Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

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If you were both emotionally mature enough you perhaps could have come to a compromise that was sympathetic to your wife’s medical conditions, but still had intimacy that satisfied you. (I still can’t really believe that wasn’t something she was prepared/wanted to do???)

If anything caught me by surprise, it was this...disbelief that there was nothing she wanted to do with me. Unless women want men with extremely tiny penises that have difficulty in achieving and maintaining an erection and that reach climax in seconds (and I'm not any of that at all), I found that beyond belief.

It's not bragging if you can reproducibly "perform" and as a lover, I would take as much time as needed (or as little, if that was what was required by the circumstances) to make love. And although I would say I'm really out of practice, sexual performance was not nor never has been a problem. So stunned, was my response. It did not help that she had her own medical problems and that her mother had just suffered a stroke.

At one level, even I understand not leaving at that moment as my current wife did not leave her second husband for seven years until after her dad had died (and she was ready to go when he suffered a fatal heart attack).

At another level, I always thought she would reconsider. So surprise and then the realization and accepatance that she is not and will not change her position is one that I've come to.

In one sense I feel "lied to." I was very, very clear about what I was looking for right at the outset and although I was not looking for "the one" to replace the love I had lost, I was open once again to establishing a loving relationship and would allow it to be as long or as short as it would be.

What I had noticed was that women my age (and my ex-wife's age since she was only 9 days older than me) when I was 31-33 seemed to be all going through this tough early 30's passage with career, family, etc. A younger woman was not there yet and an older one would be through much of that (children, career, divorce). So that was part of the initial attraction.

What I keep coming back to is that fact that I ignored my intuition when it told me that the love I was looking for was not this "difficult." But the relationship with my first wife had been so easy until our son was born and look at where that got me? So, I doubted my own voice.