Beth-- I have been thinking and reading about that, too.
I read that, in our 20's, our Rs serve as "I'll be good and take care of you, you be good and take care of me." We are trying to be what the other person needs.
The next stage of life (which women hit first, like other social development) is when you start to look at yourself and try to meet your own needs. You realize that another person can't "complete" you or make you happy, so you set about learning how to do that for yourself.
I think that is what happened in my M. I got to that stage first. Having raised my kids to being more self-sufficient, and caring for my mother through her sickness and death, I was ready to reinvest in myself. I started to focus more on my career, a dream job that I have wanted to do since grade school. I got involved in scouts again, something that I had always loved (and where I had met x, actually).
I just didn't realize that he was still in the "I'll be good so you will take care of me" stage.
So, he felt lower on my priority list. Not taken care of or respected. Taken advantage of. My world had expanded. His hadn't.
And the skank was right there to say, "Oh, you poor baby--I can't believe that she treats you that way and doesn't pay attention to you. I would take care of you..." Lots of attention, gifts, emails and texts....
well, you get the idea. The biggest problem was that he never told me how he was feeling. I was happy, I was taking care of my happiness. He saw it as selfish. I never saw his discontent, especially since she had been waiting in the wings with her tongue out, and practically told him that he should be treated better before he even formed the idea in his own head (now, that is a complete guess on my part, but I'm not sure that I'm that far off--NO ONE saw any signs of him being unhappy in the marriage, and I would think someone would have either seen it or got wind of it).
So, he was trying to "be good" and didn't feel like he was getting the return he wanted. He threw that right out the window. A few people have told me that he has become like the most selfish adolescent they have ever met, only thinking of himself and no one else around him. Not listening to anything anyone has to say about it. With him no longer having to "be good," to play the part, maybe this is the real him? He said that he was pretending for a very long time. Maybe he did go into the next stage, and feels that this is the only way for him to find his own happiness? I don't know, and it really doesn't matter at this point.
