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Ohio_peasant, your approach makes sense. The OP wants to discussion relationships later in life so here is my attempt.
In this case, the OP was married, had an affair and divorced her husband of many years. We do not know anything about the new partner. He may or may not have been married but he was certainly aware that he was participating in adultery. Taking away any religious or moral considerations, the odds are not good that 2 adulterers will establish a sound, lasting relationship. If this second relationship fails, the OP could find themselves growing old and dying alone. For many of us, retirement is a time when relationships grow. We tend to better respect our partners for their positive characteristics and often become more tolerant of deficiencies. Slowing down and having more time together can help heal previous conflicts and can grow the relationship. When that fails, the first step might be to spend some time trying to resolve the differences including professional help from the marriage counselor. It can be a traumatic experience when a marriage fails. I would agree with Ohio_p, it is even worse when that happens at a later age in life.
Two things here...one that this is certainly turning into a soapbox drama, and the other that there are so many high moralists among the boomer generation who seem to never have heard of separation, divorce, estrangement, and incompatibility. Finding other partners, accidentally or intentionally, has been going on since time began, and we all know the history in many cultures of men having multiple wives. The OP was saying you can change partners late in life. What is so new about that?? Get a grip.
This is an interesting thread so please let us continue with our discourse ! Some threads can be so boring that I have no interest whatsoever.
I still applaud the OP cause I did not have the courage to do what she did, although after 28 years of misery, I did get out. I just hope we can continue to be civil here, and not knock each other out of the party just cause we differ on opinion.
I missed most of the discussion but I do want to address MMOBs comment.
Gender doesn't matter. Sex with someone other than your spouse is adultery.
It doesn't matter if you are separated. S/he is still your spouse until the divorce decree is signed. Those who cannot wait neither respect their spouse nor the institution of marriage.
Two things here...one that this is certainly turning into a soapbox drama, and the other that there are so many high moralists among the boomer generation who seem to never have heard of separation, divorce, estrangement, and incompatibility. Finding other partners, accidentally or intentionally, has been going on since time began, and we all know the history in many cultures of men having multiple wives. The OP was saying you can change partners late in life. What is so new about that?? Get a grip.
Nothing new about it at all. But is it a good thing, and, since it was presented in the Retirement forum, is it an "option" for retirement life? That's another thing altogether.
From bitter personal experience (my own, and that of family members), I have learned that it is not a good thing to end a committed relationship just because one feels he or she might be happier with a different partner, or, indeed, no partner at all. If the spouse is abusive (emotionally or physically), or if the spouse has made it clear that he or she has no interest in continuing the relationship (because of infidelity or other behavior), that's one thing, and I agree those relationships should end. But just "I'm not happy" isn't a good enough reason, IMHO.
When you got married, you promised - in public - to stay married till death did you part. Your spouse is presumably depending on you to honor that promise. Just throwing all that out causes tremendous pain to the unsuspecting partner. And that's not even considering what it does to other family members. Even grown children often feel great pain when their parents' marriage breaks up. And for what? Because "you don't make me happy any more"?
I believe that we make our own happiness, and that we can put love back into a loveless marriage if we want to, assuming the other partner wants to too.
I strongly disagree with those who responded to OP with variants of "you go, girl." There's nothing at all admirable about OP's behavior, as she has described it. What is admirable to me is those people who do the hard work of honoring their commitments, because Lord knows, it ain't easy.
Slow down certain posters...let's take a time out to regain our sense of civility and hold on reality.
Who is this Hester Prynne type character of "poor taste" who had a" long term adulterous affair"," multiple sex partners", marriage defiler who "dumps" innocent husbands and "knows nothing of the institution of marriage' who also has the temerity to post something of her personal life on the retirement forum when she's "not even retired"??
I don't recognize her. Is certainly isn't me....well, it is true that I'm not retired but I am in my mid sixties. Does that count?
I didn't provide time lines and day to day documentation of a forty year marriage. I didn't discuss the gradual descent on both our parts into indifference, criticism, absence, lack of joy in each other company.Nor shall I now because it is nobody's business.
And no, adams-aj, I don't feel it incumbent on me to check in with you about my new partner to let you know "when the smell wears off" You think I'd be" better off" with my ex,, because you have privileged information? And no lurtsman, I think I'll decline to chop off my ring finger. I was a committed wife for decades and hope to be again to a man I love. OMOB, I was separated before my divorce and not conducting "long term affairs".
My biggest regret was posting this in the first place . I merely wanted to include the discussionof relationship and change into our experience in late life and broaden the discussion. I see that I should not have made it personal. For that misjudgment, "mea culpa". It's visceral out there as some more experienced posters warned.
The anonymity of the board must give some posters, who are probably lovely people, the license to be offensive, slanderous and writers of fiction and supposition.
