If you got married young, do you wonder what if...

[Easilyflattered]

If, for your generation, compared to your peer group you married young, have you ever felt a bit restless and wondered what if? I'm turning 40 this year and have been with my husband nearly 20 years, which is longer than most my friends have been with their husbands, and my children are older than their children. I should count my blessings that I have a happy if slightly dull marriage apart from I'm slightly regretting not sleeping with more men before I got married because I wonder if I've missed out . Possibly I've missed out on a wholeload of heartbreak over the years, but I've also missed out on a shit load of romance and excitement. I'm so bored of him. Does anyone else feel like me?

I understand what you mean and feel similar. My DH is 7 years older than me, I had DS at 20 and we married when I was 23. Now 10 years later I have moments where I think we are in different wave lengths, I love him and he's my best friend but jeez he's reached a point where he wants to sit in front of the tv on a Sunday and has no inclination to go out or plan anything and I struggle with that. I think it will pass and while he's done things which constitute an affair or close to one, I never have. I just miss the excitement and it sounds like that's what you're saying.
I remember being early 20s and having no wish to do what my friends were, i felt like I'd done magaluf enough times and had all of those experiences but now my friends have moved on and go on posh holidays and emigrate with work, I think about how different things could have been...
Equally I count my blessings every single day, i have an amazing family and I too grew up in a less than amazing one.
I don't think it's a bad thing to be flattered by someone showing you an interest and obviously you're not in need of a slap, you just need a safe spot to talk it out. It'll work out in the end.

I don't know. I think he was in a panic after the engagement to prove something to his family and friends.

He does some acting, where he been cast in situations where stage kisses and general manhandling of co actors is required. He tells me out of courtesy and I let him get on with it. I'm of the opinion if they want to cheat they'll do it regardless? There's not much I can do?

I got together with exDH at 19, divorced by 46. However, I did have plenty of adventures before him.

Other things drove us apart than boredom.....as a pp said, we stopped functioning as a team.

I don't think that what you've described is just down to boredom, but equally it doesn't sound like it would be impossible to fix. Which will be a much nicer and easier way if you can get back on track......all the usual advice would apply about trying to inject more excitement and variety into your relationship.

Good luck with whatever you do xx

C’mon OP - you’ve felt a spark of attraction because you’ve had some attention. You’ve been married a long time and you’re reflecting on feelings of temptation.
NewsFlash- even people who were completely promiscuous in their youth would feel as you do after many years with the same person. Monogamy can be a bit shit like that!
But a thread that ended up on the daily mail this week was a woman who was tempted into an affair-and her life is collapsing! She’s since discovered that all that glitters is not gold, he’s a twat, and that she loves her partner. And crippled by guilt and uncertainty over what’s happened and what it would mean to her family if the truth came out or whether she can lie ‘til she dies, she’d give anything I suspect to wave a wand and go back to being bored and unsatisfied, with the chance of doing something about it (that doesn’t involve betrayal, infidelity and heart ache.)
Well - you can imagine you’ve just saved that wand for yourself-nothing bad has happened, no one has been hurt, and you have the chance to do something about it! Take it - talk to your DH - because no truth is worse than seething resentment, or deceit or secret unfulfilled longing - see if there is something you can do together to put the spark back?

Met DH at 18/19 so when we get to 40 I'll have been with him more than half my life. However I had no desire to be a wife or mother in my early 20s nor did he & focused on my career & doing things with DH & friends. It also meant that my friends & I started having dc at the same age so we are all on the same page. Never felt I missed out, never tempted etc. but we have had highs & lows. Talk to your DH & try & work on your relationship first.

I am in a similar situation, about the same age and married the same length of time. I often wonder what I missed out on as far as work, study travel etc... But not that I should have slept with more people... That I couldn't care less about. But I'm sure I missed out on plenty of life experiences and building a career etc because we had kids as soon as we were married. I always wonder where I'd be now and what I'd have done if we had not been married and settled down so young.

My friends are now having babies at 40..while I'm LONG PAST that stage and could think of nothing worse than having babies in the house at this age, so on that I'm glad I did it how we did. It's mainly travel and career I didn't get to experience prior.

Been with my OH over a decade.

There have been times when we’ve been unhappy and probably bored of each other.

Now, through a variety of circumstances, I understand that nothing will ever compare to the depth of our relationship - our understanding and care for each other. I would prioritise it over everything.

Don’t throw away a marriage for a fantasy, but you have to consider how you feel about him - it’s not fair if you really don’t love him anymore.

I met DH at 22. Got married at 25 (when DC1 was 4 months old!) and have been together for 27 years now. There have been times I’ve been desperately bored and impatient, full of hatred and resentment, and have wanted a divorce. Thinking about it seriously though, I don’t want to be with anyone else and that’s probably the only reason I’d leave.

