I cheated on my wife, please help me save my marriage!

UPDATED (Dec.7) I cheated on my wife, please help me save my marriage!

This is going to be an extremely long read, so I am very sorry in advance! I will divide the post into 2 parts, 1 being the history, 2 being the indiscretions.

I am 41, and have been married to my wife for 14 years; we were high school sweethearts. We have 3 kids together ages 8,6, and 4. I know I am completely in the wrong and I am so sorry about what I have done to my wife and my kids.

I will begin by saying that for pretty much 13 of the 14 years I have been the best husband I believe I could be. I had a very successful career, I attained wealth and a terrific job, really early on and was very comfortable by my early 30s. My wife and I travelled frequently around the world, never wanted for anything material. Even having 3 kids, our children and us, never had need for anything. We were sometimes financially stressed though. On the surface, we have/had the picture perfect life; top careers, beautiful home, beautiful children, exciting life.

Underneath the perfect picture, my sex life with my wife was/is far from ideal. I would describe myself as very passionate, emotional, sexual person. Yes I have a very strong sex drive and I know that is part of the problem. However, by contrast, my wife is very logical, non-emotional, sometimes cold-like. I have unfairly described her from time to time as an "ice-queen". We are both fairly attractive people. I have kept in shape as I aged and I look a lot younger than I am. I have always been attracted to her, physically and else-wise, and she to me as well. (by her words). However, she has never had much of a sex drive at all. She has always been career driven, and twice in our marriage, during a time of significant conflict with us regarding her work and my feelings/opinions, she chose work first, over me. This has always been a sticking point for me, one that I haven't really forgiven her for; another problem.

So as I said our sex life is sometimes okay to mostly a problem. I want to have sex a whole lot more than she ever does, and she will not initiate sex ever. I feel pathetic that I have to initiate it 99% of the time; as often times it's like begging for it. I feel dehumanized by doing it, yet I want it and all the while know I'm a slave to my sex drive, which makes it worse. I think in all our 14 years, she may have initiated sex less than 5 times! She has said she is attracted to me and that I do turn her on, and when we do have sex, she is completely satisfied. She has sometimes said that she loves sex when we have it, but she does not necessarily need to have it...at all sometimes! contrast this to the fact that I would have sex once or twice daily if I could. We have gone weeks not having sex from even the start of our marriage in our 20s, and I found that totally unacceptable (think of a young, successful, good looking 20 something going without sex that long!). Even more humiliating, is the countless times I will admit that sex for us amounted to me dry humping her leg while we lay in bed like a F&&*#ing dog, or even worse, having sex with her in bed, lying down from behind, and she falls asleep! I am going to come out and say countless times I've basically had sex with my wife, sleeping. (she started out awake). Yes it's completely pathetic, and I feel like total **** for it. It's a total beating on my masculinity and my ego, of which I know I could get what I needed from another woman, if I wanted to.

As I said as humiliating as this sounds, more often than not I have had to resort to leaving the bedroom because she didn't want sex, to go to the TV or computer and watch porn with masturbation as my only escape. This only worsened my problems as of course I became addicted to fantasizing about different women and what it would be like..etc.

Now I mentioned that my wife chose her career over me twice in our relationship. Once when she basically left me for what I'm guessing was a few months to study for her designation, mind you this studying included being with all her classmates 24/7, out to very late hours of the night, at bars to blow off steam, etc. I basically had no girlfriend for months. I was essentially alone and felt it. I told her how I felt; which was I thought she could spend more time with me as well during this important period of her life, rather than always and only with her classmates, as much of the evenings /nights were out, not necessarily studying. She didnt' agree, and to this day, says she would do the same again and that really hurts me.

The second time she chose career over me was 2 years ago. She decided that she wanted to do her EMBA at a very prestigious school. I implicitly told her that I could not handle 3 young children mostly on my own, and asked her if she could put this off to some later time, when the kids were a bit older and more manageable (they were like 5,3 and 1-2 at the time) Mind you the degree required her to be away from home and at the school which was in another city, every other or third weekend. Add to this that every other weekend she had class and meetings all weekend and throughout the week after work. So I hardly saw her. She works long hours at a very successful job, and would come home late, and eat dinner or not, and go straight to studying in her home office and if it wasnt' that she'd have to go out to meetings with her local work groups (other students in the area doing the same program). This lasted for nearly 2 years, all the while I was daddy daycare with 3 young children. I grinned and bared it for 2 years, and honestly I hated it and it hurt me very much that she would just do what she wanted regardless of how I felt and esp. that she said she would do it again, given the situation.

CONT'D next post of mine...