I am not praying that you just 'shut up already', Hold. I would just like to see you right with yourself. If that means staying married until your kids are grown, great, but your unhappiness seems pretty clear and is hard to just ignore.

I want to be O&H with you, though, Hold. I sense that even when your kids are grown, you will not divorce your wife. I sense that you two will be so ingrained with each other that change will either seem too problematic and complicated or require too much energy.

I hope when you are deciding what to do with the rest of your life, that you will think about that at some point because I fear that years will turn into decades, and all this time when you could have been strengthening your marriage and willfully chose not to, will be wasted because although the marriage will still be intact, it will not be any happier. We can only expect from our marriages what we put into them. Things just don't improve spontaneously; they don't. They can't. It takes conscious effort.

On your deathbed, will you be saying "I wish I'd spent more time being unhappy"?