@106: You're absolutely right: if he's ready to walk out anyway, what do they have to lose in having this conversation. It's definitely worth it, if there's a chance that the marriage can be turned around.

I guess I just get so annoyed at the tone of entitlement in his letter that I don't even consider that possibility.

I've met a lot of entitled men going through their midlife crises. They're not irredeemably bad. They just aren't ready to accept that the suburban life is all they get from now until death. And they don't know how to move forward, except by exploding what they have and starting fresh.

Ethical non-monogamy isn't a cure-all, but it is another option that people can try, if their marriage is basically stable and just a bit boring.

@91. Nocute. So why have you, you collectively--cishet women married to guys who wanted to flake, to stray, to resume the freespirited ways of youth, just as you and they were entering middle age--got yourselves into that position?

I'm not saying there are no structural faults, no misunderstandings around dating, in the gay world. There are many times I thought I was loved for my mind, when I was loved for my ass. But in those circumstances, there were norms of extricating myself, getting shot, fairly easily. It was painful for about a month. There wasn't the sort of pain that could elicit, many years after the event, the kind of anger about immature man-children we're hearing from you, from Traffic, from DarkHorseRising, to a degree from slowpokey--a pain and anger that inhibits sympathetic identification with the motives of the person who has caused it; which instead wants to get hold of a person--TYTF--expressing the same view and to give him a good shake.

In my view, it isn't good enough to say that women and mothers have learned to bend to reality, and that men and (sort-of-)fathers have been socialized into a selfishly unreasonable sense of their entitlement to pick up where they left off at 23. Even if it's true. Even if, almost certainly in this case, the wife isn't boring and wants a more expansive life than TYTF is shaping to offer; and he's actively preventing her having this by not pulling his weight domestically.... I think we need, in the generic case, to listen to him. Not to say, 'you want out? Get out! Your family don't deserve someone who sees them as a millstone round his neck! Let's see how many 22yos you have twirling from your finger in six months' time!' And not to say, 'man up! You think you're so special! You're going through a midlife crisis, man! Do what everyone on earth has to do, knuckle under!'. To say neither of those things, even if we're tempted to think them. But instead to find out what he's missing and to begin to work out how he can start talking to his wife about what he wants.

Hey Harriet,

Honestly and sincerely, this does not come from a place of pain nor a place of personal resentment as all of my intimates, male and female, are wonderful people for whom I count my stars every day. Instead this is coming from a place of scorn which is a very different feeling. And here's my message:

FUCK YOU

I don't know if you intend to be so insulting and arrogant as you come across or if you really are so clueless. I don't know because when I try to hash things out and get to the core of things with you, you never pull back the arrogance enough to reveal anything sincere and reflective. So from now on, here's my message to you:

FUCK YOU.

Lava was right about not talking to you in the first place months ago.

@109:
Harriet, I'm not going to respond to any of your points. I don't want to argue with you. In fact, I don't want to interact with you, either on this thread or any other future ones.

It’s not worth it, and it gets me so angry so quickly and easily that it’s not good for my health—mental and physical.

I will just deliver the parting message that I really loathe the level of disingenousness to cloak the most off-the-mark and out-of-pocket interpretation of the various letter writers' motivations or behavior or the subjects of letters' motivations or behavior, and the utterly absurd and offensive suggestions you spew (I don’t understand? All I said was ----------. Why do you think that’s so wrong? If you only did --------------, this wouldn’t bother you.). And if it’s sincere and not disingenuous, then I don’t want to bother to argue with someone that intellectually challenged. But I don't really care which it is; I just intend to bloop right on over your posts, so as to keep my blood pressure down and my mind free of homicidal thoughts. I could wish that you'd adopt an avatar to help make my blooping-job easier, but you have a recognizable enough style.

Be well.

P.S. If I’m being too harsh, I apologize; but like the lame excuse offered by the abusive HUSBAND to his battered wife, you drove me to it.

