I have been in a loveless marriage for 20 years. It didn’t start out that way. I thought we were happy in the beginning. After the birth of our second child I gained a lot of weight and he seemed to be very disinterested. If we had sex, it was less than intimate, and more about getting to the end as quickly as possible. We have nothing in common besides the kids. We rarely have more than a 5 min conversation on any subject, never go out together to do anything unless it’s as a family, and haven’t had sex in more than a year. At one point, between my weight, the loss of my job, and my fiasco of a marriage, I was contemplating suicide.
Over the last two years I decided I didn’t like the person I had become and decided to change. I’ve lost a significant amount of weight, decided to go back to school, and have changed my entire outlook on life. I’ve since fallen deeply in love with another man. One who is in a very similar relationship with his wife. The affair has been going on for nearly a year and I can’t see my life without him. I don’t expect a fairy tale ending where we both run off to some hidden paradise and live happily ever after, but I can see myself growing old with him. Because I still have one child living at home, and so does he, we don’t want to put an end to our marriages (and I would never ask him to leave his family for me). I just get tired of trying to hide my feelings for him when all I want to do is shout it to the world. It’s probably the happiest I’ve been in a very long time. I know it’s wrong, what we are doing because we are both still married to other people, but why can’t things just be easy for once? Why does it always have to be so damn complicated?
image- Catalina Rusu