I guess the quickest way of saying this is that I discovered about a year ago that my wife of almost 10 years and the mother of my two kids has had nine separate one-night stands with strangers she met off of Craig's List and I really don't know what to do about it.
This all happened about a year and a half after our first son was born. I was working crazy hours to support the family (she decided at almost the last minute to be a stay-at-home-mom) and we had almost nothing in savings. The time that I had been spending with her before our son was born was split between 70 hour weeks at the office and helping her to take care of our young daughter.
She became convinced that I didn't love her anymore and that the marriage was over and decided to start responding to ads on CL. At first it was just cyber- and phone-sex but eventually it escalated and she started meeting people in cars and in hotels for sex. The oral sex was not protected, the vaginal and anal sex were. I've been checked out and I do not have any STIs and we are trying to deal with the emotional fallout with individual and couple's therapy, and we get along just fine except when it comes to sex.
Our sex life was never ideal. I tried all sorts of things to find out what turned her on but I was never able to find anything that worked with consistency (me taking the reigns, her taking the reigns, me as a sub, her as a sub, porn, erotica, etc, etc). Finding out that what did it for her was "literally anyone but me" hurt a lot. The fact that the sex was at least partially unprotected and that I was exposed to STIs without warning has left me completely un-attracted to her. It borders on outright disgust. The thought of touching her sexually makes me want to peel my skin off. But bluntly, I feel sexually assaulted by her and I don't know if I will ever want to have sexual contact with her again.
I have raised the issue of formally opening our marriage so that we can each feel fulfilled but she got extremely insecure and refuses to allow that to be an option. Ideally we would stay together (we are great co-parents and are otherwise good friends) but I'm not going to spend twenty years in a sexless marriage. What do you think I should do?
Craig's List Assaulted Partner
So your wife can unilaterally open your marriage—aka cheat on you like crazy—for completely self-serving, bullshit reasons, and risk exposing you to a whole host of STIs in the process, but you're expected to go without sex for the rest of your life because the prospect of formally (and honestly!) opening up your marriage makes her feel feelings?
Yeah, no. Jesus Christ. Fuck that noise.
It's ultimatum time, CLAP: The wife either accepts reality—yours is a companionate marriage and you have no claim on each other sexually—or she accepts alimony.