My wife's midlife crisis

[Gerda]

Ciluzen, I think what you have written here is really wonderful for a normal marriage in crisis. But MLC is something different. Faceman is not making something up when he says that this person is nothing like his W. My H may have had little twinges of selfishness or poor money management, some intimacy issues etc, but he was a wonderful man with astonishingly sound morals, an amazing father, a hard worker and very loving to me. He experienced a very clear break and EVERYTHING about him and thus about our lives and family changed. This has been going on for five years and the only way I can remember my old H is to read his old letters. My kids don't even remember what he was like before, as they are 9 and 13, though my S13 remembers a little.

The conversations you describe sound wonderful but with someone in MLC, those talks are almost always misconstrued and head south and turn into something horrible, no matter how kind or open I am.

I think it would be like trying to offer a delicious wonderful favorite meal to a person who was sick from chemo treatments. No matter how delicious the meal was, they would feel like it was disgusting and they would wonder how you could possibly offer it to them and see it as almost cruel!

It took me a long time to realize that I had to let my H go completely. If he comes to me to talk about things, I try to listen, and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it turns into something borderline verbally abusive against me. It rarely seems to be something I can predict. And I say that as a woman who many on these boards see as a doormat! I am always advocating patience, forgiveness, kindness, unconditional love. I just think that with MLC that unconditional love may include giving total space to them and accepting that the person we knew before is temporarily gone. As Faceman is facing life just after BD and is struggling a lot with accepting that his W is not herself, I don't see how he can do anything very active right now except step back and let her go, but be as kind as possible to her.

Just my two (loving) cents!