I HAVE a marriage that is 20 years old, and a daughter, 12. I love my daughter, and do not want to leave her. I do not love my wife, and want to leave her.

My wife and I have been on the skids for 10 years or more. There is no tenderness, friendship or love. We seldom fight, but we rarely make love. We have nothing in common. We take separate vacations. Some days I feel like a stranger in my own house. We’ve had a hard time financially the past two years, and it has put undue pressure on our marriage. She feels it is my fault I do not have the same income I used to, but my construction company has been hit hard by the recession.

There has been no moral support from her during this rough spot in my career, though she has helped out financially by going back to work. I have been resigned to this shell of a marriage for the sake of my daughter. We are pretty good parents, in spite of the problems.

This viewpoint recently changed for me, though. I reconnected with the woman I was with before I met my wife. Blame Facebook.

We got together to talk a few times, and we’re both surprised to find we still have strong feelings for each other. We have a communication I never had with my wife.

Nothing untoward has happened between us (yet), but I know it’s only a matter of time. I find that after 25 years, I still love this person. Even if nothing else happens, this has made me realise there can still be love in my life, and now I want to be free to pursue happiness.

I feel guilty and selfish for thinking of myself before my daughter. But I also feel that at my age, I should be thinking about my remaining years. I don’t want to age as a grumpy old man.

Bart
Your marriage is like the back-lot set of a Hollywood studio: It’s all façade. You and your wife take separate vacations, not from the work-a-day world, but from each other. Your daughter isn’t seeing a loving couple. You and your wife aren’t modelling that behaviour for her.

Don’t blame Facebook. Facebook doesn’t break up happy marriages. You had a hole that needed to be filled, and people can only live in starvation mode so long. We all need to hope that life is more than just a grind and falseness until we die.

But there are a couple of problems. When a builder institutes safety rules only after someone falls off a roof, it calls his sincerity and judgment into question. If you leave your marriage after another woman comes into view, your wife and daughter may always believe it was because of the other woman.

Then there’s the question of your own judgment. The longer a person stays in a miserable marriage, the less it takes to draw them out of it. That’s why so many second marriages fail. The second marriage was only better, or different, from the solitary confinement of the first. But it wasn’t love.

When times got tough, love would have drawn you and your wife together. But it pushed you apart. She’s still angry about the lack of money. That’s why a marriage has to be based on love, because hard times and bad times destroy a couple otherwise.

This is our advice: If you leave your marriage, do it on the basis of your marriage, not on the basis of someone else. Do it because the hammer is too heavy, and you have to lay it down. Do it because you cannot keep propping up the back-lot set forever. Do it because the example you are setting for your daughter isn’t right.

But don’t ruin a new relationship by cheating on the old.