How much you want to bet that Alice gets fired? The woman always pays the price.
don’t ask, on behalf of your friend, I would like to thank you for your wisdom. My ex impulsively walked out on our 18 year marriage to be with someone (grass is always greener and all), which relationship ended after a short amount of time. A year and a half after the divorce, my ex was confiding in a friend that he wished he had never ended the marriage, and that he still loved me. The friend asked him if he had told me that, and of course he hadn’t. So he asked if I’d take him back. No, I would not. Had he, however, worked on the marriage like I begged him when he asked for the divorce, the outcome could have been different. So, good on you for the wise words to your friend. Everyone should have a friend like you.
Not gonna happen. I said they work for the same “organization” because i saw no point in giving more details than necessary.
The organization is a university, and they both work completely independently, on completely different subjects, in completely different departments. They literally do not even see each other during a work day, and the only chance they have of interacting on a professional level is if they were both, by some coincidence, to end up on some university-wide committee. But that sort of thing is pretty easy to avoid.
My wife and i were wondering last night how long it will take Ted to come to his senses and realize that he’s made a colossal mistake.
I guess it’s possible that he might not, and that this new woman might really turn out to be the woman of his dreams, and he might live happily ever after. But he’s only met this woman in the few weeks that Alice has been in the US. I just can’t see how he can know that she is the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
Even if he does wake up and realize that he really does love Alice and wants her back, i think it will be too late anyway. She says that she’s lost all respect for him, and wouldn’t take him back now anyway. I’m not sure if that’s completely true, or if it’s something she is saying as a defense mechanism, but she’s a pretty strong person, and i get the feeling she means it.
I’d be really surprised if that turned out to be true.
And if it is true, then it’s a pretty safe bet that there was a lot more than meets the eye to their marriage.
Unless Ted got hit in the head by a flowerpot dropped from a balcony, or has a really weird concept of how to “Punk” someone.
Until the first time she farts?
I completely agree with this. I just don’t see how someone can turn on a dime in the way the OP has described. So my bet is either that he’s known this woman for much longer than he’s saying or the marriage has been in trouble for a while.
One thing I know for sure is that no one ever really knows what’s going on in a relationship and that people have a great capacity for kidding themselves about the state of their relationship…
Well, if it has, Alice had absolutely no idea. She was completely dumbstruck when Ted called her and told her he was seeing someone else and was leaving her, and she still can’t believe that her whole life turned, in the space of one phone call, from being completely happy to being completely bereft.
It could be that Ted has been feeling unhappy for longer. In fact, he said as much to her during the phone call. But that’s not quite the same as saying that the marriage was “in trouble,” because Alice had literally no idea that he was unhappy, and neither did anyone else.
I’m not saying that he should stay with her if he’s unhappy; i’m simply saying that you can’t fix a troubled relationship if one party doesn’t even realize there’s something wrong. If you begin to feel unhappy in a relationship, you either tell the other person and try to work it out, or you say that you don’t want to be together anymore, and that you want to separate. You don’t wait until they go overseas, get involved with another woman, and then break up an 11-year relationship over the phone.
I wonder if Ted said, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
There’s even Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
Hope your friend gets through this okay, mhendo. That’s rough.
One of my two or three best friends was in the same boat. When my ex and I split up, there were no other people involved, but I amde the choice to leave. My ex dumped to our friends, I didn’t (because I chose to leave, I figured as well that the issues in our marriage weren’t other people’s business).
But this person, one of my two or three best friends in the world, never once picked up the phone and asked my side of things. And we haven’t spoken since - were he to call now, I am not sure I would answer the phone.
I didn’t expect people to believe me, or take my side. That’s not what I was looking for. But to completely cut me out, pretend I didn’t have a side, wasn’t the action of a friend.
This just bears repeating. I’ve come to believe that the vast majority of individuals in relationships sees a fictionalized version of their partner rather than who that person really is.