Gotta love these posters who post the most personal info, get differing opinions on the situation and then chastise the ones who disagree with their position and tell them the details are none of their business. LOL
Two things here...one that this is certainly turning into a soapbox drama, and the other that there are so many high moralists among the boomer generation who seem to never have heard of separation, divorce, estrangement, and incompatibility. Finding other partners, accidentally or intentionally, has been going on since time began, and we all know the history in many cultures of men having multiple wives. The OP was saying you can change partners late in life. What is so new about that?? Get a grip.
"Gray divorce", as the term goes, is becoming more rampant. That is relatively new. The idea of "personal rediscovery", whether it's a 55-year-old-accountant deciding the he'd rather become a bricklayer instead, or a lapsed Catholic (or whatever) turning to Buddhism, or a couple that grew distant from each other deciding to divorce... this is all, by my understanding, comparatively new.
Until 3-4 generations ago, most people found their lives to proceed along a particular course in early adulthood or even adolescence, and then continued along that course essentially until death. Certainly, tragedies obtruded. People would get tuberculosis and lose a beloved partner at age 25. Young men would get conscripted into military service to serve as cannon-fodder, leaving behind widows and babies. It wasn't until all that long ago that failed harvests could lead to famines and mass starvation. You're healthy one day, and dead of typhoid or cholera or dysentery 6 months later.
For most people to live to substantial old age is new. Retirement itself - for anyone outside of the upper classes - is relatively new. More marriages lasted until death not necessarily because people were more dedicated, patient or had higher moral rectitude, but because death came earlier. Fewer men philandered and cheated on their middle-aged wives because so many of those wives were dead before middle-age. How many died in childbirth, at age 27? Or 17? How many men spent their youth as soldiers or apprentices or yeoman artisans, finally "settling down" at age 40, marrying a teenage girl, having a couple of kids and dying a decade later?
We modern people live longer. We have such a thing called retirement. Many of us spent decades preparing financially for this thing called retirement, with the idea of enjoying a decade or two in that retirement.
Do we really want for those decades to be spent alone?
Maybe the age of tuberculosis and cholera wasn't all bad.
LOL - this whole thread reminds me of Mad Men in some ways. Just finished watching the entire series on Netflix (sans the final seven episodes).
Most of the male characters are relatively affluent, chronic and serial adulterers, primarily because they get bored and are surrounded by far too many willing females. I was exactly the age of these characters in the 60's - and I don't remember women hopping into bed at the drop of a hat. Premarital sex was "not done" - or so I always believed at the time. Maybe it was NY thing??? Certainly not done around here anywhere that I worked, and not among my friends.
With one exception, that I know of. I remember working with an executive in the early 60's whose neck would get red whenever Maribel (that was her name, really) would walk past his desk. Ultimately he did divorce his wife (and two kids) and married Maribel who I think had also been married and had a small child (his? - we always thought so). Lost track of them. No idea if that marriage lasted. He just had to have Maribel - cute little young sexy thing v. his too-tall, too-ungainly, plain wife of ten years.
In Mad Men, Betty (wife of Don Draper, himself the far too handsome adulterer-in-chief) lined up her second husband before deciding to leave Don (deservedly so, although I didn't like when or the way she did it), flew to Reno for the divorce w/Henry, soon to be second husband, whom she'd met at a party while pregnant w/hers and Don's third child who was only a few months old when she split.
WellShoneMoon expressed my feelings pretty well. I've known a few women in their 40's who've left perfectly good husbands, homes, and marriages because they felt they were missing something. None improved their situation.
One immediately married again the man she thought she had to have (which is why she left husband #1) who then almost bankrupted her (put a mortgage on her free and clear house to fund a failing business), divorced him, and remarried for a third time and determined, come hell or high water, she was making the best of it. Third husband turned out to be a decent earner but a moody alcoholic. 25 years later they are still together and she seems reasonably happy. Guess they worked through their issues, but it was a hell of a journey, and took quite a toll on her three children from her first marriage who took second husband's last name - all for naught.
For another - a coworker - it didn't end at all well. She ended up living in her car, lost custody of her children. She went from a comfortable suburban life with a decent man and children to pretty much nothing.
Oh, the human condition. We are surrounded by soap operas.
Stringing your husband along for 40 years and then dumping him when you found something better is nothing to be proud of.
Oh for Goodness sake!
"stringing him along for 40 years" - hello? How many man socks did she wash in those 40 years? how many meals did she feed him? How the HELL can you judge that it was a one way road, that she USED him all that time?
How many kids did she carry and give birth to, while she was "stringing"? Yeah, party! String along a man for the BEST 40 years of your life, gone, never to return - YAY!
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