Hold,

Sorry you haven't found peace...

But it's like I have told my frightfully lazy, know-it-all 15 YOD, the true challenge in life is internal, not external. You can conquer the world and if you haven't mastered your own emotions, you haven't achieved anything.

As you probably recall, your and my situations weren't all that different. Distant wife. Little physical intimacy. Work issues.

I have been there with you. Maybe I didn't fight with depression to the extent you did/do. My wife probably wasn't the spendthrift that your's was/is. But my wife's and my relationship was similar to what you and your's were going through.

I know I have been to the dark places emotionally too. I don't know what brought me back exactly.

As I think about it, I probably am a lot like my stoic father. He isn't much of a conversationalist but we were discussing happiness in life and I said that friends, family and work were like the 3 legged stool with your spirituality/god as the seat that holds it all together. I said that you can survive if you have some of those pieces working and if you have ALL of them working you really shouldn't tell anybody about it. His reply was that's true as long as one of things that is working well is your job.

Yes.

I have been with my current company over 5 years and have worked my way up to being the controller (in all but title). We have been through some horrific times financially during that period, but we pulled together when the economy tanked and are now more profitable than any time in the company's history. Now, I am one of the 3-4 key people in the company, my boss is buying the company from the absentee owner and I am hoping and praying that I can work here and continue to build the company until I can retire (say at the age of 110 or so based upon my current rate of savings). But work is definitely been the recipient of a lot of my energy and has been a source of pride and achievement for me.

Ironically, my boss has pushed all of us to have a work/life balance. This from the person that works 80 hours per week! But she is earnest about it.

So starting in January I started to exercise (as I recall you were doing for a long time). I am down about 10 lbs from 240 to about 230, but I feel way better. I have begun to get home by 5:30 or so at night. We took a 3 week vacation for the 1st time to the east coast in May and June.

In the month of June I think we were intimate about 3 times. But that was after about 5 months of nothing after my wife had her hystorectomy in December. But since I was working on improving me during that time it really wasn't a huge source of stress.

I am sure we will settle back into our old, little SF, grind again. But it really doesn't bother me because I am content, work is good, friends are good, I know I love my wife and I also know she loves me. She may NEVER love me exactly the way I would like. But you know what? I don't know that if I had regular SF that I would appreciate it as much or that I would be any happier than I am now.

In fact, I know that I am the type of person that if I was getting SF regularily, I would complain about the lack of variety or the fact that it had been a week with no contact. It would be more of a physical act/ release than real intimacy.

Yes, I have a lot of things in my life that could be much better but in the grand scheme of things it's really pretty good and I am happy for the most part. I certainly am no longer the person that let's the perfect get in the way of the good.