And who knows, by breaking up you might actually be able to salvage the business & some sort of friendship...but you're not happy now & it's not getting any better, so what choice do you have? You'll be fine.

A lot of life's questions can be answered by asking yourself, "is this how I want things to be for the rest of my life?"

And for what it's worth, friends of mine that split up years ago still own a store together. I'm sure it wasn't easy to get there, but they're both doing great now.

Life's too short, end it now. Don't make the mistake so many others have, don't wind up hating her because you spent so much time hating yourself for not getting out when you should have/could have.

Life REALLY IS too short, too short to be unhappy, too short to be unhealthy, too short to not go with your gut and enjoy whatever else may come along. Cause this clearly isn't working.

Good luck.

Wow good advice from Dan. I really expected him to start in on how 'open relationships solve all problems'.

LW you say you're 'relationship works on multiple levels' and my question is 'what levels'? The level where you've cheated multiple times? The level where she's moved out? The level where you admit you're in love with someone else? I don't think this relationship ever worked the way you guys wanted it too. It's time to end things and stopping trying to revive this dead horse. The horse is ashes and you need to let it go and find a way to have a professional not romantic relationship with your wife.

Being "head over heels in love" is not a solid basis for a long term relationship.
Living apart, and restructuring with your long-term partner, such that you can have the sex & romance you want.. sounds like the way to go. But please please please don't marry this new romance! At least not within the first 5 (FIVE) years after she is finally divorced and you are fully..'restructured'.

Yeah, not telling your life partner something because you fear her reaction is ... codependency. Not at all healthy. Dan is right, ovary-up and be honest about what's going on. Sounds like she might already know anyway.

What a chickenshit.

OMG, I lost all sympathy for FUCK w/ this:

Knowing I was unhappy, she kept asking me what I wanted, and I kept saying "I don't know."

She was either being dishonest with her partner or dishonest with herself. But it sounds like she knew damn well was wrong and refused to talk about it. FUCK, you owe your partner a big apology for emotionally abusing your partner w/ your chicken shit "I don't knows."

Focus on what you have (a business, a long-standing friendship), rather than what you don't have (sexual compatibility), and I think the answer will come to you.

FUCK. One of the myths that sustains itself is that sexual, passionate, romantic love somehow trumps platonic, familial love. They are two different things. Most people seem to need both to function but there appears to be some unwritten rule that combining the sexual, passionate, romantic and familial is the only jackpot.

You seem to need both, that is reasonable, but your partner of 12 years can't offer the sexual and passionate, only the familial; accept that. And accept that she must find her way to deal with your right to find the others elsewhere; she seems to have done that. So, while being as sensitive about it as possible, you need to get on with a new phase in your partnership based on what is on offer there and allow yourself passion and sex. If you are worried about the state of your newly platonic partnership, then you need to work on allowing it to re-establish in its new form: that requires some space and time, and a little heartache.

The automatic three-point deduction to LW for using "me and my partner" as the subject of a sentence. (The last time I mentioned this, some of the assembled company assumed I was being anti-Wainthropp.)

Missed opportunity for Mr Savage. LW asks if 42 is too old - a golden opportunity to remind her of the age of Shirley Valentine. (That may have been the last time I had any stake in the Oscars.)

Maybe we need a new poll:

"Should I stay or leave." Have you ever seen this asked by someone who should stay?

@11: A few times, the LW should stay. In those cases, husband was great at getting wife off, attentive in every way, and all-around perfect, but wife just couldn't help but bang other dudes or pine after the "one who got away" because reasons.

Wife blamed monogamy (I believe one used the words "fuck monogamy fuck fuck,") and of course Dan swallowed that hook, line, sinker and canoe, but most commenters called wife out on being that type that has, as Vicky Christina Barcelona coined it, "chronic dissatisfaction." Even if wife were in an open marriage (as Dan inevitably recommended), those women were of the type that would fall head over heels for a new "troo lurv" and leave because obviously her marriage to her last "troo lurv" was the cosmos conspiring to keep her and her soulmate apart.

