It's baffling to realize that our spouses are peculiar blends of who we knew. It's hard to recognize some of the particularly unkind things that they might have done are acts of the same person who might have been wonderful for us once. These things take a long time to come to terms with. And it's OK if it takes a long time.
Cognitive dissonance...
It affects the MLCer (WAS) in different, and exactly the same ways, as it affects the LBS...
We are wise to be weary of allowing the cognitive dissonance to go monster on our MLCer (as they, often to us), by rationalizing they are somehow bad people...
This... I think the LBS struggles with... and neither good nor bad... how ever we choose to deal with and resolve the dissonance...
