please don't waste all your free love/ alternative lifestyles bs on this LW - he's not worth it. This is not an open relationship and the LW is NOT HAPPY. If he wants one, fine. But someone in the relationship has to stand up for HONESTY and INTEGRITY. You can probably do that in many different kinds of relationship, but not one in which one partner lies and the the other feels violently angry (duh!). Btw - they can both be happy in their sick twisted little games but their daughter will grow up with NO ROLE MODELS. Love for her will mean uncertainty and jealousy - checking peoples pockets, slamming of doors, multiple sex partners, tearful recriminations. The fact that this selfish knob doesn't even care enough to wonder what kind of effect this is having on his daughter makes me wish his wife was riding everyne he's ever met. Stupid asswipe.

I'm usually in awe of your insight Cary, but I disagree on this one. I've been there, dealing with drama after drama, becomeing obsessed with what to do next. It's not worth it. Dump her. Take the time to hurt. Figure out what it is in yourself that was attracted to this kind of emotional complexity. Develope a healthy relationship with your self. Then, and only then, if you still want a relationship, look for a woman who has done the same. I'm in the last phase of this process. It was a rough road. And, I have never been happier in my life.

clearly this is not a matter of is she cheating/should i forgive her/where are the bright lines. clearly this is a matter of two people who are VERY screwed up. the question of whether love is madness is moot here. these people are both mad. and since the guy is writing...this isn't even about whether the wife is crrrazy or not. it's about why in hell this guy would put up with this for multiple decades, and what kind of mental help he needs, since it is clearly not a defined/consensual/"normal" kind of crazy for either party. and it's not nice to write off this woman as awful evil and crrrrazy, dear letter writers. she clearly has deep rooted emotional probs as well that need to be adressed with compassion. this stuff should've and could've been resolved decades ago, if problems were addressed instead of glossed over, but at this point...wow. what a mess. this is why people shouldn't subscribe to bs theories like "the madness of love" without knowing what the heck they're talking about. there's truth to it, but i doubt most people *ahem cary* could actually use that train of thought meaninfully or to any use or advantage.

I'm going to make a huge generaliztion about straight people versus gay people. I feel entitled, being a gay person myself and therefore having been the subject of many such generalizations, some positive and some negative (well...mostly negative), some deserved and some completely irrational.

Straight people seem to think that adultery begins and ends with sex outside of marriage. Gay people, on the other hand, understand implicitly that adultery is primarily about emotional abandonment, about sharing with others romantic and intimate feelings that you are supposed to reserve for your partner. In most gay relationships I know, if you say you're "in love" with someone else, the relationship is over, CAPUT. Having sex with someone else is having sex with someone else. But being in love with someone else and carrying on with them romantically (even without sex)? That's an absolute abandonment of your primary relationship.

This LW and Cary both seem to buy into this shiboleth that you can be repeatedly emotionally adulterous but, if you're not screwing around, the primary relationship is still besically intact and it's just a question of sorting out the "madness". I think that's a crock. These people have nothing like what I consider to be a marriage, which is probably why they've both been married multiple times.

Tell me again why this straight institution of marriage is so perfect that I as a gay person am not allowed to participate in it?

...just a comment about how easy it is, looking from the outside in, to minimize the overall devastation of a person that comes from living with lies over an extended length of time. Several posters have used terms like "narcissistic", "personality disordered", etc. to describe LW's wife. This may or may not be true, but even if it is not, LW is still a guy who for over a decade has been lied to and manipulated and placed in a position of having to either deny his conscience and his sense of reality or lose the relationship.

Manipulators have a way of creating a false reality in a relationship that the other party is then forced into accepting, usually through guilt and fear. Every time LW's wife lied about what was so patently obvious in her behavior, she was giving LW a choice to suck it up or leave: there is no such thing as working out a problem that one party does not admit even exists. When lying is involved, you either accept or reject the lie; and with manipulators, if you reject the lie you also somehow reject them, and reject the relationship. Sounds nuts, and is, but that's the dynamic.

In the meantime, they rob one of one's own internal resources, creating an exaggerated need for the relationship to remain intact and removing exactly what the manipulated one would need in order to make a safe exit. It's no surprise that LW is all twisted up and perplexed by a problem that most of us -- from the outside looking in, that is -- have no problem sorting out: we haven't had to deal with her lies, manipulations, and repeated deep betrayals.

Whether there's a personality disorder involved or not, the fact of manipulation in personal relationships is that it exists to deprive the other party of free choice. While I certainly agree there's nothing to be gained by LW staying with her, don't condemn the man for not exercising a free choice he has not legitimately been allowed in the relationship for over a decade. Making the decision to leave, and then having the wherewithal to follow up on it and carry it through, is just not as simple or easy as it seems.

That's just the emotional picture. The physical reality is that if she's lied this hard for this long, he cannot expect her to start telling the truth now when it comes to division of business, property, and custody agreements. The presence of a personality disorder, if one exists, only further guarantees that whatever hell the LW has already gone through, it is nothing compared to what will happen when he tries to leave. (Several letters have suggested getting a PI and starting to document the situation now, quietly, before leaving. I agree that that is a mighty good idea.) Again, just not as simple or easy as it seems.