WAW, not sure how to proceed...

[dearme]

That could be as well. She's probably too young for MLC.

One of my friends speculated that mine W isn't having a MLC, but rather she's just running away from the house to escape whatever negativity she's perceiving in the household.

I'm not sure if I read it in DB/DR or somewhere else, but I was thinking along the lines of the "anytime" MLC...which I guess might be better described as an identity crisis. My wife has just really returned to the exact same place we both were in when we first met 10/11 years ago...she's basically become a regular in the "hip" bar scene where we live, and she works as a server so she's part of the whole restaurant crowd, and they just all see staying out until 2 or 3 am as totally normal. I used to do that too...a lot. But once the kids came along I really started to mellow out some, and my wife did too...although not as much as me. Because she's younger than me, I kind of gave her the freedom to keep doing some of that stuff a little more often than I honestly would have liked, because I didn't want her to feel too constrained by the new "domestic" life we were building. And for a while she seemed to appreciate that. But ever since dropping the bomb on me she's really been immersing herself in it more and more...and trying to emulate the new crop of "hip" girls on the scene that are the age now that she was when we first met...mid-twenties or so.

Some people have suggested the possibility of an affair to me, and I would of course be a fool not to consider it...but I really haven't seen any definitive signs of it. No mysterious texting or phone calls, no lack of explanations for where she is and what she does. In fact, she's been really good about calling me when she gets off work to let me know whether or not she's going out and where she's going. She says she feels compelled to do that because I've been being "so good" to her since she dropped the bomb, so she wants to show me some respect and consideration as far as that goes. She actually said the other day that she's never seen anything like what she's seeing from me right now, the changes and the work I'm doing on me. She said she honestly doesn't know what to make of it.

Personally, I never had any suspicions of my own about the possibility of an affair, or of her meeting/pursuing/being pursued by someone else until this week when she stopped wearing her wedding ring. This weekend she stayed at her friend's place down on an old farm, ostensibly so that she could get some time to herself and clear her head, but I also know that the weekend will include a drive into the city to go dancing at a club...and the thought of her in one of her "club outfits" with no ring on her finger just about sends me up the wall. She's very attractive, very fit, and when she dances it's pretty d@mn amazing. But, before she left for the weekend she sat down next to me and held my hand and hugged me, and told me that for her this weekend represented nothing more than the weekend camping trips that I sometimes take on my own...a chance to do something as her own person instead of as "wife" or "mother"... and that's something that I actually have always supported...I just felt a whole lot better about it when our relationship was secure...and when she wore her d@mn ring...

So I don't know...maybe she's using the weekend as an opportunity to run around with someone behind my back and maybe she isn't. But I think it would take a special type of liar to tell me what she told me before she left, and if she is lying I have to assume she doesn't understand that if I find out, it will ruin the chances of maintaining the friendship that she says is so important to her. She still says that I'm her best friend, and that she wants to make sure no matter what happens that we continue to get along for the kids' sake and because her parents still love me and want me to continue to feel welcome in their home... but I'm not sure I have any interest in being friends with someone who would lie and manipulate me in order to get what they want when I (and her own father for that matter) have asked her point blank if there's someone else in the picture or waiting in the wings, and she has emphatically said "No."