[252338133]

children - 2 both ours girl 6 boy 4
Date of Marriage: 27.8.2004
Date/Season of Bomb Drop: 9.8.2014
husband left home on 9.10.2014 I
s there an alienator?: Yes physical affair

Forward to today 7th April 2023.
My ex husband (we are now divorced, he paid a lawyer to write me a letter inviting me to divorce him for adultery, which eventually I did long story) is now married to the woman he was having an affair with (12 years his junior) and they have a son aged 3 going to be 4 in July 2023.

My question is this.  Please bear in mind I have not been standing in the pure sense of this blog in the interim by which I mean, I have not been actively engaging in any conversation he has tried to initiate with me (hardly any - even conversations about our children have been very difficult), but by the same token I have not got into a new relationship myself, mainly because I have had so much to do in the meantime (moving house twice, looking after my primary school aged children more or less full time on my own).  There have been a few opportunities to get into a new relationship for me but I have not pursued them so they went no where.
Apart from that I have not properly followed the recommendations of standing but I have grown in many ways I never thought I would at the start of this.

Anyway.  As we are now 8.5 years since his bomb drop date and moving out of the family home, my question is, if it really was a midlife crisis for him, what are the signs he might be coming out of it (if he is, and bear in mind I don't see or hear from him apart from things my children say to me when they get back from seeing him).  (What I have read indicates male MLC can last up to 10 years and I am assuming the whole 10 years so on paper there is still 1.5 years till that 10 year anniversary)

If this has already been covered in resources on this website apologies and if someone could point me to where I need to look to read up on it I would be very grateful.  thank you

Previous thread: https://mlcforum.theherosspouse.com/index.php?topic=9350.0

[252338133]

I should say I have accepted his marriage to his affair partner (mainly because my children have had to interact with her on a regular basis since my ex husband left) I have only met her very fleetingly in the passenger seat of a car in 2014 did not speak to her.
My only hope is that my ex husband stays with her as I feel she is stability for my children, having said that my children are reporting quite a few fights and instability in his marriage to her especially recently.

[xyzcf]

I don't have an answer to your question.

What I have read indicates male MLC can last up to 10 years and I am assuming the whole 10 years so on paper there is still 1.5 years till that 10 year anniversary

I know of a few MLCer's who are past "10 years"...and still seemingly continuing to act is a strange way...certainly different from the person before this hit them. My own BD was over 13 years ago...we are in contact but just superfically.

His life style is not what we had together and it is not what I would want.

I think it is possible that some never resolve the issues that might have caused them to crash ...compartmentalizing their old life, and searching still for something to fill that void.

I am not sure there are any "recommendations of standing "....it's a very individual thing....I personally see this as if he ever wanted to come home, the door would be open for that...but with the need to really work on building something new (which is what I have seen in marriages that seem ok post crisis)....a new relationship...because we are both very different people now.

Thanks for coming with your update. Perhaps other "old timers" will have other things to say.

[OldPilot]

(What I have read indicates male MLC can last up to 10 years and I am assuming the whole 10 years so on paper there is still 1.5 years till that 10 year anniversary)

You can never put a timeline on this.
It might last that long or it might last forever.

The point about the searching is that they are searching for something rather than looking at themselves and trying to change the real issues.
I have seen so many people never resolve their issues, my mother being one of them.
She died before it happened.

So you must do whats best for you.
JMHO

[Songanddance]

my question is, if it really was a midlife crisis for him, what are the signs he might be coming out of it (if he is, and bear in mind I don't see or hear from him apart from things my children say to me when they get back from seeing him).

Is this out of idle curiosity or is this because if he does you and he may reconnect and maybe ultimately reconcile?

From what premise are you asking this question?   
You say that you have accepted his marriage to OW and that you hope he sticks with it because of the children. 
And yet you must be aware that very often MLC 2nd marriages do not always last. Some can last years but that's not necessarily because it's a happy one - it's just that the MLCer hasn't really grown out of the crisis and is permanently stuck in escape or avoid or has come out of the crisis and conscience is not allowing them to do to the second spouse what they did to the first because it means less hassle!

