Internal suffering

I am not spiritually the same as I was a year ago. I am 43 years old, and I love my wife deeply, but not how I used to. I cant say I love her more than anything anymore because my understanding of love isn’t what it was. I love being with her and love our good times. Our sexual quality hasn’t changed and our activity has not slowed much. And even during sex I feel more of a spiritual connection than ever. But my spirit feels like its growing. It is a selfish feeling that is eating away at me because it can not be satisfied. My heart belongs to her alone, but my mind and my spirit want more. I desire three other women. Specific women in my life I have gotten close to. I cant help myself when I talk to them. I speak in poetics with them. I expose the monster in my spirit to them, while my wife only knows the man wearing the mask. We’ve been together 14 years, married half that time. I don’t want to sleep around. I don’t look for one night stands or sex parties. I don’t have fetishes she doesn’t fulfill. Its spiritual connections I keep searching for and I get responses from all of them. They all know about my wife but they all know about the monster behind the man. I haven’t touched any of these women physically. But emotionally we have shared perhaps too much. Making matters worse, I don’t know how to stop this. Am I supposed to just never speak to women again. This happens organically with them, I never expect them to be drawn to me. I was much heavier before, and Ive worked tirelessly to change my physique and health. They see that and I make them laugh and that’s it. Instant attraction. Then we socialize in the settings we met in. I say charming things, and I come home. When I come home I am a loving husband. My wife is none the wiser, and I don’t even feel guilty. The lack of guilt makes me feel guilty. People would simply say I am a terrible person. They will say I am heartless, or a sociopath. That last part may be correct. I may have a disorder. But no one will ever know how much I really hate myself for my desires. I crave the attention from these women, not to replace attention from my wife, but rather just to have more of it. It is an addiction. The ego that went starved in my less attractive years, being fed today, it feels better than any drug I could buy. I have tried and been so faithful for so long. But it doesn’t feel as rewarding as that look when you know someone wants to share their spirit with you. They will say I don’t know anything about love. They will say if I really love someone I could never get that close to anyone else. They are ignorant. They believe in fairy tales. It has taken some time for me to realize this is an addiction. Love does not beat any addiction ever. Just ask the family members of any addict. I am addicted to affection, to being loved. I yearn to be desired for my spirit. To feel my spirit is powerful. I need to know I can create a loving look in a woman’s eyes. I want to share the feeling I have for women, with these women. To recreate this feeling in them, for me. I cant shake the feeling I no longer belong in this society. That I should be on some sort of commune. My emotions go to extremes now. I have less patience for peoples nonsense. I feel extreme happiness at times. Other times fear. Other times deep self loathing. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this. People will simplify it because they want everything to be black and white, good and bad. They want me to be either a good husband or a bad one. They don’t want to think of me as deep. They want to think of me as some guy who wants to sleep around on his wife. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t want leave her, and if she left me, I wouldn’t simply move on to one of the other women who I could go to. I would really want to start my entire life over. Do I go to counseling? How does one tell the person they’ve loved for so long, who has no suspicions of my activity, that he feels a spiritual needs for more contact with more people? How do I tell her how I am not satisfied by our constrictions, that she just isn’t enough, because nothing will ever be enough for me. Selfishness isn’t an easy thing to deal with internally. Selfishness is in fact what comes natural to most, but I cant say for sure that this selfishness, means I deserve to feel this tortured underneath. Because the internal struggle I deal with, is true suffering. I suffer in silence. No one knows how much pain I am really in. Not even anyone reading this.

(Ignore that exploitative excuse to advertise, it'll be removed anon.) You're over-complicating this. You present it as a spiritual need yet contradict that in the very next breath by putting it down to an under-fed ego. It's simply a result of the fact that you lacked confidence when heavier set thus neither did enough experimenting around, romantically, nor built enough really close friendships. 'Contained' is a running theme, I note. And you say yourself that you've worked tirelessly to change your physique and health. Well, when people do a run of very hard work, it's natural to want fruits for that labour... which leads me on to... I also note you say 'more contact with more PEOPLE', right after having admitted how you're paying attention exclusively to women. So do you still lack the confidence and know-how to form real friendships with men, and find women easier to get instantly quite close to as a way to get around what now feels like a lack of time and a sense of urgency?