Okay, I'm going to ask this because I can't get this "I'm a special snowflake and so's my wife" idea out of my head. Tag it victim puke if needed, but this is just eating at me.

  1. Arranged marriage. Never dated her, never wooed her, never asked her to marry me. This was a religious thing; we believed it was god's will, and had high hopes for building a perfect heaven-blessed family. Before the arrangement, we each committed to marry whoever was picked for us, and so we did. That was 22 years ago. I'm now an atheist and she at least has moved beyond the old "live by faith" days.

  2. Language and culture barrier: She's from an Asian country and hated studying English in school; she only moved to my English-speaking country because of the marriage. Even after all these years, we still don't understand a lot of what each other says.

  3. She keeps saying she's "getting old". And that old people don't have sex. She's 47. In the past year or two her cycle has become fairly unpredictable, like sometimes 14 days, sometimes 30.

On top of all this, I've spent the last 20-something years entrenching myself as a nice guy / drunk captain. That part I know is up to me to fix.

It's the three points above that keep coming back to taunt me, as if they were out of my hands and could just defeat me. Stoic voices say that victory or defeat is up to me, regardless of the challenges. But part of "victory" for me includes raising my 3 kids in a loving family. I keep asking myself, is it still reasonable to aim for that?