There is no specific guaranteed timeline for the MLCer to emerge from the crisis and there is also no guarantee that if they do emerge that they want the former marriage and spouse.  MLC burns something out of them and if an MLCer decides that the bridges have been burned then there is often very little reconnecting or reconciliation.
The MLCer can also believe that the former spouse wouldn't want them back - sometimes because the LBS has said so and sometimes because their shame is so great they won't even think to ask.

As you have children my advice is keep the door open for lines of communication.  If you get a hint or whiff of reconnection or the MLCer declares that he is no longer happy in his current situation, you have to ask yourself if this is what you truly want.  If not then keep the status quo - if you do then understand it is not going to be easy and there will be a lot of further heartbreak on the way because he has another spouse and a young child.

In short - what purpose does asking your question serve you?  As OP says - focus on your wants and needs and leave the MLCer to it.

[252338133]

Thank you so much Old Pilot and xyz for taking the time to reply I am very grateful.  Everything you say is right.  It might sound like I am "waiting" ("waiting" even 8.5 years on!) but I can honestly say I am not (or rather I don't feel like I am waiting for some radical event or change).

"The point about the searching is that they are searching for something rather than looking at themselves and trying to change the real issues."

Well this is exactly it so far as I can see.

This is the thing I have found most difficult all these years.  I just wake up some mornings and have an overwhelming feeling that I really have zero sense of my ex husband as a human being.  I cannot get any kind of sense of any feelings he might be having (apart from anger and sarcasm towards me).  Where I would anticipate something, anything about a thing a person cared about, I sense none of that from him. 
Just thro away comments he makes to my children about how much money he earns and how important his job is.

Recently my daughter found herself in a real scrape (since exhonarated) which involved being interviewed by the police.  She has since been cleared.  I had to contact ex husband to give him the details in accordance with a court order.  He paid for a very expensive lawyer to represent her.  But when the time came for him to actually see her and (should he have wanted to) and potentially have a conversation with her about it he did not mention it to her, not even once.  She is 14 so you might wonder whether she was going to look to him for some kind of reaction.  He gave none.

Similarly, we have been invited on a church holiday later this summer which would involve switching round dates on the calendar he is due to see my children.  I knew if I asked him to do that he would refuse (from past experience) because (I guess) he always has refused and I can only assume the calendar symbolises some kind of control for him (it never seems to have any consequence or meaning to him explaining his refusal if that makes sense).

The person who invited us said to me "Why don't you tell him its a church holiday in other words its good for the children" I replied that so far as I could see doing anything which is (arguably) nurturing/life affirming/good for his children etc would literally be of no consequence to him so no point in explaining that. (as it is we are still going on the holiday but now just different dates so we don't have to ask him the question).

The hardest thing in this journey is the feeling that there is no human being there on the other side of the person.  The switch is so final and even now years on i still wonder how a human being can switch off feeling so completely and permanently

[252338133]

"Is this out of idle curiosity or is this because if he does you and he may reconnect and maybe ultimately reconcile?"

Songanddance.  I have never really thought about reconciliation.  Mainly because I have almost never got any sense of any kind of self awareness /conscience /self reflection over what the consequences of his actions have been for me and his kids.  Not even now.

The children report that even now when he sees his own family members (and certainly at bomb drop in 2014) he just explained in a very matter of fact, there-is-nothing-more-to-know way "I've always wanted to be with a much much younger partner" as the reason why he left me and his kids. I get that some people might well find the idea of a much much younger or much much older partner something which has a deep importance to them but he did literally offer that fact as explanation in itself for just going with no more elaboration.

