Bea and Snodderly, you recommended Frank Pittman on another thread and so I decided to look him up. It is funny, really that after BD I obsessively started to read - books on relationships, books on MLC and anything else that I thought would help with this situation.
I have learned a great deal. But I think what I learned the most is that no matter how we want to categorize, pigeon hole or look up "statistics"; there is just no guessing how any oof our situations will turn out. Jim Conway says that he has rarely seen someone who did not come out of th MLC tunnel eventually but does that mean my xSO won't? And DM on her thread observed that sometimes, the MLC person is the new person whereas the literature suggests that when a man is finished MLC, he is just a better version of what he used to be. I would love to believe that but am a little scared to believe it.
However, it is amazing that xSO's behaviour can be found described so well, like in this quote by Pittman:
Romantic Infidelity
Surely the craziest and most destructive form of infidelity is the temporary insanity of falling in love. You do this, not when you meet somebody wonderful (wonderful people don't screw around with married people) but when you are going through a crisis in your own life, can't continue living your life, and aren't quite ready for suicide yet. An affair with someone grossly inappropriate—someone decades younger or older, someone dependent or dominating, someone with problems even bigger than your own—is so crazily stimulating that it's like a drug that can lift you out of your depression and enable you to feel things again. Of course, between moments of ecstasy, you are more depressed, increasingly alone and alienated in your life, and increasingly hooked on the affair partner. Ideal romance partners are damsels or "dumsels" in distress, people without a life but with a lot of problems, people with bad reality testing and little concern with understanding reality better.
Romantic affairs lead to a great many divorces, suicides, homicides, heart attacks, and strokes, but not to very many successful remarriages. No matter how many sacrifices you make to keep the love alive, no matter how many sacrifices your family and children make for this crazy relationship, it will gradually burn itself out when there is nothing more to sacrifice to it. Then you must face not only the wreckage of several lives, but the original depression from which the affair was an insane flight into escape.
People are most likely to get into these romantic affairs at the turning points of life: when their parents die or their children grow up; when they suffer health crises or are under pressure to give up an addiction; when they achieve an unexpected level of job success or job failure; or when their first child is born—any situation in which they must face a lot of reality and grow up. The better the marriage, the saner and more sensible the spouse, the more alienated the romantic is likely to feel. Romantic affairs happen in good marriages even more often than in bad ones.
If only we could make our partners SEE. This is xSO and his chase of this woman.
I really do not know that I believe that we can reconcile. At this point, our ideals are too different. At the beginning of this, my hope was to save the friendship but I had not anticipated the complete change in xSO. That is the part of MLC I find most difficult to fathom, although I accept that I will never really know why: Why if someone decides you or your life style is not what they want, why the cruelty? The complete abandonment? So all of that makes even the friendship difficult.
Not that I want that shadow of a friendship that he is currently offering to last forever. I do hope he calls, though. Dang it all, I am a bit worried about him.
I am doing all right, though. Making plans for the summer and trying to get some rest. Setting some future goals.
