Guest Posted August 7, 2006 Posted August 7, 2006 After reading through a lot of these posts, I get the impression that many people still believe that the only reason a marriage breaks up isuddenly s because of extramarital affairs. Maybe that is true for many marriages, but I can definately state from experience that just because a spouse suddenly asks for a divorce with seemingly no warning, that in itself is not evidence for an affair. I was married for 25 years to my highschool sweetheart, and by all accounts we had a pretty good marriage. By our 23rd year of marriage, our children were all nearly grown, a small but paid for home of our own, a little money in the bank, and were beginning to talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives once the children all left home. WE were by no means living the life of gross materialists--our home was in the inner city, and we had never lived out lives around luxuries or trying to keep up with some kind of material standard. But somehow my husband had developed the idea that our way of life was a drag on his soul. I had no clue that my husband was questioning his mode of life and belief, there were no clues. No one else around us, family and friends and co-workers alike had any clue, either. He hid his misery very well. Eventually, his feelings made their way to the surface and that was when our marriage unraveled. My husband came home from work one day and said that we needed to talk. He sat me down and told me that for some time he had been questioning his faith and the big questions of life (and to make the story short) he had decided to become a Buddhist. And for him, that meant he needed to leave me and give up the "pursuit of desire," whatever the hell that means. While my mind was trying to wrap itself around all that he was saying to me, he was busy packing a few essentials into a backpack and walking out the door. My first instinct was to think, "that SOB must have another woman somewhere," because what he was saying and doing made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Often wherever confusion is present in a situation, lies are at the base of it, so I assumed that what he was telling me was one big, dramatic, and very idiotic lie. I went to work to find out the truth, to try to catch him in the awful lie that I just knew he had to be keeping from me. But I was wrong--he really was telling me the truth, as ridiculous as it seemed to me. We were separated for 5 years before we decided to get divorced. During those five years, he lived a celibate life and his life was an open book--he tried to hide nothing from anyone. He really did come to believe that the desires he felt with me (material desires, as well as sexual desires) were keeping him from advancing spiritually. I felt during our separation that surely one day he would suddenly wake up, see what he was doing to our family and what he was throwing away but he didn't. In some warped way, he feels that his actions have been a blessing to all involved. When he finally asked me for a divorce, I gave it to him--what more could be done? It's been one year since and from all accounts he's happy as a clam. And there is no other woman in the picture. Affairs may be run-of-the-mill, but they are not the only cause of divorce and separation by a longshot.
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