I pulled out the dictionary and looked up 'irony' this evening, but after examining the definitions, I don't think that my situation is precisely 'ironic', even though that is the word that most folks would use.

Let me back up for a minute.

My wife and I have been married for seven years, one of those couples that tied the knot in June following their college graduation. Little models of Ron and Laurie Smith stood on the top of the cake. In case you missed my subtle hint: I'm Ron and my wife is Laurie. We both work in the finance field. I'm a Financial Advisor with a national firm, and Laurie works for a regional accounting firm.

No children yet.

The crux of the problem is that my wife was seduced while on a business trip about six months ago. The son-of-a-bitch who got into her pants went to college with us; we both knew him.

The details of their coupling aren't especially important; that it happened at all was. And imagine this: the guy emailed me a confession of what happened, saying that he was feeling so guilty about what he and Laurie did. Bullshit was my personal response — I know that he had always had his eye on Laurie, he took advantage of the situation, and he wanted me to know.

The result, as one might imagine, was that by the time Laurie arrived home, I was loaded for bear. I was ready to kick her cheating ass to the curb. I just waited to hear what kind of phony-baloney story she was going to lay on me, not knowing that her one-night-stand partner had already spilled the beans.

That wasn't how it worked out.

The moment Laurie walked in the door after returning from the airport, she dropped her bags and immediately came to me weeping, her eyes puffy and raining tears, and figuratively threw herself at my feet. She confessed everything to me — throwing herself on my mercy.

She promised me that it was a one-time thing, that she had learned an awful lesson from it, and it would never happen again. She didn't try to lie to me, and she never tried to evade the responsibility for her actions.

Call me a wimp, or a pussy-whipped husband or what you will; I forgave her, and put it behind me. It was a one-time thing, and was alcohol related — too much to drink and a known predator ready to pounce. I believe her assurances that she won't ever get into that position again.

I don't suffer from visions of her having sex with him, or anything like that. I don't worry when she has to work late, or visits her mother or sister on the weekends. In short I have put it away.

Laurie went to her doctor and was checked out for STDs. The results came back clean. After that, we had some great 'repentance sex'. In fact, probably due to her guilt feelings, our sex life has been great. All I have to do is make the slightest hint that I'm in the mood, and she is jumping my bones.

She has initiated sex a lot more as well; I suspect that so long as I'm willing to have sex with her, it makes her feel that our marriage is secure.

So what is bothering me? A lot of things.

For example, over the past six months I realized that Laurie's voice can be really irritating. She starts talking fast — too fast — the pitch goes up, and it's like dragging nails across a chalk board. She has a whiny tone a lot of the time when she speaks to me. She sounds like she's complaining, even when she's not.

When Laurie comes home from work, she just about talks my ears off with some of the most boring shit you can imagine. She's feels this need to tell me all the gossip she heard that day about the people at her office — most of whom, rest assured, live boring and uneventful lives.