The part that bugs me is that it tells others around us that it's ok to be hypocritical, lying, manipulative, etc. for the sake of finding happiness.
All you have control over is YOU. YOU conduct yourself with honor, integrity and dignity and leave your W to conduct herself in whatever way she sees fit. She may think she's fooling people but she's not.
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I feel like D5 will look at us when she is older and ask why this all went down. What am I going to say? "I did not love your mom the way she needed so she left to find it with someone else?"
Just tell her the truth- you don't know what happened. You tell her you loved her mother and still do and would have stayed with her forever, and you thought she felt the same. But sometimes one person grows apart from the other for reasons we don't understand, and when it happens you have no choice but to let them go. You say it without anger, hatred or malice. She will understand. How do I know this, because I had this exact conversation with my kids and they understood. One of my D's said "well you were together for 25 years and that is pretty amazing, and you did an awesome job of raising us." She's very wise.