(oh and for any casual readers of the comment section, my response is not due to just this isolated conversation. A few weeks ago Harriet told me all about how the female reproductive system is only an issue in gender relations and women's experience of the world for exactly one week after childbirth- aside from those seven days apparently it's totally irrelevant now to our enlightened modern life. And if you disagree, he's willing and ready to lecture you about what you don't understand about feminism.)

Oh my god, EmmaLiz!!! We are doing some sort of Vulcan mind meld. Right down to your post @111.

ha ha Our collective exasperation and blood pressures rose up to universal unstable levels and merged in the spirit plane.

Harriet @109

Re: "There were norms of extricating myself... fairly easily. It was painful for about a month."

See: https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finance/articles/2017-08-14/why-women-should-rethink-their-finances-after-divorce

"After divorce, specifically, women's household income fell by 41 percent, on average, almost double the loss men experience, according to a 2012 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office."

I'm not directly affected since Mr. P and I aren't divorced. But I'm aware of the facts about divorce in the US.

@89. slowpokey. Not grandstanding? What was your first response?:

"I think men like OP really, really need to listen to women here. ... [I]t will show them what women will think of them when they drop their wife to go seek some strange."

And he doesn't know already? Your words are falling on him from the sky like a thunderbolt, with revelatory force? And, in the broadest terms, in order to prevent men wanting out from being a standard occurrence, there's no need for women to listen to 'the husband'?:

" "I want strange, so I'm leaving my wife and kids" is such an entitled, typical midlife crisis script. He's not special."

Traffic correctly pointed out that TYTF recoiling thoughtlessly from his adult responsibilities lay at the root of his problems, not his wife acting a certain way, or stopping acting as she did at 22. I asked her: 'Would one night a week of drinking'n'partying and one 'date night' with a secondary, FWB or gf incapacitate Too-Young from being a responsible parent?'. (My answer is 'no', but there would have to be at least one corresponding date night, or night off, for her to be equitable; and that the couple is a long way from having had the discussions that would fairly put him in that position). But traffic did not answer my question. Instead she went off on a jag:

[I]f some 40-year-old wife with young kids was like "boohoo, I'm so bored, my husband spends all his time earning money and watching the kids, I wanna jump every young dick I see," my answer would be exactly the same. ... Ain't no one wanna see some sad 40-ass-ho getting trashed at the club and trying to climb all the dick! And you can't go bringing that trash home to your kids, neither! What're you gonna do, spend the kids' college fund on some gigolo boytoy, or drag home the local trailer trash barfly that yells at your son and leers at your daughter?

And soon enough there was a chorus of vindicating applause:

DarkHorseRising: @57. F-k ya.

To me, this kind of response is definitionally 'moral grandstanding'. It relieves strong feelings; it is enjoyable to say in a mood of righteous indignation, and it fails to address the difficult matter at hand. The letter is old now, so there is probably no immediate need to address TYTF, or to pull him up short. But we can all recognize a societal problem--of husbands and wives being mismatched in their libido or adventurousness going into middle age.

I agree with you that the nub of the question concerns how fully he co-parents. If he is genuinely committed to that, and his wife can see it and believe in his commitment to the marriage, she would possibly be prepared to consider workarounds for his restlessness, even horniness. In fact, though, my suspicion would be that he is shirking his share of the hard parental yards. There is no sense--at all--in which I think he should be cut any slack--just because he is the one who is complaining--that is not extended equally or further for her. Whatever a couple agrees should be genuinely agreed between them. Sorry if it was not clear that I thought that.

My identification is much more with straight women than straight men. (In my personal history, it's with people who have been spurned for not being sexually exciting enough, for being too cautious or boring, or for finally being too full-on, non-standard, sometimes too cerebral). I was not trying to put him and his loudly-asserted needs in the middle of any deliberation, and I'd say in fact that would be a wrong and prejudicial move.

@98. nocute. Please print out a passage where I tell cis women what they feel. Don't paraphrase; don't offer a supporting commentary; please just print it out. So I can understand where you get that impression.

