JujuB, I'm not going to speak for other guys. But My Guy does the work.
I tend to take a scorched earth view of marriage & divorce myself. I don't really understand what could cause a connection to decay so badly that it can't be repaired, barring anything catastrophic like infidelity, abuse, or addiction.
However, in my life I've seen couples where that was just so. My uncle married a woman whose first marriage decayed in that way, in spite of their two kids. They parted very amicably, and then my uncle and his wife have gone on to have a long and very happy marriage. I have friends and a cousin who are very close with the respective exes. It can happen.
I'm only going to speak for myself here, but I think the factors that caused me to stay in (and fight hard for) a marriage that was uneven and shallow, to say the least, are what make it so hard to be OK with people not being willing to accept those qualities in their own life. My sense of commitment is strong. My sense of right and wrong is fairly black & white. My willingness to sacrifice myself for the "greater good" is pronounced. I find it difficult to tolerate people who dont share a lot of those values.
Maybe there are people who lack the ability to tolerate mediocre and rather than let their lives degenerate into something miserable and potentially abusive, they face up to it honestly and do the hard thing of saying "if we can't make it better, let's make it different." And different means splitting up.
Mr. Fantastic never found the courage to tell me what he wanted from life. Instead he drank like crazy, worked away from home as much as he could, avoided engaging unless he knew it would be enjoyable (not merely pleasant), and cheated. If he had been open with me about wanting to be a spoiled college kid, that might have spared me the cheating, etc., but we still would have ended up divorced, because I want none of that in my life. Our values weren't aligned, to a catastrophic degree. Maybe it's possible for a couple to have that kind of misalignment in their relationship, and something like kids are a career or whatever brings that out to a really noticeable degree, and then, instead of acting out and being passive aggressive about it, they do the hard work of disassembling the marriage in the kindest, most honest way they can find.
