So it's been almost seven months since I had an entry here. A lot has happened in my life and while I continue to doubt I'll ever be as happy as I was when I last posted, I'll find a way to get up every day and hope that something good will come along sooner or later.

In the years after my daughter was born my wife and I slipped into the ultimate marriage malaise. When we both got home from work, just about the only time we spent together was dinner. After that we split our time with our daughter and when one of us finally managed to get her to sleep, we would each go to separate parts of the house to do our own thing. It's not like we were too exhausted to do anything together, we just had no interest in doing anything together. I would watch a movie, she would chant for a better future.

In April, that chanting paid off. For me. Briefly.

For months there was a girl at my office who I was completely smitten with. She and I would talk from time to time and it quickly became clear that we had a lot of common interests. She was funny, intelligent, gorgeous and had a razor sharp wit. Every time she laughed or smiled my heart would pound with such an intensity I thought it was going to crack a rib. Every day I considered inviting her to lunch or to grab a coffee, but the ring on my finger held me back. Also, I never imagined she felt the same way.

Through an all day discussion over Facebook, it started to become clear that we were on the same page. Casual conversation became innuendo, innuendo became outright flirting. By the time that day was done, we had agreed to go out for a beer after work one night that week.

As I sat at the table of a local watering hole, looking across at the girl of my dreams, I couldn't help but be filled with that white hot sense that what I was doing was so very wrong. I had a wife and daughter waiting for me at home.  I knew it was horrible, but sitting there with someone who made me feel completely reborn, that's something even my moral compass couldn't say no to.

I've always been incredibly shy and awkward around women. I've never had a first date in my life where I moved in for a kiss. Standing in the parking lot with her at the end of the night compelled me do something I'd never done before and that first kiss was so soft and perfect someone could have told me there was a God on the way home and I would have believed them.

The next day I went into work with a bounce in my step and a glow in my heart that would've made E.T. jealous. For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt happy. Not the kind of happy that you get holding your child in your arms for the first time, but that sense of such utter contentment that if the world were to end the next day, you'd die with a smile set in stone. She and I instant messaged the whole day and snuck off to any remote corner of the office building to passionately embrace once again.

That's the way things went for the next month. Daily kisses, trips to Starbucks for coffee and lunchtime walks around the park. We engaged in all day epic IM conversations at the office and continued them late at night. Exactly a month to the day that we first began flirting, I told her those 3 little words that beer commercials have us believe men are incapable of. And she said them back.

My head was dizzy. My soul was conflicted. I had no idea how to resolve my dilemma. What does a guy with a wife, a child, two car payments and a mortgage do when he realizes he's finally met the one person in the world who completes his soul and it's not the one he said "I do" to? If I had been a real man I would have sat down with my wife and explained what was going on, I would have owned up to the fact I was an adulterer and needed to make things right. Instead, I kept sneaking around with my dream girl hoping that somehow, magically, everything would work out like it did in the fairy tales I read to my daughter every night.

It wasn't long before people at the office stared to notice how close the two of us had suddenly become. It wasn't just the fact that I was married that had people intrigued, but the fact that there was a considerable age difference between us. She was 22, I was 38. It made me wonder myself if what I was doing was beyond the realm of crazy. I asked my fellow brethren on this site whether such an age gap was insane and if I was headed for the cliff. The responses were uniform: everyone replied they wouldn't have a thing in common with someone 16 years their junior and the relationship was doomed.

Talking with dream girl erased those fears. She was mature beyond her years. There wasn't a topic near and dear to my heart that she couldn't discuss with me. I talked more with her in one month about life, the universe and everything than I had with my wife in seven years of marriage. There was nothing anyone could say to convince me that I hadn't found the most perfect woman on the planet and through the grace of whatever force of nature you wish to believe in, she had come into my life so that I could spend the rest of it with her.

Like most bubbles in life, mine was ready to burst.

I was being pretty careful the way I conducted the affair. I wasn't leaving paper trails everywhere, she didn't call me at home and I wasn't working late night after late night at the office. But eventually you slip up no matter how cautious you are and after two months of sneaking around, my wife finally caught wind of what I was doing and you know what they say about a woman scorned. Vesuvius didn't leave an ash cloud this big.

Before I go further, let me say a few words about my wife. She's a great woman who put up with a lot of my bullshit over the years. Between my reckless spending and drunken antics, I was not an easy person to live with. Whenever I would ignore my duties as a father, she would pick up the slack. And when no one else would offer me words of encouragement about my potential as a hopeful screenwriter, she was there to let me know that one day I would be a smashing success. By painting her as a wonderful mother and wife, I'm not exactly doing myself any favors here, but there's just no getting around it. She's an amazing woman and I never deserved her from day one.

