Yup - my W has said this, that had it not been for the A, we would have gone on like this for a while longer, been miserable and then ended things. I'm not sure whether the fact of the A makes things better, because it brought a lot of the emotions to the surface, or if it complicated things to the point where it's far worse than having a WAW who wasn't in an A.
The fact in my sitch is that my W wasn't aware of why she felt things weren't working. It took the A for her to realize that they really weren't and why - and the trouble is that a lot of these reasons are viewed with justification of the A as motivation, so they are unfairly weighted in the negative. I think had she not chosen to indulge herself in the A, we could have worked through our differences and made the marriage something that satisfied both of us. Now, I don't really know what we can do. I think it comes down to picking the better of several bad options.
I think that we never made the marriage what it should have been. In our case, I don't think either of us really tried, so what reason did either of us have to think we ever would? Where was the hope? Who was going to take action? Well, I think the fact that my W took action, even though it was detrimental to our M, took us off of that course. It set the stage for two people actively guiding their lives to be together rather than two people who were tossed around by events in their lives to be stuck together.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
