Originally posted on June 1, 2011

Is it better to stay with your overweight wife—who happens to be the mother of your infant daughter—and cheat on her to get sexual gratification (and be a shit of a husband) or leave her (and be a shit of a father)?

Almost Twice The Wife

My response after the jump...

Cheating shit or leaving shit—are those your only options?

If they are, ATTW, then stay and cheat. Abandoning an infant—to say nothing of abandoning someone with an infant—is a shit move. So is cheating on the mother of your infant daughter, of course, but it's slightly less shitty.

But here's another option: You could go without for six months or a year—you know, like most new parents.

Backing way up: You were presumably attracted to your wife before the baby... otherwise there would be no baby, right? And presumably, the mother of your infant daughter is going without, too, as she's probably too exhausted to bother with sex. Because she just had a baby. She also may not be feeling it for the husband who doesn't find her attractive in her current state—a state he put her in.

Take a little responsibility here, ATTW: You knocked the wife up knowing that pregnancy and its tragic aftermath, aka "parenting," leave new moms with very little time for the gym. If you expected your wife to bounce back to her pre-baby weight in 10 weeks like some sort of celebrity mom, then you needed to get her two nannies, a personal trainer, and a full-time nutritionist like some sort of celebrity mom.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on you, ATTW. For all I know, your wife is one of those lousy spouses who abandon routine physical maintenance once the first kid arrives, because, hey, now you're stuck! Forgoing routine physical maintenance is the mother of all take-you-for-granted moves, one that quickly kills desire and slowly smothers love, and it can constitute grounds for cheating and/or leaving. (Normal and natural aging, health issues that make routine maintenance impossible, etc. do not by themselves constitute grounds.) But it's too soon to know if your wife is one of those lousy take-you-for-granted spouses, ATTW, as your daughter is still an infant.

Masturbate, help out, make sure your wife has the free time she needs to take care of herself, and you may find that you don't have to be any sort of shit.