I can certainly see there might be a point in the future when he and his wife (he married her shortly after they had a child (boy) who is now approaching 4 years) split up.  My children with my ex husband regularly report disharmony of a nature which feels fundamental to me (for example he tells our two children that his new wife is "selfish" and they have had rows in front of my children about her infidelity against him etc).  But even if they do split up I cannot see how we could ever reconcile even if I wanted to because I have zero transparent information that he has even thought about what happened for us as a result of him leaving.  (eg living and maintaining a very large family home alone for 4 years, divorce, living in temporary accommodation, buying the new home the children and i live in now, all sorts of emotional turmoil which, on a factual level I think he must have been aware of even if he did not acknowledge it to himself). 

He sometimes asks my daughter where various toys he gave her when she was 5 and 6 years old shortly before he left us are.  The answer is that they went to the charity shop long ago (she is 14.... and has changed her pass times and interests dramatically obviously and only retained childhood toys of sentimental value to her).  She says he looks really surprised when she says she no longer has her dolls house etc.  Its bizarre.

[MadLuv]

I think the fact he has mot changed any outward behavior towards you tells you he hasn’t done much work on himself the fact it seems to be an unstable relationship yet he stays may be due to the small child and feeling he can’t leave again? We just never know what is in their heads do we? I agree the hardest thing is that they are like the walking dead. They are alive, but who they were is gone. My XH started showing signs in 2008 and I had a couple BD’s and the last I divorced him and he remarried. We were in heavy communication for a year and then none  for 10 mths and then started back a few months ago and there are moments where he seems to be the old him, but then I find our he has lied about small things for no reason. He doesn't see his kids and that will always be my guide on him.

I do think the MLCer needs a lot of alone time to work through issues without someone putting more in their already confused head. If your XH is in a high conflict marriage he doesn’t have a lot of time to clear that jumbled head.i wish their was a magical lamp with all the answers . The only answers are their actions matching their words and their effort. 

[OffRoad]

Are you maybe looking for even a glimmer of what you thought your husband was? I know that is something that confused me for a long time. I many times wondered if I were the one with the "wrong" xh. Like the guy I fell in love with and married was not the real xh, and what he is now IS the real person that xh was supposed to be. I wouldn't have looked at that guy twice. But then I wonder who WAS  that guy I married? Where did he go?

Let's take your question. "What are the signs he might be coming out of it?" Does it matter? How does it matter? If you see signs he might be coming out of it, what will you do with that information?

Personally, unless my xh showed complete remorse for how his behavior harmed his family, his children and myself and sought to make amends, I'm not going to care what signs might show he is "coming out of it". But that is me and my kids are older.

In what way might seeing "signs" benefit you or your kids? Will it be helpful in some way?

[Treasur]

I’m going to take at face value that you have no investment in wanting any kind of reconnection as you say. You may - and you won’t be alone in this here - feel you would like to hope that he would be a more ‘normal’ parent.
But tbh it sounds as if mostly you are chewing on a kind of residual WTF happened feeling about what was ‘real’ about this person, who they were/are and how you found yourself here.
Which is imho pretty normal for most LBS.

And wondering about ‘signs’ is some kind of answer to some kind of question that, for you, is not quite put away in its’ appropriate box?
Do you know what that question is really about?
If I could tell you with 100% certainty that the answer was yes, or indeed no, (and of course in the spirit of honest disclosure I can’t), what would you have that you don’t have now?

From reading here, it seems different LBS reach different conclusions about what happened as they move forward from what is a life-altering experience. I couldn’t honestly tell you with real certainty even what happened with my former h let alone yours, whether it was a reversion to who he really was, an MLC-type fracturing into something different or whether he will  stay like whatever he became  There are anecdotal stories here of everything from one end to the other and somewhere in between, aren’t there?

