[WHY]

Thank you FH.  I will read through these.  I know BB’s and his was a happy ending. 

[UrsaMajor]

Take a look at Navigator's Threads as well....

He reconciled and had a whacked out father (IIRC) to deal with as well....

[FaithWalker]

Well I haven't had a happy ending because my life hasn't ended yet, but I am happy.   

There are so many factors in MLC so we will probably never know the outcomes of many, many stories:
-MLCers may try to come back to find that the LBS has moved on and remarried.

-MLCers have remarried and come out of the crisis, but don't want to hurt the person that they've married now, so they never try to reconnect or take time to truly apologize to the LBS.

-Sometimes the MLCers reconnection/reconciliation is a friendship. 

-MLCers have minimized the damage they've done in their own minds and see the LBSer living life to the fullest and don't see a reason to re-hash the whole thing or to apologize or show remorse. Doesn't mean they might not be remorseful, but not everyone who has remorse seeks out the other to fix it.  I see it often in 12 step programs, but people don't always do a 12 step program, right? 

-Sometimes MLCers die before a reconciliation happens, or an LBS dies.

[KayDee]

-MLCers have minimized the damage they've done in their own minds and see the LBSer living life to the fullest and don't see a reason to re-hash the whole thing or to apologize or show remorse. Doesn't mean they might not be remorseful, but not everyone who has remorse seeks out the other to fix it.  I see it often in 12 step programs, but people don't always do a 12 step program, right? 

IMO, if this is the case, they are, if not in full blown crisis, not much further along than when they fractured, because minimizing can be another form of avoiding what is not bearable. I suspect, sadly, that this is more common than I wish to believe. But I guess it is part of the make-up of a person that goes into this sort of crisis. To face one's damage and try to make some sort of amends, even if that isn't about the restoration of the marriage, that takes strength. It takes a person who can handle someone else's pain and take responsibility. Hard enough for people without shame and poor sense of self, so, well - I think that is why the crisis person doing a kind of 12 step is rare. Not impossible, of course,

Another option about why people don't reconcile. Off the top of my head - the so-called LBS 'vanishes' - aka pulls down on the shutters and says 'no more'. I know of one of these in RL.

[Trustandlove]

I find my self agreeing with KayDee here; I see this in my former H.  From what I can tell he is completely minimising the damage, to the point that a mutual friend said that he acts like he hasn't done anything wrong at all. 

I have no more contact with him, but from what I hear nothing has changed on his part, still saying "woe is me", and from what I can tell, still seeking the next thing that is going to make him happy.  And this is years and years later.  It makes me so sad.

[Treasur]

In the spirit of being fair-minded, I think a lot of MLCers run and therefore are not around to see the relentless damage they leave behind. Or to understand our grief, or our children’s bewilderment, bc their own mindset at the time was so different. They disassociate, compartmentalise and absent themselves. So, yes, they show little sign of getting it bc they weren’t there to see us all stumble through the rubble of it. I suppose some then encounter their own life rubble down the line that may give them some empathy, idk. But years later quite a few seem rather surprised even years later about some of the entirely predictable effects on their original family or how others see them.

Tbh I find it quite tricky even now years later to describe it as an experience in words that might make sense to other people in RL who did not see me then and who have not experienced something similar in their own life. It was truly shatteringly awful. One of the great blessings of this group it seems to me is that people here really do get it.

[WHY]

Tbh I find it quite tricky even now years later to describe it as an experience in words that might make sense to other people in RL who did not see me then and who have not experienced something similar in their own life. It was truly shatteringly awful. One of the great blessings of this group it seems to me is that people here really do get it.

This hits home more than you know.  No one I know truly understands what I'm going through, not even my parents.  HS has saved my life. 

Frankly I dont think I will ever be able to completely explain to myself what happened here.  It's just too crazy to fully wrap my mind around.  Like some sort of paranormal experience. 

[WHY]

-MLCers have minimized the damage they've done in their own minds and see the LBSer living life to the fullest and don't see a reason to re-hash the whole thing or to apologize or show remorse. Doesn't mean they might not be remorseful, but not everyone who has remorse seeks out the other to fix it.  I see it often in 12 step programs, but people don't always do a 12 step program, right? 

IMO, if this is the case, they are, if not in full blown crisis, not much further along than when they fractured, because minimizing can be another form of avoiding what is not bearable. I suspect, sadly, that this is more common than I wish to believe. But I guess it is part of the make-up of a person that goes into this sort of crisis. To face one's damage and try to make some sort of amends, even if that isn't about the restoration of the marriage, that takes strength. It takes a person who can handle someone else's pain and take responsibility. Hard enough for people without shame and poor sense of self, so, well - I think that is why the crisis person doing a kind of 12 step is rare. Not impossible, of course,

Another option about why people don't reconcile. Off the top of my head - the so-called LBS 'vanishes' - aka pulls down on the shutters and says 'no more'. I know of one of these in RL.

You're so right on this Kay.  Because my gut feeling is that the vast majority of MLCers awaken to the fact that they wrecked their lives, and the want their old life back, and feel bad about what happened.

However, if reconciliation rates are so low, that tells me that a lot of them probably dont do the work or the 12 step program.....

