Let me say up front that I don’t endorse this particular plan for leaving a marriage. My personal conviction is that one should have enough courage to leave the marriage and THEN seek another partner. There is considerable courage necessary to leave home without a safety net in place. Not everyone is ready to make such a leap, nor take such a gamble.
Perhaps the romance has left your marriage. Or your spouse has turned into a major nag. Maybe you’ve always wondered if you shouldn’t have married your first love (who’s now free and seeking solace with you). Or perhaps your marriage began under less than ideal circumstances (unwanted pregnancy, for example) and you’ve always felt trapped.
Perhaps you’ve never resolved an old love and the flames have recently been rekindled. Whatever the reason, your new lover has become the answer to all of your marital problems. There is nothing you wouldn’t do to be with them. Or maybe you’re just afraid to leave home alone.
Leaving a marriage because you’ve found a new love causes major damage not just to your spouse, but to your children, your family, your in-laws, your friends, your social circle, and possibly even your business associates.
Don’t expect your new lover to fit right in to the space left by your spouse’s unwilling departure. It won’t happen. For every spouse that makes a graceful exit, there will be another who will seek vengence for the duplicity and deceitfulness that cost them their marriage.
Don’t expect your children to readily accept their new “new mother” or “other father.” Your spouse will have made it perfectly clear why the family unit has been destroyed, and who is responsible. Depending upon their ages and their levels of maturity, it may take years or a lifetime for your children to forgive you and your lover.
Don’t expect your family to eagerly discard your spouse in order to welcome your new love with open arms. They don’t have the same motivation you do. They still love your former spouse. They may not be ready to replace him or her in their affections. Your choice may not be acceptable to them, and they may make their feelings very clear.
Your friends may fear that your actions will set in motion similar occurrences within their own marriages. Call it the “I did it, so can you” mentality. Or the “misery loves company” syndrome.
Your friends’ spouses may see your lover as a predatory threat to their marriages. After all, your lover didn’t let your spouse stand in the way. Perhaps he or she might find one of your friends equally attractive. Call it fear of the unknown. Or the “except for the grace of God, she’d be with my husband right now” syndrome.
Sometimes affairs don’t lead directly to divorce. Perhaps you realized your new love was not the answer to all your problems. Perhaps, over time, the “sizzle” fizzled and day-to-day boredom set in. Or, the more time the two of you spent together, the more you realized your new love had all the traits you disliked in your spouse.
Instead of dumping your spouse, you ended the affair. Many times that doesn’t end the problem instead it opens a whole new set of problems. Here’s what one man said: “My wife of 23 years has just ended an affair of 4 years and I am having a lot of trouble getting my head round it. But I have just been propositioned by a friend. She knows what I am going through. I do not know if I should do this or not.”
My bet is that he will do it.