recognition (on my part) of that which I feel as love. And I also idnetify and relate to that expression as more akin to a housemate. Our relationship feels like it operates at just about the same level of relatedness as the relationship that I retain with my ex-wife (and I haven't seen or talked with her since April).

Am I prepared to have an affair (and I would tell her if I did. I would be true to that promise). No, not really. I've been on the receiving end of an affair and I know my experience of that was not what I would call fun. I maintain my boundaries as I know how tenuous they can be when intimacy goes missing (real or perceived). I am certainly not out there looking. Am I in someone else's crosshairs? Possibly, but I'm not easily persuaded.

So, an affair for me looks pretty much out of the question. My ex-wife did that to me. My current wife did that to her second husband (by routinely sleeping with her first (ex) husband). The mess that creates looks like more than I'd like to deal with.

The last question about walking away is something I'm still considering. What's the probability? About 25%, about 1 out of 4. My guess is that it would hurt her badly and the thought of her crying at the reaction (if that's the reaction she would have) is not one that I relish. By the same token she's not going to change.

So, where I am is the same place that I was when I arrived here. Kobayashi Maru. Which leads me back to my original intuition...I should have never gotten involved.

I appreciate you sharing your sense of loss. I can related to it from the "receiving end."

More later. It's time to go share some time with a friend whose mother died this weekend, something I went through earlier this year.