What's my story?

Here's the scoop...

I have a wonderful wife and two great kids. I have a good job with a recent promotion and my co-workers don't hate me too much. I have a few friends and an reasonable social life. I could stand to lose about 15 pounds from the midsection, but who amongst us couldn't?

So, what the hell is my problem?

It all stems from a business trip my wife took earlier this year. It was about 6 weeks, and the kids and I joined her about halfway through. This business trip was to a foreign country where it was very cold. During this first three weeks, my wife met someone and their relationship is ruining our relationship and my life.

I knew this person sort-of, as my business community is reasonably small. I never trusted him, didn't particularly like him, but didn't think much about him. It was pretty apparent though that my wife spent a LOT of time with him during this session. When the kids and I arrived, she met us at the airport after having spent the weekend with him in the city where we arrived. He flew home a few hours before we arrived.

My wife says everything was platonic, but there are so many things during and since then that simply don't add up. She has been like Jekyll and Hyde towards me ever since. Most of the time she is quite nice to me, but occasionally she gets extremely emotional. All the bad stuff evolves around her relationship with this guy.

While continuing to tell me how much she loves me and how much the family comes first to her, she continues to do things on the side with this guy that infuriate me to no end. She knows it, and doesn't seem to care. This guy lives across the country from me, but that hasn't stopped her from frequently communicating with him and trying to set up rendezvous with him, always when I am away from the house or out of town. Whenever I say anything, I'm told that I am simply a control freak. Maybe I am. Maybe she is too. But I think she really is putting her relationship with this guy (he needs a name, let's say Dr. Evil) ahead of our marriage and just doesn't seem to mind.

During her whole trip away, she never called. This is a first for her. I called three times and she was always too busy to talk and never called me back. I got several emails and the occasional IM, but never any voice. Weird.

Since then she has a fascination with this guy, and lies to me about him constantly. It's only when she's caught in the lie that she seems to have any regret, but is the regret about being caught or the behavior? She's told me that she won't lie about him again, and then a week later there's another lie, usually about something like sending him self-portraits, sending him a dozen red roses, or trying to set up a rendezvous when I'm gone.

My later posts will get more into the history and future of this relationship. Despite all of this I still love my wife. She is smart, beautiful, athletic, and has probably dropped from a size 10 to a size 4 since the beginning of the year through diet and exercise. She is great in bed and more experimental than ever. I really like this woman, and I compare our relationship to that of a perfect body, except for this one sore where the scab continues to get picked, festers, and gets infected. I wonder if it will turn to gangrene.

As The Clash sang in the early 1980s, I'm at the point of "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"