"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." - Oscar Wilde

I wish to start out today thanking everyone for sharing their advice, stories and comments to my last post on this site and via email. You have given me no small amount of both comfort over these past very difficult days. I was not surprised by the majority of the responses to my previous post being generally sadness, anger, frustration and a general desire that I end my marriage. I have not really written a post before responding to what people have written back, but I think the time has come.

And I realize that many of you may not understand why it is that I am even having this dilemma. The answer seems so clear to many of you. I feel personally that in this situation I either lose the person that is the most important person that I have and have had in my life or I lose my own self dignity and self worth. This is hardly a wonderful or even remotely easy choice to make. But unfortunately, as with so much else in life I have found, dichotomies don’t really exist as clearly as we thought as kids.

I strive to be as honest as I am able to be in this blog. Part of this exercise for me is to explore my life and what is going on. And it serves no purpose to try to embellish it. But a first-person narrative will always be clouded by the perspective of the writer. And as with any story, there are things that have gone on before the first chapter presented that colours every characters actions without the reader every really becoming privy to that “backstory”.

I remember an episode of “Sex and the City” (shocking, a gay man quoting that show!) where Carrie said to Miranda, “No one else will ever know what happened in your relationship but the two of you.” And the truth is that no relationship of one month let alone four years can be distilled neatly into the confines of one post (or for the habitual reader, this entire blog). Epic novels have been written on the relationship between two people in love and even then, the full story is never told. Taken on its own, in my post, there is the paradigmatic villain and victim. But no matter how much I can reduce what has been transpiring in my relationship to a post on this blog, it cannot possibly tell the entire tale anymore than this entire blog can give you a complete picture of who I am as a person.

I can hardly claim to have been the innocent at every point in this relationship. I have been the villain and Bud the victim. I have done things that Bud could have justifiable left me for. I have not been the perfect mate either.

And for me, breaking up is the easy solution to our problems. Easy in that it will require none of the difficult work in growing together out of these situations. It is the staying together in the hope that we can work this out, that we can both grow up in the ways that each of needs to, that each of us can come closer and closer to “we”. As Joan Baez once said, The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one."

Will we be able to save our lives together? Will I be able to save myself at the same time? I don’t know. And maybe my story will follow the same path that many of you who have commented went down. I hope not. It might last another day. It might last another year. I cannot say.

I might not be strong enough to stay in this relationship.

I might not be strong enough to end it.

But all of your kind thoughts and kind words have given me the firm knowledge that if my marriage crumbles (or is already in ruins and I am but a crazed fiddler ignoring it burn), there is still life and love in my future.

Thanks again.