Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Today is the 24th anniversary of the first time my wife and I made love. There was a time when we used to celebrate this day and laugh about how difficult that first time was (courtesy of Eastern Airlines, the world's largest unscheduled airlines). But she waited for me at the airport (rather than at my house because she was afraid my ex-wife would see her car and come to investigate) as my plane was more than 3 hours late.

Now the day passes with only a notice by me.

The other day I was reading about how difficult it is to alter our lives to deal with energy and climate issues and it struck me that the observation there applies here as well.

I have been asked several times why I stay in a sexless marriage to a woman that has set things up to suit her and not with any consideration of me. The answer is two words:

"Sunken costs."

I have invested so much in time (wasted though it may have been) and money that walking away just has the appearance of being "too costly" even though I have relatively little to show for my marriage and the intimacy that I explicitly sought so many years ago. It's one thing to realize that long ago I made a mistake in not ending this and just walking away when I was 35 or even at the age of 43or 44. It's something else, at nearly 57 years of age, to say that I should just walk away and start again or, more likely, walk away and live the remainder of my life alone with all the emotional and financial costs associated with that.

The question I'm always dealing with is this: is it better (for me) to have a wife that is little more than a housemate than to have no one at all?

We are now a mere 3 weeks away from 13 sexless years.