All this would mean "please leave your husband by jumping off a cliff, you'd be doing him a favor" were it not for these women having small children. (Because of course when you marry your troo lurv, you've got to consummate it with offspring right away). Dan counseled them to stay for the childrens' sake (albeit while slapping down an open marriage ultimatum).

Frankly, my answer to this clusterfuck would be, "you should stay; he should go," but cue Kermit the Frog sipping a hot cup of Lipton.

Unfortunately, many couples in new love rationalize away any aspect of incompatibiliy that exists. Some incompatibility can be worked through and accepted but other types of incompatibility just won't go away. Compromise in sexual incompatibility usually won't be satisfying to both in a couple and can place a wedge between them. Ultimately one or both wind up miserable.

The LW has intellectually accepted that her marriage is over but hasn't accepted the pain and sadness that often comes from the end of a committed loving relationship. Other commenters here have recommended that she wait before committing to a new relationship and I agree. Rebound relationships often don't work out because the person who has just left a relationship hasn't fully gone through his or her stages of grief and acceptance, even if they were the one who wanted to end the committed relationship. She needs to re-establish her singleness outside of her "coupledom" before again coupling. Additionally, her being single for a period of time before coupling with someone else may help her preserve the trust needed to continue the business relationship with her Ex and to continue on as friends.

@12: I'm not sure I agree with you in those instances, if we're thinking of the same ones. When one person's saying "I don't wanna fuck my spouse, and I wanna fuck other people, what should I dooooo!?!?!" I wonder about the person's worldview. I mean, there are billions of people I don't want to fuck. One of the secrets to happiness is don't be married to those people.

I agree with you on the rest, I'm just kind of perpetually baffled at people who don't realize that they shouldn't enter (or stay in) relationships with people they don't want to be with. Even if they're with someone who's all-around perfect, but who they're just not into.

It's not quite a "life's too short" thing, because life is plenty long enough to find someone compatible. But it's too short to waste more of it than necessary on dating someone you'd rather not be dating. Because that's awful.

Oh letter writer.

... I was in a very similar place not too long ago: in a sexually dissatisfying marriage with my partner of more than a decade and agonizing about leaving. Deep down, I know it wasn't working, but I didn't want to lose the friendship and history we'd built together. Eventually I found the ovaries to leave and damn if I don't wish I'd do so sooner. I knew when I was still married that I didn't have a lot of perspective on the situation, and I suspected that some of my barnacle-like sticking around was based on fear, but I didn't realize until after I'd left how grinding it is, living with someone you love but with whom you are fundamentally incompatible.

Stop putting yourself through this: your partner has given you an out. Take it. Stop putting your partner through this: you may be rationalizing your fear of ending things by telling yourself that you want what's best for her, but she deserves to be with someone who 1) isn't constantly sexually frustrated and 2) isn't in love with someone else.

LW has been a TERRIBLE partner in this. Sure, she wrote in so we get her side of it (the relationship is unstatisfying! Woe is I!) but even through that lens, she comes across as a CPOS: someone who doesn't want their current partner, has cheated, and is actively in love with someone else, but won't let her partner go, for purely selfish reasons. Even the partner is all "let's get some distance".

So, by all means, GO already! but I hope the LW eventually realizes her role in her own misery (as well as her partner's).

I think the Portlandia writers could've condensed this letter a bit and made it funnier.

Honestly I don't think there's much of a choice here. LW if there's any chance of saving this relationship you need to be honest. Tell your wife how frustrated you are, how unhappy you are with your sex life. Tell her you've met someone else. Tell her that you don't want to lose the friendship and the history. Tell her that if this going to work then she NEEDS to step up her sexual game. I doubt that this will save the relationship but it might give you both a chance to build a friendship once the relationship ends.

@20: "if there's any chance of saving this relationship you need to be honest."

People really shouldn't halfassedly "try" to save relationships they don't want to be in, though. They want out with honor and they'll just keep doing things to lessen themselves and hurt their partners until they finally quit with the pretense and do something in the interests of them both.

I'm more riffing off the idea of "saving" something neither one wants as the other does, I know you have a realistic appraisal of her odds.

