New here and just posted my first 2 comments in other threads and thought I would more formally introduce myself.
I am a 66 year old married male in a reasonably happy - though not perfect marriage. (I gave up on "perfect" long ago and am now content with good enough. ;-) Luckily for me my wife feels the same - as I am a far from perfect man.
I am retired with a small pension from IBM plus SS and brought a house and 401K savings into our marriage, and my 65 year old wife still works as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner in the Neonatal ICU's at 2 local hospitals. (This is ONE full-time job that entails 7 24 hour workdays a month. And the pay is very, very good and she loves little babies. It is also flexible enough that she finally went to Ireland and England for a 2 week vacation last summer with a girlfriend. I stayed home and refinished the kitchen HW floors and took care of our 3 dogs and 2 cats. I am just not that interested in travel myself, nowadays.)
This is my 4th marriage and the one that WILL last for life.
I first got married at age 19 to my pregnant 16 yo girlfriend. (Yes - I SHOULD have been shot back then.)
I dropped out of college and got a job at a local (St. Louis, then) IBM sales office within a month of looking - at an absolutely entry-level clerical job that barely paid above minimum wage but had those excellent healthcare and vacation benefits. We actually lasted 9 years and had 3 kids (one died almost immediately after birth - all of her pregnancies were difficult and I got a vasectomy after this event occurred that I rationalized as "for her benefit" - but was actually more selfishness on my part. Another act I would have liked to have not done). Money for us was always tight but never desperate. Our sex life was great in almost every way - as we averaged daily sex right up until the last 2 weeks before I moved out of the house. She NEVER said no to me - not once in our entire relationship once she allowed me to deflower her - about 10 months into our dating. It was just not in her nature to try and even use sex to get her way in any of our arguments. Amazing girl in that regards.
But this WAS the 1970's and that whole Hugh Hefner/Penthouse Letters/hedonistic lifestyle was permeating our society - and I got seduced into fantasy about "open marriage", "jealousy is just wrong", and "if it feels good, do it" and conveyed a lot of that rubbish to my wife as well. Of course, as a young attractive woman it WAS just easier for her to flirt and "play around" a bit - and she did - as I soon found out. Eventually I did as well and the amazing thing was that she went absolutely ballistic when she found out "I had cheated on her!" (Despite her own admitted dalliances.) So much for any "open marriage" ideal - and we soon decided on a mutual divorce. We separated in Feb. 1976 and the divorce became final in April, 1976. She called me once before the divorce was final and wanted to try a reconciliation. It did not seem like a good idea to me then because I had the feeling she just felt I hadn't "suffered" enough for my betrayal of her. Maybe she was right. In retrospect I would have done many, many things differently back then if do-overs were possible in life - including TRYING to stay married to her at least a couple of more years for our youngest son's sake. The divorce terms were that she got the house and one car (her Mother had given us the downpayment for that house AND it was the children's home), I paid child support and covered all medical and dental for the kids - not insignificant because our son had slight cerebral palsy and a more significant rather severe asthma condition - but did NOT pay her alimony due to our agreed "no fault" vs. the whole adultery issues. And I got the other car and basically all outstanding debt.
She remarried within a year of our divorce and has remained married to him ever since. They still live in St. Louis and I now live in the Atlanta area.
