I love conversations like this. I love it when people have dreams, and the desire to pursue them.

Cary's advice is excellent, I can't add that much, just a few points that have helped me, that I think might be relevant in your decision-making and goal setting:

1) Happiness is not necessarily novelty, ease, or pleasure. Happiness is not even necessarily always "fun." Happiness is more like satisfaction, contentment, joy, confidence, pride in (difficult) accomplishments. Many things about some aspects of learning and education (and real life) can seem dull or boring or repetitive or extremely frustrating. But if you are learning what you really want to learn, some of this "drudgery" can be fabulously rewarding in the long run. Don't be afraid to do the hard work you need to do if it helps you get where you want to go.

2) Further to point one: "The true test of a vocation is a love of the drudgery that it involves." I don't know where this comes from, but it is good to keep in mind when you are slogging through some kind of lesson, or practice, or audition, or trying to make a creation of your own really, really work.

3) Write down your top 3 to 5 absolutely crucial lifetime goals: One for family/friends, another for education, another for career, etc. Post them where you can see them every single day. Pursue only them. (If you want to learn to play the guitar, don't waste your guitar time by messing around with the kazoo.) Let everything else fall away, or be in service to your most important goals.

4) Ask yourself if you would pursue your art anyway, even if you knew you would never be paid. What is the one thing that you can't live without in your life? For me it is working with my hands. I will always, always be involved in some kind of craft activity, even if I never see a dime from my efforts. Even if I had no money. Even if I was in jail. I cannot live without this in my life. What is your equivalent?

5) Ditch everyone in your life who doesn't respect you as a human being. Dump the jerks, male and female. Make room- and TIME- for people who love you, care about you, and who you love and care about just as much.

Good luck!

Actually, MOST people are in a very different place at 40 than they imagined they would be at 15, or 20, or 30. Many, many people have lost sight of their authentic self and have mucked around living in ways that don't suit them. Some need real and compassionate guidance if they are to find their way back to their true path.

You're not a loser if you learn from your mistakes. A loser is someone who NEVER gets it together and who causes a lot of pain to others, and who denies their own contribution to their situation.

I admire people who can bravely re-evaluate their life choices, even if they are going through a process that maybe they should have completed years earlier. Immaturity and delayed adolescence seem to be a norm these days—I have no idea why this is, but it does seem to be indulged.

It's those people who NEVER do the work that bother me most—those who never take the time to reflect, re-evaluate, make changes, chart a new course when it is clearly necessary. It takes guts to look at where you've been, to be honest with yourself about the good and the bad. A person may cringe when they confront their past, but in my view that person is a WINNER if they can take responsibility for their choices, and use the wisdom gained in the first half of life to make better choices in the second.

It seems to me that a lot of the drama and romance of "affairs" thrives because of the shroud of secrecy. Once everything is out in the harsh light of day, and the "affair" is seen for what it really is (plain old sex) then the mystique evaporates and the fantasy quickly runs out of fuel. Kind of like at a nightclub when the lights come on . . . eeeewwww.

What I am saying is that the LW needs to view this so-called "affair" as if from outside her own distorted imagination—as if someone else (maybe her husband) was an unfortunate spectator to these unsavory events. That outside person would not see anything "hot" or "romantic" or "special" or "dangerous" or "deliciously forbidden" or whatever. They would only see something sad and infuriating: a grown woman, a wife, a mother, a university professor, behaving in a pathetic manner, and in danger of permanently destroying a number of other people's lives.

This should never have started, but now it has to end.

I can barely even imagine how the initial conversation between these two went:

"Yo, s'up? "

"I'm a married mother of one and a PhD candidate researching transgressive gender identities within the postmodern capitalist construct and—"

"That's some cool sh*t."

Wow, what temptation.

So, look, LW, ending it means ending it. NO long letters pouring out all your complicated, conflicted feelings, no more "hanging out" together, no texting, no apologies, no detailed explanations or "processing" of every excruciating emotional point in teary melodramatic "deep" conversations.

You, dear professor, are too busy for any of this garbage from now on: you need to salvage your family and your work and your future. And that boy really should be back at his dorm room studying for mid-terms, which, according to my calendar, start next week, do they not?