Unfortunately she and I spent a great deal of time apart the first several years of our relationship. She would go back home to Korea for 12 months at a time and then spent two years doing her masters a few hours drive away so for long stretches of time, we had an e-mail relationship. That continued absence made the heart grow fonder, but conversely didn't let us spend enough time together to realize it just wasn't an ideal match. We were two very different people with very little in common.

When my wife learned of my infidelity she was more than a little shocked. She was aware that we had fallen into a routine and that our marriage lacked a spark, but she had no idea that my love for her had faded in the years since my daughter was born. I dropped hints that we needed to re-energize things: dinner and movie, a vacation, anything that would get us out of the house and give us some time alone. Between not wanting to spend money that wasn't in the budget or trusting someone else to babysit our daughter, she consistently shot down my suggestions. Eventually I gave up and night after night as she shut herself in her room engaged in her self-help routine, I began to feel like a husband without a wife.

Those first couple weeks were ugly. She monitored every move I made. My nightly conversations with dream girl decreased, but we still continued to prance around like lovestruck teenagers at the office. The tighter the vice got, the more determined I was to hold onto my one true love, but with my wife and my family beating down on me, that grip started to become tenuous.

By the time August rolled around, dream girl had quit her job and was preparing to go back to school full time. Not being able to see her everyday was brutal. The interference from my wife and family had really frightened her and our relationship looked ready to implode. I wasn't sleeping at night, I was losing insane amounts of weight and I was constantly on edge. When it started to affect my work performance and risk me losing my job, I had decided I couldn't live like that anymore.

So I found an apartment and I moved out. Dream girl was back in my life.

I found an energy and enthusiasm I hadn't known since I was in high school. I was going to the gym and writing a page or two of my screenplay everyday. I was fit, I was motivated, I was on top of the world. It didn't matter that the only furniture I had was a couch and a desk for my computer, with dream girl in my life I had everything I needed. What's more, it was everything she needed as well. She didn't require anything other than my company to enjoy a movie on my computer.

I did my best not to neglect my responsibilities as a father. I spent time with my daughter one or two evenings a week and on the weekends. Everyone had convinced me that she would have abandonment issues, especially since I had left her mother for a younger woman so I was determined to prove them wrong.

Dream girl and I continued to IM during the day, she would come over for dinner and/or a movie and I was once again planning the rest of my life with her in it.

Three weeks after moving out, she came down with H1N1. She was quarantined and bedridden. That didn't stop me from bringing her lunch every day and satisfying her ice cream cravings by dropping off Ben and Jerry's at night. Her dream was to one day go to Italy so I even contacted someone in Rome to send her a postcard that said, "Wish We Were Here." I was certain that one day we would be.

On Thursday of that same week, I was at a Habitat work site as part of a charity off-site day my office was involved in. When I got back to the apartment and cleaned myself up, I had the most welcome message waiting for me on my phone: dream girl was finally ready to leave the house and she desperately wanted to come see me.

We played cards and talked, she told me some sweet, funny stories about her childhood and we were both giddy to be around each other after several days of her flu keeping us apart. As it got late and she began to get tired, I recommended she go home and get some rest. Little did I know that would be the last time I'd see her.

The next day she was swinging into almost full recovery mode and that night she wanted to see me. Unfortunately I had a previous engagement with family and foolishly didn't think the whole thing through. After having been deprived of physical human contact for the better part of a week, she was lonely and really needed my company. When I told her I was stuck with family, she asked me to call her. I even failed to do that.

I didn't hear from her all weekend and when I finally did the following week, she told me she was just too damaged from everything that had happened between us over the summer and that emotionally she just wasn't ready for a relationship. Stupid me, I didn't even try to fight. I figured the non-aggressive "you need to do what's best for yourself" approach would bring her back to me in a week or two. It didn't.

And that brings us to today. Four months later and I haven't heard from her since. I sent her a heartfelt e-mail two months ago pleading my case, but I never got a response. Somehow along the way it seems she learned to hate me and forget I exist.

Every day since has been an exercise in depression and nostalgia. There are monitors around the office that display a slideshow of that day at the Habitat site. Every so often as I pass one there will be a picture of me swinging a hammer. I look at the guy in that photo and envy his situation. He didn't know the world was about to turn on him but at that moment he was on top of it. I want to reach through the screen and shake him, tell him not to screw things up and slap some sense into his idiot head.

I'm not asking for pity. What I did was wrong. Had I made a clean break with my wife not only would things have worked out in the end, but I could have a clear conscience that I handled things like a man. I know dream girl had some emotional baggage, but so did I and in a strange twist, each seemed to cancel out the other when we were together.

I met a once in a lifetime woman, loved and lost her. Maybe one day fate will forgive me for screwing things up and send someone else my way. I just need to find a way to forgive myself first.