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An Absence

"An absence." I almost wrote "the absence", then realized how pretentious that would sound. This is not about Napoleon and Josephine, or FDR and Eleanor, or JFK and his two hundred and some odd true loves, it is about two ordinary people living ordinary lives and about the end their marriage and lives together.

We had been married a little over ten years and were in our early thirties. We were neither of us remarkable for breast size or male endowment, but had found each other attractive and had had a pleasant and uneventful marriage up until recently. The seven year itch had skipped over us and we had a satisfying and mildly adventurous sex life for most of our marriage.

We both worked, with me earning more than my wife earned, and had postponed having our first child until we felt that we had our financial feet on he ground. I had inherited our modest house from my grandmother, and so we were in the privileged position of having no house payments. The house was in my name as I had inherited it before we were married. We had two automobiles, both registered in my name, not for any particular reason other than that I had made the purchases and paid for them. Up to now, it had not occurred to me to think of them as mine instead of ours.

Our home life had been warm and friendly, with discussion of our work lives and interests and in shared interest in a few TV programs. We went out for dinner once in a while, and to movies, and occasionally took short vacations together, and generally enjoyed each other's company.

Then, for a few months, I began to notice an absence of the close relations that we had generally shared. Casual and pleasant conversation tapered off to nothing, and our sex life did as well. She never refused me, but seemed uninterested and uninvolved and I asked less frequently as it did not seem that attractive a prospect with a largely disinterested wife.

An absence. She seemed distracted and seemed to be elsewhere in her mind.

It was after several months of this absence of normal relations that she said, for the first time, that she was going to go out this evening for a "girls' night out". I said, "whoa, this is a first. How did this come up?" I had until the last few months enjoyed our evenings together and did not like the prospect of an evening alone.

She said, well, she needed some time with her friends instead of always spending evenings at home with me and that that was what she intended to do tonight.

I said that for some months now she had seemed to me to be absent from our marriage and it seemed to me to be a bad thing for her to now decide to have evenings away from me with people that I did not know. I saw no good reason to equivocate, and so went on to say that from my reading and talk with other men, girls' nights out usually meant that a wife was seeking romantic and perhaps sexual relations with one or more other persons outside the marriage, or that indeed a wife had already formed a relationship outside her marriage and was going out on her own to be with her new boyfriend. I added that neither of these possibilities was even faintly acceptable to me, and asked her to cancel this girls' night out and have instead a discussion of where our marriage was and where it was going, and whether she had found someone else and was that what this was about.

She was irritated, and said that she did not feel like talking about our marriage and that she had a right to go out on her own if she wished to do so, and that indeed is what she intended to do.

I decided that there was nothing to be gained by shouting and took a moment to compose my statement to her.

Then I said, all right, if that is your decision, here is mine. If you go out tonight I will assume that this is the beginning or continuation of infidelity on your part, and that this marriage is over. I said that I would initiate the process of divorce first thing in the morning, and that she was not to return to this house, tonight, or ever.

I went on to say that I would immediately change the keys on all locks and reprogram the garage door opener, and would engage two security guards starting this evening to insure that if she and any companion tried to approach the house that they would be forcibly removed from the property.

I then took her purse from her, and removed her key ring and her telephone, which was in my name and paid for by me, saying that I was not going to provide her with a telephone to call her boyfriend(s), and that she would need to get her own. I added that she would need to take an overnight bag with whatever she might need for a few days, and that I would tomorrow engage a professional moving and storage company to come and remove her possessions from the property and put them into storage for her to retrieve at her expense. Any thing that did not get removed tomorrow I would gladly box or bag up and send to her, so that she would not lose anything that she valued, as long as she initiated this process within a month from tonight. More than a month, anything left would go to a charity. I suspect that a judge will give me a hard time about this at some later date.

Continuing in her purse I removed all credit cards that were in both our names, along with the checks on an account in both our names, and resolved to cancel all such credit cards by telephone this same evening and to go modify the joint checking account in the morning, leaving half the balance for her and removing my name from the account. I mentioned that I was keeping the car keys as well as the house keys, as both cars were in my name and not hers. Who got which car and so on would eventually decide by the judge during the divorce proceedings, but for now I was keeping them rather than make it more convenient for her to fuck around outside the marriage. I suspect that a judge will give me a hard time about this too, but so be it.

She said that she was stranded without a car, so I volunteered to call her girlfriend and ask her for a ride. I called the first number on her phone, and a woman with whom she worked answered. I said that I was Maria's husband and that I understood that she was going on a girl's night out, but that she didn't have a car. The woman answered that she did not know anything about such a night out, so I asked her if she knew who I should call, and she became a bit defensive and said that she nothing about it at all.

I called the second number on her telephone and a man answered. I said who I was, and asked if he was going on the night out, presumably with friends from work, and he said that he was, and that they felt it would be good for the co-workers to relax together. I agreed, and asked if he could pick up Maria as she did not have a car tonight. He agreed, and I gave him the address.

I then turned to address Maria directly, and listed three options from which she could choose.

The first option was as described above: out the door, out of the marriage, and out of the house. Conditions as stated above. I would file for a divorce tomorrow in recognition of the fact that she had, by her actions, in reality already chosen to terminate the marriage.

The second option was to tell me what was going on, cancel this night out, send her 'date' away and sit down with me to discuss the matter. I would still initiate the divorce first thing tomorrow, on the assumption that she had already nullified the marriage, but let her stay in the house for a week or ten days using the spare bedroom before requiring her to leave.

The third option was to cancel this night out, but refuse to discuss anything, with the same result as option one but not being forced to leave the house until tomorrow morning, although leaving tonight would be better as far as I was concerned..

Divorce proceedings would be the same in all three options.

She said all the stock things, that it was not what it seemed, that I did not understand and so on, that she "needed space," and could we not work this out without such drastic consequences for her.

I replied, no, that I could not ever trust her again, and that for me, she was permanently gone no matter which option she chose. I also mentioned that she had in effect left me some months earlier and that I was simply belatedly recognizing a state of affairs that she had chosen on her own to put into effect.

I waited out front with a camera with a flash attachment for her date to arrive. He did, and I photographed him as he got out of the car, and photographed his license plate and the car several times, and went to get Maria and tell her that her date was here. This was her decision point as to the three options. She chose option one, and came out with a small suitcase.

I said nothing to her, but mentioned to her date that he and I would have further business, but that I was in no hurry, it would occur at some appropriate time, and that indeed it would occur and that he should not look forward to it.

They left, and I immediately got on with the business of card cancelling, engaging security guards, engaging a locksmith at sky-high night rates, and finding out her boyfriend's name and address from a reverse directory service on the internet. Tomorrow I would arrange for the moving and storage of her possessions, the checking account and other details as to insurance and so on, and look into causing him some discomfort if he was married or in a relationship. Developing a plan for causing him some real pain could wait until later.

Once the locksmith had finished his work and left, I went to bed and slept well. A precariously teetering situation that had existed for some months was now made stable.

Was there still "an absence" when I awakened the next morning? Yes, but it was a better sort of absence. And so it goes. She had initiated new terms of our marriage and I had told her that these new terms were unacceptable to me, and as neither of us was ready to retreat from the position that each of us had taken, the marriage was no longer tenable.

As to whether she had already began sex outside the marriage before that confrontation, it is irrelevant.

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