How to shake up spouse without having an affair?

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Have you ever actually done what Cinco is describing?

Yes, and it was completely unnoticed. Weeks and months later, I had to point out that not only had I "withdrawn" (and why), but then I had to put up with all the crap associated with my choice. She had not noticed, and then got angry because of the choice I made.

So, a borderline sociopathic personality? What is it exactly that attracts you to your wife? Why do you wish to stay married to her? Why do you? I'm still not clear.

Actually, it has the appearance of some aspects of an antisocial personlity disorder. I am not a clinician. But certainly some of the following do ring true for me after 24 years of observation. There are the more "benign" related traits (Cleckley and Hare), some of which I think I've described in one form or another. The key is there is always a component of plausible deniability to this:

1) Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
2) Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
3) Authoritarian
4) Secretive
5) Paranoid
6) Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
7) Conventional appearance
8) Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
9) Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim's life
10) Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim's affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
11) Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
12) Incapable of real human attachment to another
13) Unable to feel remorse or guilt
14) Extreme narcissism and grandiose
15) May state readily that their goal is to rule the world

What I can say that it is more a persistence of memory of what I once felt and the unrealistic hope that it might be so again (though that hope has been slipping away with the passage of time). What I weigh in this is the knowledge of what I went through before and whether I want to go through another version of that again OR I live as a testament to endurance until one of us dies.

At some levels, we do fine. Yet, this is not what I envisioned nor is it the relationship I described when we first met. I was not looking for a housemate, though that is largely what this has devolved to.

It's not that I am uncaring or unloving AND, as I've said before, I've come to accept that I probably made a very bad choice 24 years ago. Given my own interpretation of my own pathology, I probably would have been "better off" not involving myself with anyone else. Other than my son, I would not have shared my life with anyone else and the choice of what I kept and let go of in my life would have been my own.

I cannot tell you what conditions will walk me away from this marriage and that is what I am weighing now.

Few of us go into marriage with the intention of divorcing, and in that sense it is a "failure." Besides, marriage is the most important relationship we make out of choice. My view is that it represents a "failure" to maintain and sustain a promise made.

The Captain