"I didn't sign up
for all this."

The ache you're describing is real and heavy. Two years without intimacy in a marriage creates a particular kind of loneliness, and the fact that feelings have begun to surface toward someone else has triggered the self-loathing. That reaction itself tells you something important about where your conscience still stands.

The temptation is to treat the new feelings as the problem that needs solving. They are not. They are a signal that something in the marriage has gone unattended for a long time. Feelings arise; what matters is whether you feed them or bring the full weight of the marriage back into the light.

You said you've tried everything. What does that actually look like when you describe it plainly, without softening the details? And what has her response been, not in words but in the pattern that has held for two years?

The work colleague is not an answer. She is a doorway out of the marriage's unresolved pain. Walking through it will not relieve the self-hatred; it will compound it.

God is not disgusted by the struggle. He sees the full picture of what has gone unspoken between you and your wife. The next faithful step is not managing the feelings at work but returning, with whatever honesty you can muster, to the covenant you already made. That is where the real work waits.

The abuse was real. Years of it do not dissolve because someone is dying or because your family needs the story to end neatly. That pressure to reconcile, to produce the words they want to hear, lands on the wound like another demand. You know the Christian language — forgive, honor your father, be reconciled — and you cannot force your soul to match the script. That is not rebellion. That is integrity refusing to lie.

Forgiveness in Scripture is not the same as reconciliation. One is a matter of the heart before God; the other requires safety, repentance, and the possibility of restored trust. Your father's approaching death does not rewrite what happened. The ache you feel is not unchristian. It is the body remembering what the mind has tried to organize into doctrine.

You say you cannot make yourself mean it. That refusal may be the most honest thing you have offered anyone in this situation. God does not traffic in performances.

What would it cost you to say the words anyway, just to quiet the family? And what would it cost you to stay silent and let the silence speak for itself? Those are two different prices. You do not have to decide tonight which one you can carry.

This tension you describe — the fear of losing your son while every interaction feels like it could fracture further — is one of the oldest aches a parent carries. The desire to reach him collides with the reality that you cannot force his return, and forcing the issue risks exactly what you dread.

The prodigal son story does not begin with the father lecturing or strategizing. It begins with the father letting the son walk away with his inheritance, then watching the road every day without chasing him down. That waiting was not passivity; it was a form of love that refused to rewrite the truth to keep the boy close. Yet when the son finally turned, the father ran.

Your son's choices place him outside the pattern God designed for intimacy and commitment. That matters. At the same time, your relationship with him is not the same as endorsing those choices. Presence without pretense is costly on both sides.

What would it look like, in the next family dinner, to speak to the son you still have rather than the son you are trying not to lose?

Two things are happening at once, and it helps to pull them apart. There's the worry itself — the racing mind, the tight chest, the body bracing for a threat it can't quite name. And then there's a second weight stacked on top: the belief that a stronger faith would have shut this off by now, so the anxiety has quietly become evidence against you. That second layer is its own kind of suffering, and it isn't true.

Worry is rarely about the thing you're rehearsing at 2am. It's the mind trying to get out ahead of a future it cannot control — running every scenario as if certainty could be earned by enough vigilance. When Jesus told his followers not to be anxious, it wasn't a scolding for failing to relax. It was an invitation to set down a weight that was never yours to carry: tomorrow.

So look honestly at what the praying has been doing. "I've prayed about it more times than I can count" can be surrender — or it can be one more way of managing the outcome, bargaining for the certainty you're really after. From the outside those look identical. On the inside they feel nothing alike.

Here is the question worth sitting with: what is the specific thing you're afraid will happen if you stop bracing for it — and could you say that fear out loud, to God and to one person who can sit with you in it, instead of carrying it alone at 2am?