A different approach to dealing with infidelity : Becoming A Slut Husband

I should have been pissed but I wasn’t. I should have wanted to kill the bastard, but I didn’t. I should have wanted to do a lot of things, but I found out that I just didn’t care enough so I let things be. Well, that wasn’t completely true. There was still a small kernel of need to get some sort of revenge and I knew I would eventually.

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Marie and I had grown up together. I was seven and she was six when her family moved into the house next door to us. There were four kids in the family and she was the only one I got along with. Her brother Alphonse was three years older than I was and he was a bully. He soon learned that he would be well advised to leave me the fuck alone. He was bigger and stronger than I was and he could whip my ass, but there wasn’t any ‘quit’ in me and if he started something it didn’t end until some grown ups pulled us apart.

I had my dad to thank for that. I’d gotten beat up once when I was in the first grade and I had run home crying. After I’d told him what had happened he asked me what I had done to the other kid.

“Nuthin” I had sniffled and he had gotten mad as hell.

“You don’t run away Tony, you never ever run away. You fight back until you are too tired to get your arms up and then you use your feet or your teeth to tear the other guy’s throat out, but you don’t quit. They will all soon learn that about you and they will leave you alone. If you cut and run they will never stop picking on you.”

It took three fights before Alphonse got the message, but he did get it.

Marie had two sisters, Veronica was four years older and Rosario was three years younger. Veronica, being three years older than me had no use for me and Rosario being four years younger was just a baby as far as I was concerned. There were no other kids in the neighborhood our age so Marie and I gravitated toward each other and by sixth grade we were a pair.

We grew together, we played together and we stayed together. It remained that way all the way through middle school and then high school. We were inseparable, joined at the hip, yin and yang. There was no other boy for her and no other girl for me. I had never asked her for a date, we never discussed going steady and I never asked her to marry me. Didn’t need to do any of those things because we just ‘were’. It was that simple – we just ‘were’. All I did was ask the question:

“When do you want to get married?” and she said, “Not until I finish college” and that was it. Three months after graduation we were married.

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The next twenty-four years were your basic middle class marriage. We both started out working and saving our money for a down payment on a house, bought one and after our second child Marie decided that she wanted to be a stay at home mom. She raised our three kids as I worked hard to provide for the family and when they were all off to school Marie went back to work.

One by one the kids left for college and Marie and I were alone again, but something had changed somewhere along the way. I don’t even when it happened or what had happened, but the connection was gone. We lived together, the affection was there, but there wasn’t any passion anymore. We kissed each other goodbye as we left for work in the morning. We sat at the table and discussed each other’s day over dinner, we watched TV or read in the evenings and then went to bed. The urgency for lovemaking wasn’t there anymore. Marie just didn’t seem to want it and I didn’t push it. It got to where we made love maybe two or three times a month, but nothing fiery. It was almost like each of us was doing a duty, fulfilling a requirement. It wasn’t until much later that I finally figured out the disconnect between us, but by then it was too late, way too late to repair the damage.