Need advice on ending long-term relation
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| Tue, 01-11-2005 - 1:33pm |
I am hoping someone out there has been through a similar experience and can give me advice.
I have been in the same relationship for 14 years and have been married for 7 1/2. When we first met, I wasn't really interested but I knew he liked me. So on my 22nd birthday (I was in college and was drunk) I saw him and well, you know what happens when you have had too much to drink! We started dating, and even though I was never really sexually attracted to him, he turned out to be an awesome person and grew to love him. He is my best friend. However, I have in many ways just become an extension of him. All of my friends are his friends and family. I also gave up on my desire to move out of my hometown (I've always wanted to live in Boston) because he didn't want to move. And of course, there is no real passion for him and never really has been sexually.
BUT, he takes care of me, is passionate about me and he loves me like no other person has. His family is wonderful-I am an only child and he is one of 8. My family loves him, he is an all around great guy. We never fight, he has never even really said a mean thing to me. He makes me laugh. So what is wrong with me? Why can't I be happy with him? Over the years I have gone through periods of doubt like this but have gotten through it. However, last year my father was diagnosed with lung cancer (he just died on 11/20) and that started a whole re-evaluation of my life. It was slow at first, but then in June I met someone who sort of reawakened in me what has been missing in my life. We had a (sort of) affair, but he just broke it off b/c he met someone. I know that it was wrong and have deep regrets over it - I never even thought I was capable of cheating. I am not telling him b/c all it would do would hurt him.
So now I am struggling over the right thing to do. I am scared that leaving might be the wrong decision. There is a lot at stake - my whole life has revolved around him, his family and his friends. If I leave, I will truly be alone as I have very few friends who live locally. And I do really love and care for him and he is my best friend. Not to mention the hurt I am causing him is killing me, so much so that I may be willing to stay with him just to spare him the pain. Afterall, it is not a bad life. I know that I live better then 99% of the people on this earth, so who am I to complain?
Thanks for your consideration.

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I was living ur life for 5 years. I always put my feelings aside because I felt like it was the right thing to do to stay with him. Then guess what. He freakin left me. After all the times I could have left and had options, I put them behind me in consideration for him. Then one day, he just decides this life is enough for him and he walks out, leaves me with two kids and a mortgage while he is out living the single life. So I don't know if your man will do this, but honestly, I never thought mine would. I put him on such a pedistool as being perfect and he just dumped me off like yesterday's trash.
Am I bitter? Noooooo :)
I have just finished rushing through a book titled, "The Erotic Silence of the American Wife" and will be reading it again. It is by Dalma Heyn. You should read it, and then re-examine the advice you are recieving on this forum.
"Sexual attraction in women is primarily mental." one poster wrote. Another says that what you are thinking about is wrong, another said she regretted it, and another told you to tell your partner about your affair if you are to stay in the marriage.
The quote above really floors me. It comes from the same camp that would say, "Women fall in love with every man they have sex with," and "Women can't separate sex from love," even if the poster thinks she wouldn't agree with the other two statements. It comes from the same place. Think about it. Sexual attraction is mental? Is that entirely true or is that simply what we've been told...because that's the way our sexually supressed culture likes it: if women view themselves as being nearly a neuter being after marriage, if women think that sex=love and they are sexual only in a mental or emotional way, then they'll behave. They won't question as much when a problem arises in a marriage. In fact, they'll blame themselves for problems...because what's the problem, really? You wake up one day and you don't recognize yourself, but you've become what you should be--a self-sacrificing wife and mother...but you are not the same person you were when you entered the marriage. Why is that? Because you agreed with them, you agreed--Yeah, this is what my sexuality is. This is the way it is supposed to be. And you buried a piece of yourself a long time ago.
Excerpt: "If myth and literature are what mold us, popular culture is what defines us in the present--and it is movies, the most popular of all, that provide us with romantic endings which best reflect out current moral positions. In Fatal Attraction, a story of a man who commits adultery with a woman who does not (she is unmarried), we get a glimpse of how intolerable any woman's insistent erotic voice is. The movie's ending had to be rewritten three times before one emerged that satisfied viewers' ferocious lust for blood--not of the adulterous man, it turns out,but of the sexually available woman who would not be satisfied with just the one-night stand he offered her."
Ending number one involved the available woman killing herself and successfully framing the married man for her murder. Audiences hated this.
Ending two: available woman commits suicide, frames the man, but his wife comes to the rescue with evidence that gets him off the hook. Audiences liked this a little better, but still...it wasn't quite satisfying.
Final ending: available woman doesn't commit suicide, but is portrayed as some sort of monster that the married man tries to drown in a bathtub in the end. It is his wife, however, "who delivers the triumphant, fatal shot through her rival's heart. Here, then, $1.3 million later, the audience gets what it wants: The death penalty. For the adulterer? No. For the woman. The sexual woman."
I'm not saying you shouldn't consider the advice you are being given here, but do take a look at the book. You need to consider another side to all of this for your own sake.
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