Through Different Eyes

I pulled out the dictionary and looked up 'irony' this evening, but after examining the definitions, I don't think that my situation is precisely 'ironic', even though that is the word that most folks would use.

Let me back up for a minute.

My wife and I have been married for seven years, one of those couples that tied the knot in June following their college graduation. Little models of Ron and Laurie Smith stood on the top of the cake. In case you missed my subtle hint: I'm Ron and my wife is Laurie. We both work in the finance field. I'm a Financial Advisor with a national firm, and Laurie works for a regional accounting firm.

No children yet.

The crux of the problem is that my wife was seduced while on a business trip about six months ago. The son-of-a-bitch who got into her pants went to college with us; we both knew him.

The details of their coupling aren't especially important; that it happened at all was. And imagine this: the guy emailed me a confession of what happened, saying that he was feeling so guilty about what he and Laurie did. Bullshit was my personal response — I know that he had always had his eye on Laurie, he took advantage of the situation, and he wanted me to know.

The result, as one might imagine, was that by the time Laurie arrived home, I was loaded for bear. I was ready to kick her cheating ass to the curb. I just waited to hear what kind of phony-baloney story she was going to lay on me, not knowing that her one-night-stand partner had already spilled the beans.

That wasn't how it worked out.

The moment Laurie walked in the door after returning from the airport, she dropped her bags and immediately came to me weeping, her eyes puffy and raining tears, and figuratively threw herself at my feet. She confessed everything to me — throwing herself on my mercy.

She promised me that it was a one-time thing, that she had learned an awful lesson from it, and it would never happen again. She didn't try to lie to me, and she never tried to evade the responsibility for her actions.

Call me a wimp, or a pussy-whipped husband or what you will; I forgave her, and put it behind me. It was a one-time thing, and was alcohol related — too much to drink and a known predator ready to pounce. I believe her assurances that she won't ever get into that position again.

I don't suffer from visions of her having sex with him, or anything like that. I don't worry when she has to work late, or visits her mother or sister on the weekends. In short, I have put it away.

Laurie went to her doctor and was checked out for STDs. The results came back clean. After that, we had some great 'repentance sex'. In fact, probably due to her guilt feelings, our sex life has been great. All I have to do is make the slightest hint that I'm in the mood, and she is jumping my bones.

She has initiated sex a lot more as well; I suspect that so long as I'm willing to have sex with her, it makes her feel that our marriage is secure.

So what is bothering me? A lot of things.

For example, over the past six months I realized that Laurie's voice can be really irritating. She starts talking fast — too fast — the pitch goes up, and it's like dragging nails across a chalk board. She has a whiny tone a lot of the time when she speaks to me. She sounds like she's complaining, even when she's not.

When Laurie comes home from work, she just about talks my ears off with some of the most boring shit you can imagine. She's feels this need to tell me all the gossip she heard that day about the people at her office — most of whom, rest assured, live boring and uneventful lives.

Can't she find something worthwhile to discuss with me? World events, maybe? National politics? Sports, perhaps? Hell, we're both in the financial field — talking about the prime-rate would beat out her going on-and-on about how 'Sally's new hair color doesn't really complement her skin tone'. For god's sake!

I've also discovered that it bothers me to be ready for a shower in the morning, only to find her bras and underwear hanging in there drying. I either have to gather them up, or wait for Laurie to get her rear in gear and take care of them. Not a happy situation when I'm in a hurry to get to work.

Does Laurie believe that sitting next to me on the couch clipping and filing her toenails, while dressed in some shabby old robe, is a real turn-on? Can't she understand that some things are best done in private — not while parked on the living room sofa in front of the boob-tube watching 'Dancing with the Stars'?

Even her physical appearance bothers me. Was she ever really as beautiful as I once thought, or was I just deluded with the lust and infatuation of the relationship to the point that I only saw what I wanted to see?

It was the shock of Laurie having even a brief affair that changed everything. I suppose that trust and respect are somehow involved, but even though I forgave her for her transgression, it seems to have caused me to re-evaluate my acceptance of things that were unimportant to me before the adultery.

Once I realized that Laurie had feet of clay, it changed my image of her. A lot of things about her, things that she has always done, irritate me now. She was perfect and could do no wrong. I admired the way that she always tried to look good for me; I appreciated that she wanted to share the news and happenings of her day with me. So what if she had put on a few extra pounds?

The truth is, I just never noticed a lot of things about Laurie before. Since she returned, I look at her through different eyes — eyes that are more critical, more 'objective'. It's as if I were watching a stranger. Overnight, the luster wore off our relationship.

So there is my 'irony': I've forgiven Laurie for her dalliance, but nevertheless I'm on the verge of divorcing her. I got past her one-night stand just fine; but now I've realized that I have feelings that are festering and that I cannot repress for the long-term. No amount of sexual satisfaction can offset the fissures that I see in our relationship.

Perhaps this metamorphosis would have happened anyway, but over a long period of time. Like one of those couples that marry, have kids, and after twenty or thirty years, look at each other and realize that they really have no connection with each other any more, if they ever did. Their marriage has been running on autopilot for years.

My epiphany was accelerated by Laurie's slip-up; I don't really feel much 'love' for her, although I feel guilty for not being a stronger person, someone like one of our grand-parents who would find a way to tough it through and keep the marriage intact.

But I'm weak...and I can't go on this way. I'm moving out and filing tomorrow.

Oh, yeah. I'm also going to look up that SOB who took my beautiful, witty, charming and intelligent wife and replaced her with this flawed, boring, and crass woman.

The trick will be to find something apropos to pay him back. Don't know quite what yet, but something.

I wonder if he has a wife?