You never wanted it to be like this.
You're a good guy, a real contributor to the community, well-liked and well-respected, an excellent father and in many ways a fine husband. You don’t do what your father did; you don't come home drunk or raise a hand to your wife. You're not a jerk. You don't spend the rent gambling and never embarrass the family in public.
No; you are as different from the old man as possible except that you've started to fool around--but that isn't the right way to talk about it. It was your father's term--"fool around"--but it doesn't apply to you.
Because this isn't fooling around: this is serious business. You love this woman, this other woman. It's not that you don’t love your wife; you love her but you're not in love with her. The marriage just isn't enough anymore. You don't want to hurt your wife and you'd rather shoot yourself than hurt your kids.
But you also believe you cannot exist without this new person in your life. It's as if she's giving you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation every time you kiss, it's as if she's keeping you alive and breathing. Sometimes when you're home and the kids have gone to bed, so there are no distractions, you feel like a dog trapped in closed car on a hot day, like you want to start howling and clawing at the closed windows. It's all you can do to keep the leash on, to be civil, to be considerate, to be what might be considered normal. You count the minutes until you can get to the phone or get into the car and drive away.
All this is made worse by the fact that you know your wife is a terrific woman. It's not that she's a big disappointment or that she's any different from what you wanted or expected when you married her thirteen years ago. If anything, the trouble lies with fact that she is exactly what you expected and you can no longer tolerate the lack of the unanticipated in your life. Is it too much to ask not be greeted by the same complaints, same child-raising issues, same questions about work, same lack of enthusiasm, every night?
She doesn't get it. She doesn't know that you're eager to talk to an adult woman, not just somebody's mom, even if she's mom to your own kids. You longed for years for the moment when she'd be able to do something besides change diapers and tell you about what the neighbor's wife's mother-in-law did yesterday. You wanted her to be a partner but now your wife seems more like your mother than your spouse and it's weird to want to get close to her. So for a while now you've been leaving her alone.
And it's just not natural for a man like yourself to be lonely. You've always had women friends, female colleagues, members of the opposite sex whose company you've enjoyed and whose perspectives and insights you've sought out. It's not like you went looking for something to happen. You were absolutely, totally faithful for years, even in those situations where a lot of other guys would not have been. You've resisted passes, turned down invitations, ignored flirtations, and kept your idea of yourself as a good man and a good husband intact.
So when this other relationship developed, you couldn't quite lose these earlier definitions of yourself. You're still a good man, and you're really having a tough time understanding why you're not a good husband. After all, how much has really changed? You and your wife are intimate less often, but she seems grateful for the lack of attention. Or at least she doesn't mention it very much. She hasn't actually complained. It was painful when she asked you to buy her sexy underwear for her birthday because you could tell at that moment that she was trying to convey to you her noticing the change in your appetites and that maybe she did miss some of it. But you quickly dismiss this; she probably just read about it in a magazine or one of those ridiculous self-help books she's always dragging home.
If she really wanted to help your marriage she should have done it five years ago when you begged her to figure out how to be the woman you fell in love with. You and she even went for a couple of counseling sessions but then stopped, by mutual agreement, because it didn't seem to be getting anywhere. She's put on a couple of pounds, looks more like her mother, hates a lot of your friends, and only wants to talk about stuff you've been over a thousand times.
How can you do this? How can you love this other woman and leave her alone at night while you sit with the remote in your hand and flick through stations until you can bear to go to bed? How can you exist knowing that the woman you sleep next to, whose warm body you still find yourself holding every morning out of habit, is being betrayed?
You thought, briefly, that you were doubling the pleasure and possibilities of your life. Now you see that you have done quite the opposite: you have cut them in half. Your whole self is never in one place. One late night, you realize that "remote control" would be a good name for your autobiography. And you realize that between all of those you betray, you betray yourself the most.
What's the worst part? You realize that you are your father's son after all; you know that bastard, in whatever room in hell he inhabits, is having a good laugh.