And the ones that do, then it's still up to the LBS.  But 2 out of 3 of the MLCers I know did not do the work.  The 3rd did and remarried.

[marvin4242]

I am not at all being negative or pessimistic, but I am not sure where this concept that "MLCers will simply wake up" started and what supports this. I completely understand that initially almost all of us have this hope. Everything is so unreal that we can not believe this is real, that this is what the new truth of our loved ones is. So we construct a "transient" idea to what is happening. Kind of like an illness that will pass, a cold as if it were.But it's nothing like that. This is a major major crises, in a lot of ways a death or collapse of a certain version of our loved ones. I know for at least the first six months every time I interacted with my wife, no matter how much I "realized" what was happening, it was a complete shock.

So looking for odds or thinking they are good is a lot like going to the worst cases of an emergency room and hoping that there is a very hig rate of recovery. No matter how much we wish it to be it is not likely. There are so many examples of people who do keep posting in these forums who state how their loved ones are very badly off 5 years, 10 years or even longer. My own sample of one is that my wife has settled into a new "normal" which is not good and I do not think she may ever really change again. With very few exceptions even here that is the norm.

So I fear there is a lot of selection bias going on here. We grab onto the few exceptions and close our eyes to the rest. Additionally we have a self selecting sample here. We are the more engaged, more committed and maybe even the "better" cases for all we know. I would guess for every poster there are hundreds if not thousands of people who go through this and never post or see a forum like this. What about that statistic?

None of this is against any idea presented here, it is more about deciding with eyes wide open, clarity and purpose. And with a great deal of self care. If we keep pretending that the blades in the blender are not there, the blender is not on, then sticking out hand in again and again will simply not go well for us.

My advice is choose what works best for you, adjust as you go (don't fixate) and always do it with a great deal of internal clarity and honesty. I will keep saying: reality is what it is, not we wish it to be.

[Ready2Transform]

I am not at all being negative or pessimistic, but I am not sure where this concept that "MLCers will simply wake up" started and what supports this. I completely understand that initially almost all of us have this hope. Everything is so unreal that we can not believe this is real, that this is what the new truth of our loved ones is. So we construct a "transient" idea to what is happening. Kind of like an illness that will pass, a cold as if it were. But it's nothing like that. This is a major major crises, in a lot of ways a death or collapse of a certain version of our loved ones.

THIS THIS a thousand times THIS. And it's not pessimism, it's realism. It takes strong people to go deep and face the sometimes harsh truths of this stuff. And we are those people. You don't take on standing, or at the very least, trying to grasp a deeper understanding of what is happening to your spouse through research and fellowship, because you are a weak person. It's the road less traveled. We all have grace, intelligence, and the ability to forge through this grief.

My BD was in 2011, with crazy years leading up to it. If anyone was going to come through this, it would be my H, I thought. We were each others' lifelong best friends. We were progressive, self-actualizing, personal development junkies. He also had a team in a therapist, a psychiatrist, and MD who were trying to guide him in the early stages. How could he not at some point wake up from this nightmare? How could he, who had been the outlier, end up like the rest of his family who had seemingly lost the plot at some point?

But here we are. Almost 13 years, and he's still riding the crazy train. Married to the OW for a long time, but the affair itself started years before BD, so the math puts their relationship longer than our actual marriage was. I'd be better off trying to find a golden ticket in a chocolate bar than to believe some "real xH" is floating around in his skin, waiting to pop back out and return us to the love of our youth. And thankfully, I stopped riding that bus a long time ago. It's given me my SELF back. That's really the biggest thing all of us have to lose in this.

But when I was at the beginning of this, him coming back and working this through was the only option I could see as possible. As I healed from this experience, I returned to a place where I saw life was always a series of tributaries we could take. Choices may not be infinite at all times, but they're never so polarized. Not for us. Not for the MLCers, either. Whether in their right minds or not, there are always many roads on the map of life, and what we've seen as more people have come here through the years is that both LBS and MLCer tend to explore those without standing in one place indefinitely. It almost sounds like judgment that an LBS might decide to consider something other than the condition of their spouse coming back, just as much as I remember feeling judged for initially standing by those around me. But we are all just doing what makes us feel better after being in such a low spot, no matter what side of the spectrum of standing we're on.

I think the "MLCers will simply wake up" is easy to say when you're one of the few who had one who did. In fairness, no one has ever made us any guarantees on this. Not this site, not any other site. The writings of these LBSs have soothed me many times in the early days when I was on the ledge of despair, and that has value. And I don't think it's a lie (for them) because they are telling the story as it unfolded from their experience. But as we are seeing more and more, "reconnection" can sometimes mean friendship (toomanytears' situation comes to mind) and an MLCer doing the work doesn't always pave a clear path back to full marital reconciliation (barbiedoll's situation comes to mind). So broadening our idea of "waking up" should conjure the question of what we could live with if it doesn't mean a restored marriage. COULD you be friends with your MLCer? What would that look like? Is that a soothing thought or does it spark fear of rejection, fear of wasting time, or being wrong? Do we just want to be right? What would letting go of an outcome altogether look like? From that place, could you make more decisions, see more tributaries, feel like yourself again? Would that return be perhaps even better than any other? Just throwing those out there.