There are two kinds of SLLOTD:

1) Please help me undo what cannot be undone.
2) Please help me decide whether do what I've already done in all except name.

Mr Rhone - You omit, "How do I get other people to do what I want them to do (preferably without having to cash any personal capital)?"

What FUCK and others tend to forget is that a older, long term relationship cannot compete with the passion and fire of a new relationship. The late advice columnist Ann Landers described individuals who constantly seek new relationships because they keep falling out of love with their existing, long term partner as "being hooked on speed" -i.e. the speed of new relationships.

As one matures, understanding this critical fact is very important, if your goal is to remin happy in a long term relationship. Playing partner roulette every few years in the end is a sure fire recipe for loneliness and despair as you reach the twilight of your existence.

Mr. Ven @25: You are absolutely correct (especially the parenthetical qualification).

@21 I agree. In a perfect world they would both end the relationship and still do their best to keep up a friendship and a professional relationship, but as the LW seems hellbent on NOT ending things with her wife [when they are over, they just don't want to admit it] I'm trying to offer her last-chance-hail-mary advice.

If nothing else if she finally is honest it might be the wake up call they both need.

Yeah, it'd be nice if people could just end things more honorably instead of trying to "save face" while bumbling towards nothing good and extending their own misery. Inertia, she is strong.

@26: Isn't that the definition of "serial monogamy"?

LW, maybe your LTR partner has not uttered the words "separation" and "divorce" because she feels YOU should utter them. And she's right: it is YOU who is dissatisfied with the not-enough-sex. It is YOU who doesn't love her anymore. It is YOU who is in love with someone else. It is YOU who is disrupting her trust by cheating. So it is YOU who has to say those scary and definitive words.
How do I know? Been there, done that (minus the cheating). I know it's difficult, but for goddess' sake, ovary up as a lot of other people here said.

Lolo & Venn - with a side of "loooooook at what a stud-muffin or sensitive-long-suffering or helpless-lil-thing I am!"

Still Thinking @32: +1

Also: Hey there :)

One thing I think you need to do is separate your current partner and your new love in your mind. What I mean by that is that whether you should break up with your current partner and whether you should try for a relationship with this new person are two separate questions. I tend to believe that nobody should ever break up with someone to be with someone else - because what happens if that relationship doesn't work out? A bucketload of regrets and resentment. If you leave your current relationship, leave because it's not working. Any other relationships that you then get into are separate transactions. The choice you need to make right now is not between your current partner and your potential future partner, it's between being in a relationship that makes you (and your partner, from the sounds of it) miserable, or NOT being in that relationship.

So do you want to be in that relationship? Think about how you feel right now. Do you want another thirty or forty years of feeling this way? Another ten years? Another five? Another year?

If I were in your position, and there were a possibility of negotiating for an open relationship, I might stay. Maybe. But it doesn't really sound like there is. Your partner made it clear that she wasn't okay with that before. I suppose she may have genuinely changed her mind now - people do change sometimes - but from what you've said, your new "sleep with others as long as we tell each other" agreement sounds more like your partner either a) is agreeing to things she doesn't want because she's trying to hold onto a relationship that's slipping away, or b) has totally checked out emotionally and no longer cares what you do. Neither of those is a good basis for an open relationship.

If you break up, you might be able to salvage a friendship and business relationship. Or you might not. If you can't; if the worst-case scenario happens and you lose this person as a friend and lose your business and find that you and your new love aren't compatible; if you end up having to start afresh at 42 (or even 52 or 62)...do you think you'd be in a better or worse position than you are now? I don't mean initially, when you're still reeling from all the changes and losses, but after the dust settles, and you're in a position to start a new life and go in seek of happiness. Imagine yourself in that position, and ask yourself whether you think you'd be better-off or worse-off. You could also ask yourself whether you think your partner would be better-off or worse-off.

Life is pretty damn long, if you ask me. Too long to be imprisoning yourself in a situation that isn't where you want to be. Figure out what you want from life - or at least what you don't want from life - and make the necessary changes.

Figure out what you want from life - or at least what you don't want from life - and make the necessary changes.

