Thanks, Elle. I don't feel guilty either. I've learned to love myself and realize that I actually do deserve someone who treasures and cares about me. I've sacrificed my needs for my profession and my marriage (and my hb's career) for several decades now and have decided that yes, I do deserve to have some fun, some incredible hot sex and a best friend that I also love. I supposed if this all blows up, people will be disappointed with me. Really the only ones I care about are my kids and I would hope that I could somehow not crawl in a deep hole of guilt and despair, but continue living, laughing and loving. And just hope that someday I get that phone call from them that says "I get it now". I had to face all of this when my non love affair with a single person blew up on me a long time ago and hb found out. Of course he is not clean, either, which means he will not make a big public ordeal out of things if my current affair is found out. I do remember with that blow up that he asked me if I loved the guy and of course the answer was no, it was just an occasional booty call kind of thing. Now if he asks me if I love the guy I've been with for a while, I will have to say yes and that will be a very difficult thing to have to say to my hb, even if we're rocky.
I've had a few close calls with my health lately and I've been thinking about my mortality. I've thought about where I wanted to be at this point in my life -- the things I've wanted to do and the things I have put off doing, and why (some are for good reasons, like the kids). You have one life, and no one is responsible for your happiness except for you! There was a commercial on tv last year that showed a ticket and it said something like "This is the ticket to your life, how will you use it?" Every time I saw it I started crying. Call it a "bucket list" or whatever but there are things I want to do before I take the eternal dirt nap. I am planning in my head for some changes that will get me closer to the life I want. Call it a mid life crisis or whatever, but something needs to change. The status quo isn't working for me anymore.
I really try not to judge people on the board. If they do something that I think was a mistake (sorry, Fallen), I may say that - it would be based on my own experience watching people's lives self destruct around me, and just my opinion. We can't possibly know what another person is going through unless we've walked a mile in their shoes. As sanctimonious as I might sound to someone, others sound that way to me when they say they "can't imagine having sex with someone they don't love", etc. Those comments make some of us uncomfortable because we're doing that w/ our spouses to try and keep the peace at home. If I stop having sex with my hb, he will immediately suspect an affair and my life will blow up. So it's worth it to me to be an academy award winning actress once or twice a month to prevent that from happening -- mostly to protect my guy, I don't want this to ruin his life and he is in a position to lose much, much more than me. Again, we all have our own unique situations out here.