I’m writing this while a woman whose name I can’t remember is asleep in my bed. I’m 42, and my wife (and partner of 20 years) and I split up three months ago. It was her idea; I didn’t want it to happen but I can’t refute her reasoning. We no longer slept in the same bed, had sex once in the seven years since our only child was born and had stopped talking.
Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. I trace its beginnings to the first time she hit me. She wasn’t often violent, maybe once a year, but every time it happened I retreated a little further. I was never unfaithful. I don’t think I’m old-fashioned, but having made my vows, “for better, for worse”, I just thought this was “for worse”. With hindsight, I recognise the self-delusion.
At our child’s fifth birthday party, I had a gash on my forehead and a black eye and told people I’d walked into a door. When a friend asked, “What did he do to earn a beating like that?” we both laughed along.
Since the separation, I have had sex with a dozen women. In some ways, it has been wonderful. I had totally lost any sense of myself as a sexual person, so to discover there are women who want to sleep with me has been affirming.
And yet. I fell in love with my ex-wife when I was 19 and have loved her every day since. Alone, free, bewildered – I feel no guilt about my new promiscuity, but I do feel great sadness. I would take my ex back right now if she’d have me. Anger may be a brief madness, but love, it seems, is not.
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