Dear Boris1010:

When you were a teenager, about 19, you met (I assume) another teenager, “an intensely social creature” who married you, a “nineteen going on fourteen.. extremely immature.. social cripple.. intensely shy, withdrawn, socially awkward.. the rejected outsider, teased and taunted and excluded”. I assume that (1) she was an unhappy teenager in her home of origin and wanted out quickly, (2) that she was sexually attracted to you, and (3) that she viewed you as too shy, too awkward, too rejected to say No to her and to a marriage with her as soon as she wanted it.

As a young married couple you worked on a Naval base and she worked close by. At one point on, she worked as a teacher. If the marriage was a ship, she was the captain at the helm, steering it: “there’s been a whole lot of life we’ve faced together with her at the helm pretty much; I always play a supporting role”.

For the first 15 years or so into the marriage you drank and did drugs. In your 30s you stopped drinking and remained sober into your 60s when you “got hurt on the job, surgery, chronic pain, inability to work, loss of sizeable 401K, home, just about everything”. At that time, you “wound up on opiates for chronic pain and under their influence, decided that if anyone deserved a damned drink, it was me”, and you resumed drinking. While this crisis was happening, your wife the captain steered the ship very well and saved the two  of you from losing everything: “Managed to land on my feet strictly through the efforts of my wife, who of the two of us is the only one that possesses a working brain and the drive to put it to use”. When she found out that you started drinking again, she “issued an ultimatum: AA or away. AA it was”.

About her attitude and your anger: “she tends to recall mostly the bad.. not letting me forget.. insists on holding on to the past.. She’ll remind me, literally every week, that ‘so and so’ is going to be here, so I need to be aware of that and ‘behave’. In reference of an incident that happened once when I was drunk and ‘grayed out’… she never forgets a slight, and will continue to bring that incident up until one of us dies”.

About loyalty, hers: “The affairs started at less than one year married, and continued off and on for the first half of our approaching fifty year marriage.. one of them a long-term ‘friends with benefits’ arrangement”. Yours: “I am loyal to a fault to people.. unswervingly dedicated to those I’m loyal to. Something she does acknowledge and appreciate”.

A few synonyms to loyal (Merriam Webster): constant, dedicated, devoted, steady, true. It is easy to see her 25 years of extramarital affairs as being sexually and emotionally untrue to you. I can see that you were emotionally untrue to her from the very beginning of the marriage: “I was intensely self-involved and selfish and basically a loner anyway.. I really had no business getting married, but tell that to a horny, immature nineteen-year-old.. and was pretty much emotionally absent from things”. Her disloyalty involved other men. Your disloyalty did not involve other women until most recently.

About your wife: “I just don’t feel much of anything for her, and I’m now realizing that I never really did. It’s more a loyalty/ obligation thing”-

– your loyalty to her is and has been then, a dry, emotionless loyalty. If I compare loyalty to chocolate, your loyalty to her has been like a chocolate cake mix (flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, sugar, salt, etc.). A wet, emotional loyalty would be  moist chocolate layer cake with frosting. Your marriage is a tragedy really, isn’t it… I wish there was a way for you to add butter, eggs, milk, brewed coffee and vanilla extract into that dry cake mix and end the first 50 years of your marriage with a real cake!

anita