What I found helpful was to teach myself to say as honestly as I could ‘I don’t know’, to separate out what I thought might be true or how I inferred x from y vs the facts in so far as I could see them. What I could confidently feel was reality from speculation. Sounds easy but actually it’s trickier than it sounds bc we humans are designed to infer big from small, futures from nows. But it was quite useful as a way of making some kind of peace with what had happened in my life and where that had taken me and my own regrets or unintended consequences of honestly made choices from good intent....and it stopped me looking for ‘signs’ in him and towards looking for ‘signs’ in me that tbh were more useful in my own life.

Again jmo but considering one’s own unanswered questions is part of making some kind of peace in oneself with what happened and how we feel about it and ourselves - and peace imho is a prize in itself. I could not have done most of the things my former h did....it was like a foreign language to me which left me with lots of questions but was also strangely reassuring. I couldn’t get most of it bc it is simply not who I am. Self-evidently he did and could bc he did. Which means there were things I did not know. And I don’t know how long or how much I did not know. And I don’t know who he is on the other side of it all or if that has worked out well for him or was/is transitional. I simply don’t know....with time, I suppose I saw my task as sorting through what I did and didn’t know and finding my own way to live with all the not known if that makes sense? And perhaps trusting that, bc it seems to be how the universe works, that if there was a time when any of that changed, I could adjust my lens accordingly....until then I would just move forward on the bare facts available to me 

[252338133]

I would like to update the record of my journey as at October 2023. 
My ex husband left me on 10 October 2014 almost exactly 9 years ago.
This is the update I have,  I have only just seen this evidence so have not processed it and do not necessarily think this is the end of his midlife crisis.
------------------------
i just need to tell someone 9 year on
10 October 2014 my ex husband left me for a work colleague and every kind of destruction of our marriage and our family (two kids aged 4 and 5 at the time) followed.
Almost 9 years on to the day am happy to report i am in a much better place, living in our own house happily with my two kids now teenagers, settled, feel at peace.
Today I saw on social media undeniable evidence that my ex husbands wife (the woman he left me for) is now being described as the "girlfriend" and "better half" of another unrelated man, confirming a few months of suspicion that my ex husbands new marriage was in trouble.
In some ways I feel devastated again for my own two children but also for the 4 year old son of his new marriage who will experience divorce of his parents.

But today is a day I thought would eventually come as my marriage was trashed by cheating and an affair, and eventually the foundations of that relationship crumbled. Dr Shirley Glass was right, it is 4.5 years since their marriage in march 2019 and now it is over.
https://www.infidelityhelpgroup.com/2012/12/12/shirley-glass-infidelity/

My own kids will have to face their Dad being single again though so that will be then next bit of instability.

I dont really expect any replies I just wanted to get it out, thankyou for listening.

[MadLuv]

I am more suprised to hear  that these relationships last. Anything built on the pain of others and under the veil of deceit are fighting a bigger up hill battle then the one they “think” they left. It will be interesting to see if he connects more with your children together now. If you build any type of friendship. I think we all want to just at least see the person we once knew to some degree. Keep us updated.

[252338133]

Thank you for your reply Madlove

" I think we all want to just at least see the person we once knew to some degree."

Yes, exactly this.
Unfortunately he is still very agressive and angry with me on the very rare occasions we are in contact.   The thing I hope for the very most is that he turns his focus much more back on the two children I have with him and gives them much more attention compared with the attention he has given them over the last 9 years.

I will never understand how someone who themselves cheated on you and left a marriage and children can, from the day they  left,  turn all their own anger on you the person they have walked away from and betrayed.

[252338133]

Even if we are never friends again as such i long to see the person I once knew even if just from a distance.

[KayDee]

I will never understand how someone who themselves cheated on you and left a marriage and children can, from the day they  left,  turn all their own anger on you the person they have walked away from and betrayed.

I know you probably know this, the anger, that's his defense against looking at his actions. Sometimes, this wall of anger is pretty solid and protects the person looking at themselves. Nothing you did - I sometimes think it makes angry people angrier if we do not respond in kind, because we do not provide further fuel and justification. We all hope to see some semblance of our old spouse. We know in our hearts that something serious happened to them internally, but (for me at least) there is always a small nagging doubt. Keep the ship steady! This current turn of events will likely trigger things for you. Try to have some friend and family time lined up to help you through.

