Interesting to see the opposite side of my situation, as it was for the last year. Huh.
I can’t speak for others, but here is where my fatalism is coming from:
We all make mistakes. That’s part of being human. He made a mistake, that’s ok by me.
But if someone doesn’t learn from their mistakes, they will keep making them. That’s what I don’t see here. The mistake he made was in not communicating that he was unhappy in his current marriage. I see no commitment to his new relationship to make sure that will not happen. I just see that he has picked someone who (he thinks) doesn’t present the same challenge to his psyche, so that he can have a good relationship without having to change.
As long as his solution for a problem is to find someone who is not going to cause him the same problem, he’s going to keep having the same base level problem - that he isn’t communicating.
That assumes the problem is due to poor communication. I suspect plenty of relationship problems are not due to that particular problem.
In this case, Richard has admitted to communication problems. Everything he said in the OP implied it before he admitted it.
Fair enough.
However, I still think its a stretch to assume the next relationship is certainly doomed due to communication problems. Lets say my SO does something X I just can’t stand. I can fret and fume and finally have enough of it and leave. Or I can communicate with her and she MIGHT change (but many if not most people IMO can’t/don’t/won’t).
If the next person I get involved with doesn’t do X then I am golden. Then again, I guess if I am a person that always looks for something to complain about I’ll find another X to be unhappy about…
There’s always another X to be unhappy about…
It’s not about who you have sex with. It’s about standing behind your actions, and conducting your life with honesty and integrity.
If you want to have sex with other people, that’s fine. That is neutral. But don’t lie about it and don’t make up cheap little excuses for why you were lying. Don’t continue to take the advantages of having a wife (nice home life, etc.) if you have decided to not uphold the responsibilities. Be considerate enough to give your partner the information they need to make informed choices about their lives. Every night that you are dreaming about someone else is a night your partner would probably also appreciate being free to dream about someone else, too.
None of us are perfect beings, but all of us have the ability to act with honesty and take responsibility for our choices.
Nobody forces you to have a family. Nobody forces you to get married. If you want NSA sex, there are any number of venues for getting that. There is nothing wrong with going through life in commitment-free limited-term relationships. But you can’t live that and say you are living something else.
He obviously woke up and thought “Gee…today I want to stick my dick in this lady.”
Where he went wrong was the way he went about ending his marriage. There was a way to do it that would help his wife move on, be emotionally healthy enough to provide guidance for their daughters, and keep control of her own life. Then there was a way to do it that was almost certain to be emotionally devastating. Some divorces are a relatively easy transition, and others hurt for years. In this case, the difference between the two was likely in his control and probably just a matter of minor delayed gratification for him.
Yep, there’s plenty of exes in the sea! 
To the OP:
Knowing this kind of thing happens a lot, and being a man of statistics I can tell you, whether or not you believe in Karma, what goes around - generally - comes around; be it a new younger, more athletic airline captain with no children for your girlfriend or a healthier man with different values and attitudes towards marriage for your ex-wife. Either one may cause issues in your future.
Personally, I feel compassion for all five of you, because all five of you are drastically changing your lives for the passion of only two of you.
He stood before God and family and promised her forever, to forsake all others. She had his children believing they’d be a family. And he crushed her dreams without warning to her. He betrayed The Girl’s man, who counted him a friend. He ate at his table, slept in his house. His children trusted he cared enough, about them, to put their best interests ahead of his own.
All that said, the person he betrayed the most is himself. He’s living in a dream world where magical racing hearts keep her from noticing that if he walked away from this family, he could walk away from their future family/her. And keeps him from noticing that she cheated with me in another man’s home with him there, and she must be capable of doing the same to me. He has to go through life knowing he is* not* a man of his word, he cannot be relied upon to meet his commitments, and he put his desires ahead of the needs of his family.
I have nothing but pity for him. He has to spend the rest of his life knowing how cruelly he treated the people who loved him most, who’s only failings were trusting and believing in him.