Great advice. The figure out what you don't want from life is crucial in my opinion. Don't try to find happiness -- eliminate unhappiness.

@34: That seems like absolutely terrible advice, that nobody should ever break up with another to be in a happier relationship?

I'd certainly not be married if I didn't provide the (passive) impetus for my partner to drop a situation that was miserable for years.

Persons should not jump ship regularly, but even still leaving an unhappy relationship is preferable to passive-aggressively sticking in the murk and the mire as the LW has because she wants her partner to dump her first.

Reading letters like this really makes me realize how awesome my straight and male privileges are. I am SO glad I'm not a lesbian.

(Yes, I know straight men get in shitty relationships too, but rarely so tediously shitty.)

I'm with JuanMas @26. In addition to being "hooked on speed," I think that LW is addicted to the ongoing drama of her long-distance triangle. What she won't admit to, but what is obvious in her letter, is that she cares deeply for her current partner but she is BORED, BORED BORED and it's not going to get better. I hardly think 42 is too old to move on, but if and when she takes up with Shiny New Lover #2, she's likely to end up in the very same place after the magic wears off.

Also, I don't get why she's wringing her hands about telling her current partner about the new lover on the side. Your wife ALREADY KNOWS something's going on, LW. She may not have a face and a name yet, but she's got the general idea - in essence, that's why she instigated the separation. She deserves to hear you speak the truth, so please get over yourself and come clean to her about where you've been putting all your romantic energy over the past year. After 12 years in what you describe as a close and loving partnership that works on "so many levels," I think you owe her that much.

@38 Yeah it's really great that straight guys never do 'crazy lesbian' things like date/marry the wrong person, or start their own businesses.

Have you read the recent SL column, there's a straight guy there who's unhappy with his sexually incompatible relationship. Better go tell him, and the hundreds of other straight guys who wrote in over the years, that their problems don't exist! I'm sure they'll be happy to hear that.

@38: "Yes, I know straight men get in shitty relationships too, but rarely so tediously shitty."

What a combination of dull and unimaginative and not a regular reader of Savage Love. Tedious isn't exclusive to any gender or point on the spectrum. There's plenty of tiresome vanilla to go with the poly freaky come-the-fuck-on. Dull is dull.

@14: I'm not sure I agree with you in those instances, if we're thinking of the same ones. When one person's saying "I don't wanna fuck my spouse, and I wanna fuck other people, what should I dooooo!?!?!

We aren't thinking of the same ones. The ones I'm thinking of enjoy fucking their spouse. They just can't bear not to act on the occasional wandering eye as well, even though they know it will hurt the admittedly awesome spouse. It's not a lack of mutual attraction--it's just a lack of impulse control.

@36: That seems like absolutely terrible advice, that nobody should ever break up with another to be in a happier relationship?

People should break up when their current relationship isn't working for them, regardless of whether or not there's someone waiting in the wings. Sometimes a prospect can push someone out of the inertia of a bad relationship, but it should only be speeding along something that was already on the way out, anyway--and it shouldn't be necessary to make the breakup happen.

What people should not do is break up a perfectly good relationship for a potential "upgrade." It's shallow, and a good way to end up one of those serial monogamists hooked on the rush of NRE.

@48: "People should break up when their current relationship isn't working for them, regardless of whether or not there's someone waiting in the wings."

Total agreement.

"What people should not do is break up a perfectly good relationship for a potential "upgrade." It's shallow, and a good way to end up one of those serial monogamists hooked on the rush of NRE."

Can you logic someone out of being shallow, though? Better for them to stop tormenting the current partner... if they're going to chase that dragon a good therapist is the least they need, nothing's going to resolve itself without external influence.

@43: "They just can't bear not to act on the occasional wandering eye as well, even though they know it will hurt the admittedly awesome spouse. It's not a lack of mutual attraction--it's just a lack of impulse control."

Oh. In that case: Yeah. There are a lot of very good reasons to break up, but "I haven't gotten around to developing impulse control" isn't necessarily one of them.

...though, now that I think about it, "I don't wanna be a grownup" maybe is a good reason to break up, but it's more like a good reason to get dumped.