Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Does that sound familiar...is that what you want? I can GUARANTEE your wife has no respect for you and is just glowing in the easy life you have made for her. You might think it is not that easy for her....but she does.

Thanks for sharing this story and yes, it does have a ring of familiarity, with one big exception. As far as I can tell, she's not advertising the no sex aspect of our marriage.

You noted how your current wife finally started understanding your relationship with your 1st wife.

Actually, you don't have this correct. What I said was she finally understood how I thought. She has never expressed any words about understanding my relationship with my first wife.

I think I can accurately say that she has never understood my relationship with my first wife (or what I ever saw in her to begin with).

The most contentious part of the my current wife's relationship with my ex-wife was over how I interacted with my ex about my son as he was growing up. I had joint custody AND I wasn't happy about my therapist girlfriend/wife deciding what I was doing wrong (or what my ex was doing wrong and why I was not being critical of her, etc., etc., etc.). On that I let her only push me so far (both before and after we got married) before I told her where she could put her opinion. I have been uncharacteristically blunt on this point. I was not going to let her screw that up for me and when it came to my son, I would leave first and ask questions later.

But I have never told my current wife what my sex-life was like with my ex except for how that went in the last 4 years between the time our son was born and the time we separated and ultimately divorced. Maybe, to my current wife, she sees the 16 times in 4 years as what was "normal for me" and the 2 or 3 times a week we made love at the beginning of this relationship was far more than what I had experience in my first marriage and if that were the case, I would not know better. I don't know because we've never discussed it and never made that comparison. Obviously, here I am making that comparison.

What we have discussed is the way our sex-life could/should look and, when our sex-life started to fall off to nothing, that we make a no-kidding commitment to make the time for each other, to take care of each other and our relationship.

That's the conversation we engaged in for eight months (over 12 years ago) with diligence and rules so that we did not go off on some angry emotional tangent (where we would not speak to each other). Do you want to know which one of us did not really say a word about what they wanted, what could or would make things the best they could be, how they envisioned this marriage and how it could look as it continued to grow? Hint: it was not me.

And after we had gone all around and over this and I had given her a whole wide range of ideas, thoughts, and (my) range of choices (all in context of maintaining the fidelity of the marriage) but had no input whatsoever about what she would choose, I wanted to know whether she was willing to be in any sexual relationship with me and her answer was, and I quote, "No, I'm not willing to do that." Nothing has dislodged her from that view and as time goes on and I turn more and more attention to this I realize that it is unlikely that anything will.

It feels a lot like being with my gay girlfriend.

As for being emotionally closed, I was not always like that and have made a committed effort in the last year to close more and more of my life off from her. She wants the stage, she can have it, all of it. That's what I told her last weekend. That way, when I get off the stage, she'll be used to having it all to herself without me.

Let me go down your points:

1) I can absolutely guarantee that I am not an INTJ.

Sorry, I've taken different versions of the Myers-Brigg and I come up ENTP almost every time. Only occasionally do I show up as ENTJ (and that is because the perceptive and the judgement factors come in almost perfectly balanced) and depending upon which guidance you use, the P/J factors may interchange. Does not matter whether I take the short version (70 questions) or the long version (more than 200). Never, ever, an I. Equally as important, I am married to an ENTP. Maybe two field marshals aren't a good mix.

2) You are correct, I do still love my first wife. I still love my first true girlfriend, too. When I care deeply about someone, I find I don't turn that off or on like a light switch. I still love my current wife and that's probably the only reason I'm still around and even having the sort of conversation I am having here and now. But I'm also starting to consider the next steps, where to move when, how to break the financial arrangements, sell the house, etc.

There is nothing to do or that I've ever done with or about that previous love. Oh, my ex and I have talked from time to time since we separated and divorced, reconciled some long standing misunderstandings, completed conversations and things left unsaid for too long. Almost all of that came after both of us had remarried. But most of the time we've spent together have been associated with activities with our son.

And if there is anything that I'd like in comparison to my first marriage is that I'd like the way that love felt as a starting point before it went so screwy on me.

3) Yes, I am a "recovering engineer." I deal with highly technical data and operations. I like to deal in the concrete facts and data. No surprise there. As for logic, true but not in the way you might think. I am a outside the box thinker (way outside) and my forte is and has always been best described as abstract logic. I'm comfortable with weirdness of quantum mechanics and the multi-dimensional superspace of string theory. For me, they are "hobbies."

Look up synesthesia. That's what I "have" and my form is that I see music in color and images. I thought everyone experienced music in color until I was 14 when I discovered (surprisingly) that no one I knew did. You go to a movie and probably don't much notice the music. I do, very, very vividly.

Its one reason I put music back into my life.

4) I recognize that I can come across as rarely, if ever wrong. I know that it can be preceived as just too knowing or maybe just a "know it all." Whether it comes across as smugness or something else, it begs a question. Which is more genuine being who I am and that comes with it or just faking it so I don't come across as correct much of the time?

And your observation actually proves a point I made a few days ago, what my intuition told me as I came out of my first marriage...that I actually have nothing to offer to a woman. All that stuff I wrote down 25 years about what I thought would be possible with a woman as I came out of that divorce was BS. I chose the wrong path and have wasted 25 years rather than doing what my intuition told me.

Be a father. Be a great father and raise a smart, well-adjusted son. Don't bad-mouth his mother or his step-father (which I haven't). Don't badmouth women. But forget about women altogether and be only a father.

It seems that being a great father (according to him, his girlfriend, and my ex-wife) is my only real accomplishment.