"You are married to a man."

I thought I was, too. He had a job in the Computer Science Department at UCLA. He stayed in that job for thirty years. But he's so steady and constant in his job precisely because it allows him to be a boy. He gets flex time, picks his own hours, takes a day off (with one day's advance notice) in the middle of the week if he wants. Goes in at ten a.m. and doesn't come home till eight p.m. "so I can avoid rush hour" which would make sense (his commute took him through the Westside part of the San Diego Freeway) if it didn't cover up what he was really doing--eating in restaurants with the other boys and single women from the same department, and running up the credit cards like crazy.

When he came home he never said hello to his wife, he never spent one moment with his children. Daddy time was that random weekday off, when he'd take himself to Disneyland, and sometimes take the kids with him.

When I enrolled the boys in Boy Scouts, this overgrown putz considered their pack or troop night to be his night home without the little nuisances around. It was eight months before I could successfully drag him to their awards ceremonies. THAT's when he discovered there were other adults there. They crowded round him, the father they had never met, and "stroked" him mightily for just showing up. He beamed and strutted and decided maybe there was an angle in this boyscout stuff after all.

You'll hate this part of the story so much, Dennis. His sex life. He wouldn't speak to me for weeks at a time. I think sometimes he just plain forgot my name, but it didn't matter, I didn't exist. Those other adults existed, sure, but not the wife. Then after weeks of not speaking to me, he'd want sex. You've heard women say "I feel like I'm being raped" and you've shamed any woman who would dare to think such a thing, and I'm sorry but I felt raped.

He seemed to resent it when he had to talk to me. One night I picked him up at the airport, after a week at the Apple Computers convention in San Francisco. "How was it?" I asked. "Fine," was his only answer. I managed to get two more words out of him on the way home: "Nothin' special." On the way home we picked up a friend at the earlier request of her boyfriend. She got in the car and asked the jerk how the convention had been. He launched into a stream of anecdotes that didn't stop for fifteen minutes. Such a charming man.

Did I do something that put a damper on his talking to me? My exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide was the only damper he needed for an excuse.

Dennis, settling for the easy job that is right before you is NOT the sign of a mature adult. I admit it may be an improvement on staying in mom and dad's spare bedroom and playing video games until a better-paying job presents itself, but I do think your notion that taking the first job that someone offers you is not a good definition.