An End/Beginning of Year Update

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

In other words, your wife's condition is that she will stay in the marriage as long as you're totally celibate for the long-term. Which is the complete opposite of what a marriage is supposed to provide. Your wife has redefined marriage to be a total sexual prison.

You know, with her definition of marriage, perhaps the Catholic Church would consider allowing priests to get married after all! Celibacy would still be maintained!

And so what I always ask in this situation, and which I've never received a logical answer to is, if a woman thinks sex is that unimportant, why would she mind if you had something that unimportant with someone else?

Or to ask it another way, what does she get out of knowing that you are celibate? Does she mind that you masturbate? If not then what is it about "friend assisted" masturbation that would bother her? Is it just intercourse with someone else that bothers her? Or just an emotional connection with another woman, even if it didn't include sex of any kind?

Perhaps she just wants a husband who is a skeleton in a chair that she can talk to, and spin around for the audience to gasp at? Don't know why, but that famous movie scene is what came to mind.

I get the sarcasm.

There is a subtle difference between what she has said and how you cast it. She hasn't said that she'll stay in the marriage with me being totally celibate. She has said that the marriage WILL END if I am unfaithful. It may be a distinction without a difference.

But it is more than the marriage that has had this ort of requirement from her POV because when we first started dating she stated a similar "requirement." Want to know what the argument that ensued was all about? It was because I would not put a similar requirement (call it a relationship "death penalty") for exclusivity on her.

I think part of that was, at the time, her fear that my ex-wife would suddenly show back up in my life once the reality of someone else showing up in my life might really preclude any chance of return. It is much more complicated than that and there are also some things in my current wife's own past that would lead her to that sort of requirement.

The Captain