[MadLuv]

Yes and anger or monster comes in many forms. My XH monsters with silence. He withholds communication as his form of controlling and manipulating. So, it isn’t always outward monster. Also, my XH was always in contact until OW moved in and the shift became about her and her kids. He has said that he doesn’t want any “issues” with her. So, let’s see what tole your XH wife/ow had in this disconnect.

[252338133]

Thank you Madluv and Kaydee. 

I am just re reading this thread and your most recent replies.

I have to say there is such an amazing wealth of wisdom and support in this forum, I have found it incredibly helpful over the years and want to say thank you.  without picking any particular post out this one on this thread is so helpful and sheds light on all the ways I have not processed what has happened, yes even years on I cannot fathom what happened (and still seems to be happening) in my ex husbands head.

Treasur #9: April 09, 2023, 12:49:14 AM

Anyway thank you so much everyone who has taken time to post - i often re read the replies and they really help me a lot.

[252338133]

........ Also, my XH was always in contact until OW moved in and the shift became about her and her kids. He has said that he doesn’t want any “issues” with her. So, let’s see what tole your XH wife/ow had in this disconnect.

This resonates with me.  I often feel like my husband has literally bent over backwards to please the affair partner/woman he went onto marry (now separated from). It is not an exaggeration to say that it feels like his affairpartner/second wife said to my husband "jump" and my husband literally replied to her "how high" and then he did it.
Everything from where to live, where to go, having a baby (she wanted to "see what it was like" is what she told my children when they were visiting my ex husband) and getting married.  Her wishes are the fuel of the relationship and he seems to focus on them instead of in any way asking himself "but who am I?"
I don't know whether he has any introspection at all, there are no signs of it and certainly nothing which is visible to me.

[Reinventing]

252338133,
Others have reported that their MLCer views their children to be the age from BD.

One had a teenager that MLCer gave a juvenile Batman birthday card to. Others have had their children receive birthday presents that are age appropriate for BD-aged children--nor commensurate with their current age.

[252338133]

252338133,
Others have reported that their MLCer views their children to be the age from BD.

One had a teenager that MLCer gave a juvenile Batman birthday card to. Others have had their children receive birthday presents that are age appropriate for BD-aged children--nor commensurate with their current age.

This is so true and so weird.
My daughter who is 14 regularly reports/complains to me that her bedroom at my ex husbands house is still decked out in the type of thing she liked when she was 6 when he left (Frozen disney stuff etc). She has complained to him she wants it updated but for some reason he has never done it.
He has actively and vocally abdicated all signs my daughter has become a teenager to his new wife (from whom he has recently separated) - so for example if my daughter says she wants clothes etc he will send off with second wife (who is very enthusiastic about teenage girl clothes shopping thankfully)

I guess over the years it has all become part of the landscape to me, now you point it out tho it is so weird and so true.

Another thing my ex husband does is his own personal fixation on childrens toys.  As mentioned above, my ex has had a child with his second wife - and that child (boy) is now 4.  My children reported last time they were there my ex husband flew into a rage because 4 year old was trying to get his (his Dad's) attention whilst my ex husband was playing with the scalextric. 
Will he ever move on from this phase?  I am not sure he will. 
Its like he is frozen in time.

To be fair tho, sometimes I feel like i am frozen in time myself too (no pun intended about the Frozen disney thing above which i have just noticed!!)

[252338133]

" Others have had their children receive birthday presents that are age appropriate for BD-aged children--nor commensurate with their current age."

The other sightly odd thing is that the 4 year old he has with affair partner/new wife is now exactly the age my son was (4 and a bit) when my ex husband left me and the kids. In other words for his (male) children the date the relationship of their parents has broken down is the same age.