Timeline:
2019 – Wife says she’s having gay feelings. We watch Gentleman Jack.
2020 – Wife is a-twitter about a pretty lady on the other side of the country. They meet. They are in love. Said pretty lady isn’t psyched about wife having a husband (me), but that’s to be expected, maybe.
2021 – I finally decide to date. I decide I’ll be ENM. I date someone. It ends kind of badly in December. Wife’s relationship continues. We are in therapy and that is helping.
2022 – Half a year after my first dating experience ends I meet someone else. We hit it off. We’re still hitting it off. Wife is still going strong with partner across the country. There are certain stresses. Wife is significantly less interested in sex… but that’s kind of where this marriage has been going since about 2008.
2023 – Relationship with my new partner is still going well. We travel a bit, do stuff together. Daughter finds out we have a relationship and is traumatized a little. That sucks. Wife’s partner is more vocal (through wife) about not liking the fact that wife and I still, in some technical sense, occasionally have a sexual relationship. Wife kind of just stops with the sex. Eventually I ask (in and out of therapy) and she says yeah, probably no more sex. Okay. Last nail in that coffin, then. All this is affecting my relationship with new partner, but new partner is ridiculously accepting and accommodating.
That’s where we’re at. Then two weeks ago wife and I had a check-in meeting (we do that weekly, if we can). We’ve been having some very big, unhappy feelings about housecleaning. I got yet another “you thought it was OK but I’ve actually been miserable” surprise from wife (on the topic of housecleaning, but that’s a really sore, open wound). I say something like “it’s hard to be myself with you; I have to work to suppress behaviors that you don’t like and it’s really difficult.” I wasn’t meaning it to be a huge thing, but wife took it as such. Or took it as an opportunity, IDK.
This past week in check-in wife started talking about separation, divorce, and sleeping in separate rooms (not that we currently have a spare…). I’ve mentioned these ideas before but she adamantly refused to hear any of it. Now she’s bringing it up. Her idea is that we’ll eventually (“soon”) get separated but live in the same house. I asked lots of questions about what that even means. I think it means then she can tell other people she’s separated, and not feel as weird about the fact that she looks more and more butch every day. I suspect this is also being driven to some extent by her gf.
I’m going with it. I don’t want to hurt her, and I see no reason to make ultimatums at this point. I rarely do, actually. I was thinking we’d keep the marriage going until our daughter was out of high school (a few years short of that right now), but I guess it won’t last that long. I want wife to talk to daughter about this stuff, explain some things. We’ll see where it goes.
Meanwhile, work is a fucking shitshow. University. SUNY. Financial crisis. “Hard decisions” that, for some reason, always involve cutting academics but hiring more administrators. I need a new job.