Our heroine, up until now...

Christmas Day, 2008, was quite possibly the worst day in my life. I knew that my marriage wasn't in the best straits -- my husband and I hadn't had sex for three years, I was quickly approaching that mythical sexual peak, and I was ready to cut bait.

After opening gifts, my husband asked what I had really wanted, since I seemed so disappointed with his gifts to me.

"All I want is to get laid," I grumbled.

"Wifelet," (which is what he calls me) "If you haven't figured it out yet on your own, I need to let you know that I'm gay. We're never going to have sex again. At least, not with each other."

To be very honest, it wasn't the world's biggest shock. My husband is a manly kind of dude, but nothing I was doing in an attempt to fix our lack of romance was working. I'd lost a hundred pounds, offered blow jobs in lingerie or au naturale, and had suffered nothing but rejection for a long enough time.

I think he hoped I'd figure it out, he'd go on doing whatever it is that he does with whoever it is he does it with, and I'd stay home every night with our kids and explode in a shower of snark every few weeks, masturbating every time I was alone. Kind of like I'd been doing for the last three years. I wasn't willing to deal with this state of, well, affairs.

There are both financial and logistical reasons to stay married. We're a lot closer to the poverty line than we'd like to be. While I could probably maintain our home on my own income, maybe, there's no way he could live anywhere safe enough for our children to spend time with him on his income. Our kids deserve him around every day. I still like him, and he's still my best friend. I'm far more financially responsible than he is and we live together quite amicably.

A marriage without intimacy isn't what I signed up for more than a decade ago, and so we needed to develop new rules. Here they are:

1. Don't be an idiot. This means that our love lives don't cross into our family life, we don't ever have unsafe sex, and we keep the other informed about when we'll be home and where we are if we're out.

2. We need to be roughly equitable in who gets to go out and who stays home with the kids.

3. Neither of us is particularly interested in the details of what we're doing with our respective paramours, so we've got a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" kind of arrangement.

Since we came to our understanding, I've had a couple of lovers, and kissed a number of frogs. I find myself ready to seek my next lover, and thought that I should write about the adventures I've had and chronicle my ongoing search.