Just to be clear, I didn't get the "fundamentally a single guy" insight until about seven years into my third marriage. I got that I'd been trying to be the guy

Just to be clear, I didn't get the "fundamentally a single guy" insight until about seven years into my third marriage. I got that I'd been trying to be the guy that my partners wanted me to be. Or indeed, that I'd decided that I wanted to be. But I just couldn't manage it, for more than five years or so. As in the Woody Allen line that lifeisstillgood quoted: "I couldn't keep that up - I would have had a heart attack." So I shared that with my wife, and apologized. And that transformed our marriage. I stopped pretending to be someone I'm not, and resenting her for it. And I gather that she stopped expecting me to be someone I'm not.