The Hubby, the kids, the marriage.

So before I get more into my stories of lovers past and present, and the crazy shit that has gone on over the last year I figured I should give a little insight into my life with the hubby!  I had a comment from someone regarding my first post on Cheating.  The comment was about why we stay married.  I'm not sure if my reasons are the same as others.  It has had me thinking for a few days.  There are days when I love the hubby very much and days when I hate ever fiber of his being.  Days when I wouldn't want to change my situation for anything and days I wish I could just get in my car and drive far, far away!  My #1 reason for staying is my kids.  I come from a divorced family and I turned out okay ( I say that carefully as divorce has definitely screwed me up in some ways).  I never understood why people stayed married for their kids.  I thought that was stupid but now I totally understand.  My oldest son will say things like "you and daddy will be married forever, right".  Ugh, that kills me!  He is very sensitive and I truly feel like it would devastate him.  My sister was his age when our parents divorced and it had a much more severe impact in her life than in mine.  I think eventually they would learn to live with it and they would likely be okay but I just am in no way ready to make them have to go through it.  I also am just plain not ready to give up... YET!  I still have fight left in me!
As I mentioned before there is a significant age difference in us.  For the most part it never really made much of a difference but recently he has started acting like an old man.  He is a very good dad, a hard working man for this family, he just doesn't really do so well with ME!  He never wants to do anything with me... he never wants to take me out... when I say this I mean if I make plans he will humbly go along but he never initiates doing things with me.  He doesn't want to hang out with other couples, be social, etc.  I am a social butterfly.  Wait, let me say this... if we were meeting couples that we were potentially going to swing with he would be there in a heart beat but just to hang out and have fun I have to almost beg and drag him out sometimes.  For Christmas a few years ago, he gave me a card and inside it was a coupon (handmade) for couples dance lessons.  He knew I had always wanted to do couples dancing so the card read "I want to Tango with your booty".. cute, eh.. well everyone was like "oh your so lucky", blah, blah.  Two years later of course it never happened.  Why did it never happen, I will tell you.  Because I did do some research on dance classes and presented him with the information but since I didn't book it and remind him, and drag his ass to the class it never happened.  Well sorry but in my book if you give me a gift than I give you the responsibility to make the gift good!  If I didn't have to be in control of every friggin aspect of our lives than maybe it would have been different and I would have taken the lead on it but I drew the line with that one.  So no dance lessons and that is just one story.  It's like that with everything.. the kids, the bills, the house, the business, and of course the sex.  He is typically pretty content to stay home day after day, watch tv, play outside with the kids, or play video games with them, call it family time and be very happy with life and himself.  If we do anything together outside of this house it is because I plan it and bring it to fruition.
Some of this is definitely my fault as early on in our marriage I took the lead and was so happy to do so.  I made things very easy on him.  He in turn became complacent and happy and didn't feel the need for change.  He is also a total perv for the most part so when I offered him a threesome he was delighted and hooked.  For me it was after my first affair and I was opening up to new things and wanted to explore with him.  It was great, we had a blast.  We fell madly in love with this new part of our love life and each other.  For me it was just a thing but for him it was the potential for a new lifestyle.  So of course we joined a site, we would talk with couples, have sex on cam and we had a friend of mine that would come over and play sometimes.  After I got prego just try it.  So we joined another site AFF.  This time it was different.  I just really wasn't into it.  I felt like most of the couples on there that had success in swinging seemed to have really secure marriages and I felt that we didn't.  I mean hello, I was cheating, he was staying up til all hours of the night camming with people all by himself (yes, he wasn't smart enough then to know to erase his history, etc).  So then I discovered Ashley Madison, met "The Traveler", had the most intense and wonderful affair for close to a year, started blogging, life was good, then the shit hit the fan, lost Traveler, had to tell my husband everything (well almost everything), decided to try and rid my life of everything that pertained to my deep, dark world of cheating (ridiculous), fell into a depression and have been struggling to climb out ever sense.  This has been one of the most challenging years of my life but the last 3 months I have started to see some light again, at least from my personal perspective.  The marriage is still very rocky but again I'm not ready to give up.
Some people may think what do I mean I'm not ready to give up, I'm the one that cheated... he didn't leave me.  No he didn't.  He, on most days, tries to understand that there is a difference between sex and love.  Although I did not share that I did begin to have some feelings for Traveler (TMI).  He made his decision to stay with me, although whenever we fight he seems to find reason to remind me about it.  Bottom line is that we have a beautiful family that is worth something to both of us.  We have some sort of mutual respect for one another and I truly believe that there is love somewhere it's just a little lost!  We need counseling in the worst way as we have a very difficult time have any form of serious communication.  It will happen we just don't know when.  Hopefully before it is to late.  So the other problem is that I really enjoy having other men or another man in my life.  I like how they make me feel. I like blogging about stuff... sex mostly, but in general.  I enjoy the other side to my life and I don't think it's dark, or bad... I think it's just me and I'm starting to really like me again.  I have thought about discussing an open marriage with him but I doubt very highly that he would even consider it and I'm not sure that is the answer so for now this is how it is.  I'm back to having a bit of a double life, he seems content as long as I seem happy???? Weird I know!
More to come......