After getting into bed last night, I kicked myself a few more times for being so foolish as to think now is anywhere near the time to invite a gesture of intimacy such as cuddling on the couch while watching a movie. We aren’t even two weeks into this mess. It was never going to fly. What was I thinking? Actually, I know what I was thinking -- I’m trying to show her the affection she says she’s never received from me. The problem is, I approached it so clumsily while feeling my way through this unprecedented situation. Another blunder to add to the list I’ve made in handling this crisis. Let her be the one to make a move like this from now on.

I fell asleep but woke up again at around 3:30am. Unable to fall back asleep within half an hour, I got up and took a Valium. It worked again. I got back to sleep and slept until around 8:00am.

I’m up for a while before Helen and my son emerge from upstairs. Helen apologises for rebuffing me last night, and I do likewise for making such a foolish, premature move. We get on pretty well the rest of the morning.

I make a food store run. While I’m there, I feel a new surge of defiance come over me. I start to feel a bit more assertive about myself. The grocery store is my home turf, because I do all the shopping. I also do all the housework and run all the household errands. I take care of the kids. I get them ready for school in the morning. I do their homework with them. I run them to all their various extracurricular events, such as karate, swimming, soccer (I coached my son's team for three years until he lost interest), and tennis lessons. Most nights I bathe them and put them to bed. And I have dinner on the table every night, though Helen is often too late home to join us.

I’ve always been there for my kids. Helen begged me to have them, but she’s been minimally involved in raising them from the moment they were born. Sure, she earns the money, which is of course vital, but beyond that she’s rarely made time to be with the kids when it was available. Instead, she’s taken on additional work commitments, because that’s what she enjoys – she’s the archetypal workaholic. She’d be doing exactly what she’s always done even if the need for income didn’t exist. And as I’ve constantly pointed out to her with no success, she could easily reduce the income burden by controlling her excessive spending habits – it’s a vicious cycle of her own making.

I’ve got my share of faults, but I’m not a bad guy. I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t gamble away the family money. I don't run around with every floozy in town. I don’t beat my wife or kids. I don’t spend us into penury (I wouldn’t dare infringe on Helen’s copyright there). On the contrary, Helen has often quipped that I don’t spend enough money. I like to think I’m honest, loyal, moral, witty, and have integrity. My friends say I have those qualities.

I could of course have done more to contribute financially, and I will do in future, but my contribution hasn’t been as negligible as Helen thinks. Add the wages I brought home for twelve of the fifteen years of our marriage I worked before staying home with the kids to the substantial monetary contributions my family has made to us and you get the functional equivalent of a yearly contribution on my part of around $42,000. Not an immense amount, but hardly peanuts either. Factor in the vast savings on interest payments by my family’s paying off Helen’s $200,000 medical school loan debt and the value of the contribution from my side of the ledger rises exponentially. When I pointed this out to her, Helen expressed her opinion that she was somehow owed this extraordinarily generous gift.

“I always expected that you'd be earning enough money to pay off that debt,” she said, “so if you couldn’t do it, it’s only fair that your family did it instead.” That’s fine if one accepts her dubious premise, revealing as it does her overdeveloped sense of entitlement, but it requires acknowledging the contribution, which she doesn’t, preferring both to take it as her due while ignoring it. She can’t have it both ways. It also betrays the lack of value she attaches to the role I have played raising the children largely in her absence and maintaining the household, of course.

I gave up family, friends, and whatever contacts and job opportunities I had in England, where my educational background also would have served me considerably better, to move here to build a life with Helen. I'll bet she's forgotten that, for the first few years when she was still completing medical school, I was the sole breadwinner. I even worked two jobs for the best part of a year to support us. I would work my regular nine-to-five office job, then go straight to the video store across the street and work until closing time at 11:00pm. I was also playing in a band at the time, so rehearsals and gigs added to an exhausting schedule.

Also during this time, Helen spent several months doing her surgical rotation as part of her medical studies. This meant rising at around 4:00am. As she had no parking privileges and I could not allow her to walk to the medical center on her own while it was still dark, I got up with her and drove her there every morning, returning home to get a few hours more sleep if I could before getting up again to begin my regular work day as previously described.

Helen also chose to extend her medical training the year following our marriage by taking optional sabbaticals abroad, each of two months’ duration. I agreed to this even though the separation was difficult because I knew she really wanted these experiences. My recollection is that this delayed the completion of her training and therefore the point at which she would begin her medical career and start contributing financially. Don't I get any credit for this? Evidently not.

I don’t deserve this. There have been problems in the marriage, sure, some of them longstanding issues of mine I never addressed, admittedly. But it hasn’t been a bad marriage – no one who knows us would say it was. The good times have far outweighed the bad, even Helen would have to admit that. And it hasn’t all been one-sided – she has her own faults that at times drove me to distraction: The reckless spending and constant debt, necessitating my father baling us out on more than one occasion. The ever increasing materialism and need for instant gratification. The lack of consultation with me on the purchase of big ticket items. The long hours away and lack of time with the kids.

