Dear PJ:

Before I let go of the affair part, I have one comment about what you wrote in your most recent post a day ago, regarding your former lover: “I respect the person I had the affair with greatly and would most likely date a person such as herself if I were single”-

– but if you were single you  wouldn’t date a married woman with two children, would you? I mean, during the six months affair she was married to another man, parenting two children in a home with another man.

You wouldn’t greatly respect a.. woman betraying her husband and endangering the well being of her children?

I am now letting go of the affair part and my concern regarding your values.

“The connection with my wife had been virtually non-existent for years”- this is your current problem- a non-existing connection with your wife prior recent tragedy. The recent tragedy brought that lack of connection to the forefront of your awareness, made you acutely aware of it.

If you expressed this to your wife very clearly, told her how lonely you feel, how desperately lonely and she made no effort to listen to you attentively, to repeat to you what you said to her, so to show you that she heard you. If she made no suggestions to spend more alone-time with you, just you and her (not sexually, if she feels uncomfortable about the sex part)-

– then she is quite cold hearted, isn’t she. And you have nothing in your marriage but an arrangement, a financial, practical setting. In which case you either endure it, or look for relief in affairs, or remain married and agree to live like roommates, staying in different bedrooms, and free to date (an open marriage, I suppose), or you separate and live in different homes and/ or legally divorce.

You have all those options. Which will you choose.

anita