Distance

Everything I do in life now is about making sure my son is protected.

My wife has been on me to have sex with her over the past two months. I talked before about no longer initiating sex with her, but I tried to wake her up several times over these two months for sex because I stupidly thought that she might actually be telling the truth about sex she asked for, and I didn't want to reject her outright the same way she's done to me for years. And of the seven times I've tried to initiate sex that she wanted, how many times has she followed through?

Two.

- I'm on my period (March).
- I'm on my period (April).
- My stomach hurts.
- I'm sick.
- I'm tired (she used this excuse for why she couldn't watch DVDs this weekend, for God's sake).

The first three don't stop her from taking care of me, if sex were about my happiness at all. The last two are no excuse. And this doesn't count the other dozen or so times during these two months that she just went to bed early, or didn't initiate herself, to leave me consistently sexually frustrated.

Last night was rejection number five in less than two months, which was her second period excuse. I was so angry that she was turning me down again, especially considering the sex fiend she used to be when we were still dating, that I wordlessly took my blanket to the front room to sleep on the couch. She came out the next morning and tried to test the waters by saying some innocuous greeting and I responded, so I guess she thinks things are fine now.

I was getting ready to unleash punishment on her this morning. I was going to put her on a one year sexual moratorium and take away money from her every month for no longer performing as a wife does, but then I realized I would just be pushing her into divorce by making the "marriage as prostitution" argument clear. Instead, I'm just never going to initiate sex again, whether or not she asks for it. I will not be fooled again. If I do confront her about this problem or directly seek a solution to the sex problem, nothing will improve:

- Sex might come around three to five times a week again, but I won't care. Also, she doesn't seem to want it anymore, and it's no guarantee that she won't just put me back on ice in another month or two if we have a sex life again.
- She might promise to change, then lie about it, which won't change anything. She's already lied to me twice about this sex thing: first she lied that she never promised me when we were dating that she wouldn't become my ex, and that she would sleep with me at least twice a week. The second time she lied was when I brought up the number of times she rejected me to the number of times we have sex, and she flatly denied the evidence.
- She might get enraged, leaving me to deal with even more of her emotional problems for the next thirteen years.
- She might divorce me, which would hurt our son.

Whatever the case, talking with her will solve nothing.

I am an American teaching in a foreign country. Ever since I stopped teaching kids, I have been surrounded by young, friendly, intelligent and fun young local women in or just out of college, and scores of them have been making eyes at me in some obvious fashion or another for the last two years. Ignoring the ones that got closer to me because I teach well or because I'm a good co-worker, there have been many that I know are into me as a man. Some blush when I look at them. Some joined my class for months and were hanging on my every word until I let slip to the whole class that I'm married, at which point I never saw them again. Some leave from teaching their classes and are all smiles, asking me lots of personal questions and blushing constantly. Some can't stop smiling when I enter the room and need to ask multiple questions after class for things I knew they already understood. Any one of these women, with just a simple question, could easily be my girlfriend.

Instead, I'm married to another local: she once was a thin nymphomaniac who bought me gifts... and now, she's my overweight, sex denying and money sucking wife.

There was one other slight change in my married life: I stopped counting the days left to live in my marriage for a while to see if I could "skip ahead" a little bit. But now, I think it's time to see how many days are left until I'm free. I just checked right now: it's 4874... almost 100 days have passed and I hardly even noticed.