Back, I really feel for your situation. My xh left a marriage ovf over 30 years, and has never looked back. It is hard at times to see what good has come out of it. Like you it is not what I wanted for my adult children, and it still seems so unnecessary.
Do not look for any rationality in your xh - he is acting out his own reality, and it seems pretty weird to those of us who are in a more normal reality where people do not think it is OK to go chasing rainbows of imagined happiness, at a huge cost in emotional and material terms to those they leave behind.
The example we set to your children is that of strength, and as much grace as we can muster, and in my case that is not always very much!
Nearly seven years on it appears that my xh honestly has no regrets and is happy in his own way. It seems incomprehensible to me that he can be happy in the circumstances that he is in, compared with what he had,but I do believe he now is. Which is good in a weird way. I always felt that to cause so much devastation and not achieve happiness was the worst outcome.
i think his journey is near its end, in that he has no further to go. He has chosen to leave his family and live his life apart from us with a succession of OW, which he says is what he wants out of life. He never hit bottom, and is still in what is called replay, but I have come to believe that the stages of MLC are arbitrary, and I also think that few of them ever come back. Some do, but the majority of MLcers are lost to us, and possibly to themselves, forever. This doesn't mean we should give up hope or stop trying, or even stop loving them. But zero expectations is about right.
Dropping the rope, and severing the strong emotional connection of a lifetime spent with someone is extremely difficult. Even if they are not changed by the experience, we are, and I work on a daily basis on trying to make the changes positive and find the good in life. It does get easier in time, but only those who have walked out path have any idea what it is really like.