@90. EmmaLiz. 'Possibly from your perspective, certainly from mine...'. I'm aware who has used the term--'mature'. I'm saying you perhaps agree with me. Someone lacking 'self-awareness' may well be immature. My read of his letter would not suggest that he's unaware he's talking about a(n even grossly) stereotyped situation.

How am I applying gay sexual norms to a straight marriage? Please print out one sentence or passage where I do this.

@92. slowpokey. I agree with every word of this (esp. re the cultural definition of masculinity).

@95. EmmaLiz. The issue is more that some people find the idea of the guy taking a night out from his marriage to live it up and chase tail uniquely revolting, and undermining of his moral relationship with his wife, while a desire e.g. to spend the evening traveling to take a class in Japanese calligraphy would not be seen as comparably disrespectful or callow.

Well I'm late here but this, like all midlife crises is not about LW's need to bang every barista in sight. It's actually about fleeing his responsibilities in an attempt to reclaim his lost youth. Similarly, banging said baristas (or anybody else) isn't going to fix his problem. It will not help him recapture his youth: That is gone forever. He needs to learn how to mourn its loss and move on to being a grown up adult person. If he can't do that without detonating the entire life he's built around him then he should seek professional help.

Commenters are killing it on this one. Love ya Dan but this is how it's done!
@63 parsing how Dan writes about divorce
@68 about how poorly reality will match his hopes
@71 @75 on midlife adulthood

I speak here as a woman who was left by her husband, years ago, in this exact circumstance. It will surprise nobody that the access visits tailed off within a year, the child support tailed off after a couple of years, and after a few years of making excuses, and seeing my little children's faces as they waited for their dad to arrive on a Saturday day visit, only to be fobbed off time and time again by bullshit excuses, that I decided that my ex was going to have to accommodate to our schedule. No more missed birthday parties and social events, only to end in disappointment when he didn't show. The new parter popped out three kids in quick succession, but refused to allow my sons to visit because of her 'childhood sexual abuse history'. Yes, this really all happened. So, I raised the kids myself. They are adults now, and so great. I never stopped them from seeing him, and I seldom said anything about him to them.
How did he turn out, you ask? Well, his second relationship broke up, an expensive and messy court case ensued, he was too busy parenting his younger children to see his sons, even after she was gone. He is now in his 50's, not a great deal of money, only recently bought an apartment, chasing younger tail around, and finding that he is not much of a catch.
Me- I worked on my shit, introspected a lot, and married the nicest man in the world. He loves my kids, I love his kids, and treat them like my own. Its especially ironic because he married the female version of my ex first time round, too.
I write to you to say this- it doesn't turn out well for guys like him. They ain't smart, they ain't young, and they ain't a catch. But it can turn out well for the ex! Having said that, I raised two amazing sons by myself, and it was very hard. There were years of being the only sole parent at the school functions, and many times that I resented having to present myself as a package deal when dating. It was never easy, but I look at my gorgeous family now, and think to myself that his leaving me was the best thing for me, although not for him. So maybe they should break up. She can find someone more loving, more responsible, more kind, and a better all-round person. Not everybody will find someone, but I appreciate my husband every damn day, and he appreciates me. In this life, you reap what you sow.

I'm late so nobody will read this. I will post the same thing again in the future. Yes, the LW sounds like an idiot but the percentages laid out in the first (?) post seem correct to me. There is rarely a time when a married man writes to Dan about wanting sex outside the marriage, basically wants to cheat, and that LW has any kind of support from people who regularly reply to Dan's posts on this site. If the folks reading Dan's columns, who are in theory the most sexually progressive readers of advice columns (given the alternatives) adopt a very normative stance about affairs then where does that leave the rest of the more conservative population?

"So why have you, you collectively--cishet women married to guys who wanted to flake, to stray, to resume the freespirited ways of youth, just as you and they were entering middle age--got yourselves into that position?"