Lately we’ve both realised that we have to put actual work into our relationship to keep it ‘fresh’ and have made a big effort to reintroduce intimacy which had fallen by the wayside due to day to day stress of raising 4 DC. Just stuff like hiding in the kitchen when he gets home from work for a long snog. Having a long cuddle and snog in bed before we get up. This has in turn massively reignited our sex life! and we just get on better. Also now DC are older we get dressed up and go out on ‘dates’.

I’ve always been very physically attracted to DH though and had been around the block before we got together!

"He has never put a foot wrong" is not compatible with "I feel like when criticism was aimed at me for gaining weight after DC, I acted on it, when lack of sex was an issue after DC, I acted on it." Sounds like your lack of experience has meant you don't know what a truly loving and supportive relationship should look like.

I met my exH at 18 (I was also on the "rebound" from abusive parenting) and for many years I genuinely thought I had landed on my feet because I had no idea how I should be treated. It was only when I had counselling at 35 for what I thought was unrelated depression that my eyes were opened. I'm remarried now to the most wonderful DH.

Oh and btw sex was on hold for months and I've put on weight due to recovering from an operation but my now DH has been nothing but lovely about it, no digs, no pressure, nothing apart from checking I'm ok and making sure I put my feet up as much as possible.

Met at 17, married at 19. Been together 33 years now. There have been ups and downs, I spent my early 20s having children, it was tough. I did miss out on going out with friends, boozing, holidays, etc. I dont wish I had slept with other people though. I have missed out careerwise I think, being a housewife. But I got a gem, he is kind and thoughtful and treats me like a princess. I got lucky I think.

Read the dating thread on here. It will soon put you off.

I think it’s totally normal to feel this way.
Most relationships that start in teenage/early 20s don’t become life long because people change a lot.
Yours lasted. So - your feelings are normal.
Now - what to do about them?
Some people recognise it and try to make changes - and reinvigorate the marriage.
Others have affairs - check out the greener grass and decide if this is what they want.
Some (few) brave ones - change a marriage in a way to allow more ‘freedom to explore’ - agreeing on boundaries.

One thing to be very careful and mindful of when your head has been turned...

Marital history has a tendency to start being rewritten. Things that were never actually a problem morph into being a problem. Things tend to get recontextualized so something that was just fine when it happened gets reframed in a different context and is now bad. Things that were once truly endearing are all of a sudden like nails down a chalkboard.

When your head is turned, things are rarely as they seem in the moment.

I got married 9 days after I turned 22, and I also became a mum at 22. It was what I wanted and I'm happy.
My husband is 9 years older than me so he lived his 20's and now I do sometimes feel I didn't get to in the way that he did. The reason being we used to have help from family, so we could still go out and spend time just the 2 of us. However we no longer have that support so we hardly get any time together. Which makes it more difficult sometimes. But I'm still happy

I've been with my husband since we were 15 and we're both turning 50 this year. I'm not bored with him yet - 3 kids and 27 years of marriage and I'm weeing myself with excitement because we're going away for the weekend together to a lovely hotel and no kids! He's my best pal and I cant spent enough time with him.

Yes I have a career, a bunch of brilliant female friends and an great extended family before anyone tells me to get a life

Been married 20 years, since age 23. There have been times when dh and I have found each other immensely frustrating, but boredom and restlessness, never.

I have been with DH since my mid teens - we waited until 24 to marry, which was about 5 years before our friendship group.
I had a point where i felt incredibly let down by him during a patch of ill health but not bored of him.

I used to imagine what other man I might have been with if I'd not married my husband. Life was quite dull as he was away a lot, and worked too hard, and just talked about his very boring job, so I thought I'd wait and see how it went when he didn't have so much work. I wasn't looking out for another man, but for example I remember seeing a man curating a museum exhibition. He looked a kind of Indiana Jones type and I imagined how interesting it would be to have a partner who could talk about fascinating topics like that.

Ten years later my husband had got bored, had an affair, we'd broken up and I was on OLD, and I saw someone I was pretty sure was Indiana. Looked up the exhibition, found a photo of the curator - it was him!
I wish I could say "Reader, I married him", but actually real life is boring, and so was he. He's still on OLD 5 years later.

So what I'm saying is, maybe your husband is just as bored as you are and will give you the chance to experiment by dumping you. And most love stories have a pretty boring ending.

It has been fun meeting other men, though. If you want to, do it nicely.

Sometimes though love dies. Married 19 years, I'm 40 and we have 3 kids. Boredom isn't the issue but we've drifted so far apart as to live on different planets. I want to leave before I'm ever unfaithful.

Yes, I love my kids though and I'm young enough to have a whole new life now they are at university. H left me though, he said he was bored

when criticism was aimed at me for gaining weight after DC, I acted on it, when lack of sex was an issue after DC, I acted on it

So he had a go at you for (completely naturally, esp after DC) gaining weight? And badgered you for sex? Neither of these are good.

How much older is he? How is the sex- is it grim?

I think you have plenty of grounds to feel like you do. xx