I almost asked her for a divorce the year after our son was born when she trained in a subspecialty that was so time consuming she may as well have been gone the whole year, leaving me alone many nights and weekends with an infant, which often left me at my wits’ end. I had been reluctant to start a family on the grounds that her long work hours meant she wouldn’t have time to devote to a child, but she promised me that she’d make the time. That promise turned out to be worthless and I was left literally holding the baby. It was the worst year of our marriage until now. I was miserable, went through my own mid-life crisis, and briefly succumbed to temptation when I had my fling. I quickly realised that this was inexcusable and that I couldn’t be one of those guys who habitually cheat on their wives, so I rededicated myself to my marriage and to my son.

My lone infidelity therefore was an aberration while Helen’s first fling seems to have been a blueprint for her future behaviour. Because of my own experience, I know exactly what Helen’s going through and the extent of the mistake she’s on the verge of making. While I handled my mid-life crisis responsibly, never totally lost my grip on reality, and faced down temptation in the form of longing for a relationship that could never be with someone with whom I’d had the briefest of dalliances, she seems to be approaching hers like Godzilla stomping his way through Tokyo leaving nothing but a trail of wreckage in his wake.

Oh, and here’s the kicker: To top it all off, the subspecialty Helen trained in which put such a strain on us proved irrelevant to her career – she stopped performing the procedure within a few years.

So no one gets everything they want in a marriage. You have to be willing to compromise. Sure, I’ve had my moments I’m not proud of. I’ve lost my temper sometimes and said things I didn’t mean. Like I said, I have issues. But the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Twice now in our marriage that I know of Helen has reacted to problems between us by having sex with other men. Is that fair or appropriate? She has issues of her own – big ones.

In doing so, especially this time with the much more serious component of her feelings for this other man and her request for a divorce, Helen has reacted to the relationship equivalent of a street riot by going nuclear. If she’d told me she was thinking about divorce, that would’ve got my attention just as well and we could’ve attempted to fix the problems. Instead, she started the affair, which threatens to destroy everything. She doesn’t seem to appreciate the severity of her transgression – and therefore my willingness to twice forgive something most people would have a very hard time getting past. This gets back to her licentious attitude about sex and her relentless self-centeredness. She doesn’t take full responsibility for her actions. She thinks my bad behaviour justifies her worse behaviour. It is mind-boggling.

While I will work on and intend to finally fix a lot of what’s wrong with me, there are some things I either won’t or can’t compromise on. I will never be as materialistic as Helen. I see no reason to change that, because her crass acquisitiveness is nothing to aspire to in my book, though I can stop being such a nag on the subject. And while I will keep looking for a job and begin contributing financially again, with the best will in the world there’s very little chance I’ll ever be as successful as Helen. I’ll certainly never be as remorselessly driven as her. I don't see how such an arrangement would serve the interests of our children, who wouldn't get to spend any time with either of their parents and who would be sentenced to being raised by a revolving series of hired hands.

Helen has to be willing to compromise a little, and I have to hope the changes in my other problem areas will allow her to do so. She has to decide if she can live with a little less than her ideal in the interests of preserving the greater good of the whole or take a total flyer on someone she barely knows, or, if not him, then the complete unknown. I know she fears being alone, yet that is precisely what she’s risking based on her brief fling, since she can’t possibly know Pascal’s true intentions or how their fledgling relationship will turn out. She knows by how hard I’m fighting to save our marriage that I’ll never leave her, and I’m ready to make the changes to improve our relationship.

Helen goes out to get her hair done and get a manicure today while I take the kids to the pool. She is gone a long time. The kids keep asking after her. When she finally arrives home, she announces that she has just bought a $300 bike for herself, which explains why she was gone longer than expected. She wants to start riding a bike again. Another questionable expenditure, but these days with therapists’ and lawyers’ fees rapidly mounting, and in view of the critical situation, my former frugality seems a long way off. I say nothing.

This evening, we leave our son at a birthday party and take our daughter for a bite to eat at an Asian noodle house. In the car on the way, Helen chimes in with a thought that struck her today.

“Maybe my standards are too high,” she says. “I expect perfection in everything, and perhaps it's unfair to apply this to our relationship.” Despite the fact that this seemingly redounds to my favour, I tell her that, in fairness to her, she has a right to expect better of me in the areas we’ve identified in which I need to change.

“The only danger of high standards,” I reply, “is if they become unrealistic and make you lose perspective.” I’m certain that’s exactly what’s happened to her, though I leave that part unsaid in the hope that she'll realise it herself before it's too late.

We enjoy the meal. My appetite has finally returned and I eat the full portion. The anxious grip on my stomach has loosened, though not totally disappeared, and it can reappear at a moment’s notice.

Excerpted from Diary Of A Divorce, by Richard Pearce, available for £8.99 from www.amazon.co.uk or for $14.75 from www.lulu.com