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This is such a sensitive topic I hesitate to even write on it. How long should one stay in a bad marriage?

For those of you who have written to this topic and have solid marriages, I salute you. Unfortunately, mine is not one of them. An unhappy marriage is agonizing. You become enemies under one roof. Every day. Sometimes it seems like God is punishing me. But deep down I know He doesn't work like that.

My wife is something else. This is things I've done coming back to haunt me, I suppose. But the question remains, When do you call it quits? Do you give it another try? Anyone who has ever married to keep a child from being born out of wedlock can identify with my situation. This isn't Wuthering Heights. And I definitely ain't Heathcliff. More Garfield.

But the problems are real. Negativity, solitude, depression, misery-which of these things don't you feel when you married out of impulse and not love? What do you do when the person you married is "in love" with you and you simply "love" them?

The question to stay or call it quits begins with which wife am I looking at on any given day. Which one I'm seeing in my mind's eye. Do I see the nurse who's taken care of me all these years in all my illnesses, and treated me better than I deserved? The one through whom the most perfect two children emerged? Or do I see the person who has cheated on me more than once, and has the nerve to answer the question I posed just last night regarding why she committed the most recent one with "Well, it seemed like a good idea'? That, folks, is the kind of mind I have to live with.

In one of the Gospels, it says if your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be dark, and how great is that darkness! It calls the eye the "lamp of the body". In my case, right now my body must be full of darkness, because I can't see the light of day in this person I am chained to. My eye is not good. I think it's time to call it quits. I've disabused myself of the notion that my children will turn out bad if we divorce.

I read somewhere that divorce that ends a low-conflict marriage affects the children more than when a high-conflict marriage ends. It's taken us years to get here. We are a high-conflict marriage now.

The children are ages five and six. Just like my own life in which grew up with a sister about a year and a half younger than me, so my children are the same. Older boy, slightly younger girl. My boy has autism. I gave him my middle

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