Angelica, I am late to your thread...just wanted to add something here. Sex in a long term marriage requires a whole different set of skills...desire is generated from within, and increasingly requires a kind of mental maturity to make it work. Personally, the way I see it, is that the MLCer takes the easy way out, needing a new source of validation. It matters not how good the marriage was prior to the onset of the crisis...what matters is escaping whatever bad feelings that are now brought to surface. And if the marriage had problems ( as mine did), the avoiding/running that our MLCers do is certainly no solution.
Really, there are no excuses. While it's always good to work on our own improvement, the self-blaming, in my mind, is just destructive, just a pit to fall into ( and yes, I have been there).
I am getting to a place now with my H where he is beginning to share some of his past thinking through his crisis, and the gist is this: he was in pain, and didn't understand it and found a way out. And you know what? Every story here is a variation on this theme.
