On 10/10/10

[AntoniaB]

Renee has a bunch of great points in her post above...and I also wanted to add to mine, since I was talking with another poster about this post off the boards, that them falling out of love with us temporarily, which often leads to their affairs, well, this is not an acceptable reason for them doing what they do. It is a reason, but it's not "acceptable" or morally right. I think what binds the MCLers together is that they are so addicted to the idea that marriage has to be this constant "high" of "in love" feelings that they assume a marriage should be over if they feel differently at some point. They conflate the way they feel about themselves in mid-life, at that 20 or more year mark of marriage, about how they are aging and "time is running out", with this sense of needing to shake things up or restart from square one. Look how many of them "regress" in the way they live...suddenly they don't want homes, they want apartments. Suddenly they blow money and live dangerously and shun all sense of being "responsible adults". They often take up with people drastically different than their age, people with totally different lives, as if they want to explore some whole new life, version 2.0. (When my XH downgraded from a home owned and land to a pricey 2 bedroom apartment in a small development that looks like every other apartment in the state, he took pics of it and said "Life 2.0 is GREAT!!!")

What I'm getting at is that MLCers don't have the capacity as adults to weather the ups and downs of marriage. ALL marriages go through spots where one or both don't feel as "in love" as they used to. I'm sure if any of us were asked we'd have said at one point or another things were just "ok" in our marriages, not great, but not bad either. But we are all the types who stick by the partner in those cases. The MLCers just do not. They bail.

So I just wanted to add that. Fundamentally the MLCer is a different personality type than we are, and we can't change this about them, so it's best to just let them drift while we take care of ourselves and our own families.