Even if she’s his freaking soul mate and their match is nothing but joy itself, for both of them, for many years to come. That’s not going to change that whenever he looks into his family’s eyes, he’ll know the pain/anger/resentment he sees, was caused by him. That’s a hell of a path to have to take through life. I’d rather have a root canal.
I agree with this.
If Richard isn’t a one-woman man, that’s fine, too, but he needs to not have kids, then. Unfortunately that ship has sailed, so now he needs to concentrate on doing right by the kids he does have, and not having any more to leave behind.
Yeah, because it’s unthinkable that kids’ parents split up. That’s just soooo out of the question, outrageous, and inhuman. For Pete’s sake, half the people around me are divorced, and most of them have kids from a prior marriage. And many of them are … gasp! … married for the second time. How can they live with themselves knowing that their spouses always see their deceptions and failed marriages in their eyes.
I feel like I’m being sucked into some kind of Victorian time warp.
Well, I hope that your wife finds a man that is worthy of her and her children someday.
(apparently you didn’t get the memo about YOU not being number one anymore, now that two little people depend on you for guidance/love/support).
Communication is the centerpoint of all relationships. If we (consider this a hypothetical we, not specifically Zyada or billfish) have a relationship, I can’t know what is in your mind unless you communicate it to me. And you can’t know what is in my mind unless I communicate it to you. It is the only way that two people can both get what they want.
Neither you nor I are perfect, and there is no way that we will automagically agree on every issue that comes up, or both be happy all the time with the way things are. Communication is the only way to keep a relationship strong when something is making you unhappy.
But if you communicate with her, at least you are giving her a chance to resolve the problem. And giving yourself a chance, at that.
People may have a hard time changing their fundamental personality, but people who are in successful relationships do find ways to make sure that both people are getting the most they can from the relationship. That involves negotiation, and sometimes finding different ways of doing things so that we don’t annoy one another when we are doing what we need to do to be happy ourselves.
I wish I had the text to .“Inside every Black Box there are Two White Boxes trying to get out.” by Dr R. Glanville. It is a really good essay looking at people in relationships as nesting “black boxes”. In this case, a black box is a box that receives input and does something, and the better you understand how the internal workings of a black box is, the “whiter” it becomes. I think I might change this from black to opaque, and from white to clear.
I don’t think he thinks of people enough that this will affect him, i.e. your pity is probably misplaced.
Did I just got transported into an episode of 7th Heaven?
How do you know his wife wasn’t a nagging bitch?
This whole thread - including my own submissions, I grant - are more of a Rorschach than any real advice or feedback to the OP. Everyone has projected their own relationships, fears, hopes, etc. onto the OP’s tale.
So it’s okay to cheat on someone if you find them annoying?
I don’t see a single post staying that he should have stayed in the marriage, or that he was wrong for leaving. I don’t see anyone advocating staying in unhappy marriages “for the sake of the kids.” We all know marriages go wrong. We all know it doesn’t benefit anyone to do something that doesn’t work.
He’s catching flack for the way he went about ending the marriage, which was sudden, unilateral, and based on deception. He’s also catching flack for airing his penthouse forum justifications on a public message board for reasons so unknowable that you can’t help but think he is ether bragging or trying to make himself believe his weak excuses- that his desire to leave his wife in order to have sex with a hot young woman is some sort of higher truth.
I would afford him much more credibility if he said “I’m bored of my wife and kids, and would like to have sex with younger women. So I left my family to go get some better tail.” That’s an honest and mature (if fairly douchy) way to tell that story.
I had the exact same thought. Only I didn’t use the word “Rorschach”. Stop fishing around in my head. 
Reminds me of the old joke:
An old man walks into a confessional, kneels down, and says “Father, I have sinned. I cheated on my wife of thirty years with a beautiful young woman. She did stuff with me that I forgot was even possible! She said it was the hottest sex she ever had.”
The priest says, “That’s a terrible sin. How long since your last confession, my son?”
The old guy says “Well, never. You see, I’m Jewish.”
The priest, surprised, asks “Why then are you telling me this?”
The old guy says “Are you kidding? I’m telling everyone!”