LW: Do you guys, you know, talk?

I started reading the letters expecting the usual barrage of meanness. (You're a bitch and a slut and a golddigger. Get out and stop wasting your husband's life. He deserves better than you. Etc.) I was happy to see lots of people entreating you to give it another chance. Not because marriage is sacred and divorce is bad, but because you really have no idea what marriage is like, and you need to figure that out.

I'm guessing that you're just like a lot of people who got married early because you were in love and you wanted to be together--without a whole lot of reflection on the part about sharing your life with another person. I was like that too--married at 21, at the beginning of my husband's graduate school career, and it was hard.

It sounds like you guys were in love at the beginning and what's really splitting you apart is the fact that he travels a lot. People DO travel for long periods of time--maybe this guy is in the military or law enforcement, maybe he's an academic who has to do the workshop/conference circuit, a consultant who has to travel wherever his company sends him, whatever. He's probably not cheating, at least not yet.

It sounds like he started travelling right after you started living together, and so you never really had a chance to form any domestic patterns together, so when he's home, it's really jarring. His return disrupts the life you've constructed in his absence, and you probably take each other for granted, and you're living like roommates because you don't know each other anymore. And it sounds like he doesn't know the extent to which you're unhappy and alienated from him. The one who travels is often so occupied with their purpose for traveling that they're not necessarily aware that the spouse left behind has to fill that void.

So, my point is, maybe it's not you, and it's not him. Maybe it's the external circumstances that are the problem. But you need to figure it out, for both your sakes. It really sounds like the separations are keeping your marriage from thriving.

So before you give up entirely, give it a good, well-considered chance. You need marriage counseling--heck, *you* need counseling--and you need to learn how to share a life. Even if you end up realizing that he was not the man you should have married, or that you're better off without a man at all, you have to try. Because, otherwise, you're just going to go off and make the same mistake with some other guy--fall quickly in love with him, have it wear off, get restless, leave. You'll hurt a lot of other people in the process, and you won't be any closer to figuring out how to be happy.

And maybe, if it's important enough to him, he should find a way to reduce the amount of time he has to travel, because you'll never have a chance together if he doesn't. Someone else pointed out that even good marriages go through slumps, and that's absolutely true. But then there are days, weeks, months, years, when you want to be close to your spouse all the time. You don't want to miss out on that. But right now you don't even know if it's possible.

All those of you who are making analogies, consider this one: Famous biologist, who wrote several groundbreaking papers in her field, who spent her whole life in the lab and the field and the college classroom, finding that, because academia is ruthless and unrelenting, that the singleminded pursuit of her research was incompatible with a normal life and that her marriage failed and children were out of the question, that all she has now is her work and her cat, goes to a dinner party.

She's asked the question, "What do you do?" She doesn't expect anyone to be in awe of her (that would be embarrassing), or even understand what she's done. But she dreads answering, because the rest of the evening is filled with really stupid questions and comments, people insisting that evolution is just a theory and that there HAS to be a master designer, people who took biology in high school and thought it was easy and how scientists studying the effects of cow flatulence on global warming are wasting taxpayer money, and how they read a book about how vaccinations cause autism, and finally, a ten-minute lecture on an outdated theory that was taught in the speaker's daughter's high school biology class. Biologist explains that actually, this isn't true, and gets a pitying smile. Biologist is polite and encouraging through all these conversations. She goes home with a massive headache.

These people have not studied biology. They may have taken a class in biology, but they have not studied biology.

Yeah, after reading Sey's article and seeing a lot of these comments, I can sympathize. (I'm not a biologist, but I know how frustrating social interactions can be for experts when they encounter people who think their tiny bit of knowledge and experience qualifies them to hold forth on all kinds of subjects they really don't understand.)

The elite are different from you and me. Get over yourselves, and have a little respect, and maybe people like Sey, who sounds like she's outwardly a good sort, will be able to kill off their "inner jerks."