I'm sure no one will see this post, but this is such sexist bullcrap I'm really surprised no one else called it out. Women "get themselves in that position" by thinking they're marrying the adult men their partners appear to be, not whiny boy children who fold when things get hard and who think they have the right to do whatever they want no matter who gets hurt or has to pick up their slack. Aka women don't do anything wrong. Unless your point is that women should avoid relationships with men entirely or just assume they're all going to flake at some point.

Neither option reflects well on men and, personally, I think men can do a fuck ton better at being decent, responsible adult human beings but society is too busy giving their whiny, entitled asses a free pass to flake out and leave all the hard stuff to women.

@110. EmmaLiz. It’s hard for me not to see your message as coming from a place of anger.

Your posts are characteristically too long and diffuse for me to see what points (raised by others) they're engaging with. You wouldn’t normally, for instance, quote a sentence of mine (clearly indicated), then, in one to three sentences of your own, tell me what you think wrong with it. In these circumstances, it's very difficult for me to isolate what our disagreement is, then either to work towards bridging it, or (in the spirit of clearly and cleanly defining the debate) hope to frame a statement of our positions that illuminates a societal faultline. So we have a situation where you say you've tried and failed to tell me what I 'don't understand', and I feel I've understood everything (maybe only all too well). I can't imagine that anyone else closely follows your reasoning, rather than skimming your repetitions and e.g. seeing what side of a question you're on.

@111. Nocute. I think you need to ask yourself why you are triggered (as far as homicidal thoughts) by genderqueerness and genderfluidity. Is it that there are no gender NB people where you live--so that our existence threatens the possibility of the 'knowable' for you? Or of your being an authority (on sex or gender)? I'd find that hard to believe, so I have to consider that you have had an aversive experience of some kind with a trans or GQ person in your own emotional life.

In the last few posts I've read, you are now having the kind of discussion --of 'what is to be done' with men like TYTF--with Erica and ciods, which I was open to your having with me, and which I broadly sought to initiate (no doubt too abruptly, polemically, as too much of a 'what-about?'). In your post @98, you are imaginatively generous about the circumstances in which TYTF might have written his letter--needing to vent, being in the throes of a perhaps passing existential crisis. In what you say you tried to say to me (that TYTF was not asking for a solution to being footloose but wanted out), you are clearly to-the-point and courteous. What you in fact said was 'fuck you', then you told my interlocutor that I 'consistently' told cishet women what they felt.

I am not disingenuous. I try to write in tones of reasonableness, leaving possibilities open (e.g. 'it may be that you think this because...') as a way to disarm reflex hostility. Reflex hostility is something I've dealt with throughout my life. Evidently my academic and career experiences are comparable to yours--a PhD, college teaching in the social sciences or humanities, in my case work in-house for large organisations.

You are somebody who has expressed the aspiration to help people with your advice--to supplement Dan, to correct a slant or supposed deficiency or lacuna in lines he takes with straight women. I would feel that self-examination, specifically on the score of your instincts concerning fundamental gender difference, GQness and 'trans', should be the basis of your conceiving yourself in this capacity. Anyone doing preliminary training in counseling or psychotherapy would be asked to go into themselves and consider what it was that made them disproportionately angry.

@111. EmmaLiz. I can't think anyone wants to know which of us is representing our previous exchanges correctly. But if you do want to convince such a hypothetical reader, why not print out my words directly and let her judge?

@114. Erica. I'm not saying that marital breakups should not be lingeringly painful to separated straight women. Nor am I unaware that one thing that compounds the misery and pain is the differentially bad effects of breakups on (ex-)wives' finances. (I think greater separation of husbands' and wives' finances, and housework being salaried, would be good for this reason). The point of the part you quoted was just to say that straight women and gay men tend to experience sex-motivated breakups a different way.

@123. eclectica. The question you quoted was a genuine question. I guess it has two parts: 1) Why did you, the emotionally mature or grown-up heterosexual women, or people capable of becoming so, not see you were marrying callow whiny men-children?. And 2) Why are there so many whiny man-children?