Just when you think you know somebody, they shoot you through the heart and give love a bad name.

It’s funny, I know you’ve probably suspected something was going on for some time now, but it doesn’t make it any easier to say. I guess I should just come right out with it. Honey, I’ve been having an affair. A love affair with music. The music of the eighties, to be precise. And it’s been going on for a long time.

How long? Years now, so many that it’s hard to say exactly when it started. Before the kids. Before our marriage. Before we first met even. I don’t know why I never said anything about it. I guess I thought maybe I could juggle my relationship with you and my undeniable audiophiliac tendencies and, for a while, it felt like I was doing it. But it’s no use. I see that now. When you brought the kids home from soccer practice and caught me in my old Frankie Says Relax belly shirt and sweatbands as I danced to Madonna’s “Live To Tell,” I knew I couldn’t keep the charade going. I knew I had to make a choice.

That’s right, honey. It was Madonna’s voice ringing in my ears. You may not have known that since I had the earbuds of my Sandisk 4GB Sansa Clip+ in at the time. And the dance you watched me so gracefully performing as the music played from the 4G solid state flash memory was an interpretive one, one of dark secrets, secrets tucked away in my heart like MP3, WMA, secure WMA, Audible, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files in a folder on an microSD and microSDHC memory card slipped into the expandable slot. I might have danced that dance for up to 15 hours thanks to the long-life rechargeable battery if you and the boys hadn’t interrupted me. In a way, it’s sort of fitting that you all walked on me when you did. Perhaps, deep down, there’s was a piece of me that wanted to be caught.

All of that doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done. I have no excuses for my actions, and I know what that means for our marriage. I won’t fight you. You can have the house, the car, the kids, whatever. I only ask that you let me keep my Sandisk 4GB Sansa Clip+ and that you don’t post the video Timmy recorded of my “performance.” There’s been enough hurt already.

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