In the seven years I’ve been in this relationship, I’ve met approximately three men who shared a serious mutual attraction with me, and I made the active choice, in each case, to stay the hell away from them. It’s not that I don’t think I can control myself – I know that I can – it’s just that I don’t even want to have to bother with the emotional conflict of such a temptation in the first place. I am loyal, and if my husband ever became the sort of person who made me question that loyalty, well we’d be having words long before I’d be having an affair. That’s the part of adultery I really can’t grasp–the idea of keeping anything a secret. Just the desire to have an affair is a sufficient warning sign, in my opinion, to warrant a serious discussion.
But while I think we’re extremely unlikely to ever have to deal with infidelity, I don’t think we are immune–or that anyone really is. My best friend shocked the hell out of me by cheating on her fiancee, breaking off the engagement and moving in with the woman she cheated with. She even surprised herself by her own actions–I don’t think she really knew that she was unhappy until she made the choice to cheat. She’s now married to this woman and they’ve been together four years… she seems happy, but who can say? As much as I love my friend, I’ll never really be able to think of her in the same way after that one. And I think I am closer to her scorned ex than I’ve ever been.
I can’t imagine the devastation that must follow this kind of revelation, but I do think you’re acting as a great and supportive friend, which is all you really can do in a situation like this. I can understand your disgust with Ted. I feel fortunate that in my case all parties involved made it clear they didn’t want to force us to pick sides. Best of luck to Alice as she pieces her life back together.
I tend to view ‘perfect’ couples with a cynical eye.
In my experience it’s the couples who occasionally hate each other’s guts that stay together.
Passion (and not just in the physical sense) is the glue that makes a marriage work. ‘Perfect’ couples always seem very content, but passionless to me.
Yeah, that was my inspiration for the names. 
Thanks.
I’m sure that, long-term, they’ll both be OK. I was more gobsmacked than anything else; it was just completely out of the blue, or at least it seemed so to Alice, and to everyone that knows them.
I think I will lose faith in humankind totally if my sister and her husband ever divorce. They seem to be a good team, they have three awesome kids, they have good jobs, live in a great town, spend a lot of time with the kids and with each other (without the kids), they have a good network of friends; I mean these two seem to have it all and seem to really enjoy the life they have together.
I, myself, am not married and am not having kids because I feel I can’t count on having that kind of success in a relationship. My parents’ ugly divorce was all the deterrent I ever needed—I don’t know how my sister ever rose above it, but she seems to be doing a great job and seems very happy. Seems.
I had a big long reply to this worked out, relating it to what happened to me and my ex - and then I realized that the last thing y’all probably wanted to read was the sordid details of how my life fell apart. Suffice it to say, we were that perfect couple that everyone thought would be together forever. When my wife cheated on me, I was shocked and devastated and taken completely unaware…but only because I had been blindly ignoring the signs of her growing unhappiness for ages (as she had been mine). I knew we had problems, but I guess I had persuaded myself that they weren’t that bad and that, once we got past the rough patch we had hit, things would get better. She decided she didn’t want to wait. After the initial shock and confusion passes and she has time to look at it in a more detached point of view, Alice will likely see the same thing; the signs had been there and growing, but she didn’t see them for what they were, blinded, most likely, by a love that had become one sided.
Give her hugs and sympathy - she’ll need lots.
Woeg, I think you’re me. That is EXACTLY what happened with me to a T. It was devastating at the time, but I wouldn’t trade my life right now for anything my marriage had to offer (which wasn’t much).
If I may play devil’s advocate, good for Ted. This doesn’t sound like a random fling. It seems like he met someone who he really liked and had the courage to break off his marriage to a woman he probably only sorta cared about.
I mean what is the alternative? Ted stays with a woman he doesn’t love just for her benefit? I mean it sucks and all, but these things happen.
The issue for me is not that he wants to leave (although that surprised and shocked the hell out of me). In fact, as i said a few posts ago, i don’t think he should stay with her if he’s unhappy. I don’t think anyone should ever stay in a relationship that they don’t want to be in, even if it breaks the heart of the other person.
More than anything, the issue for me is how he left.
First, assuming that this has been building for a while in his mind, he never once said to her before that he was unhappy or that there were aspects of the relationship that needed changing. In fact, she said that just a few weeks ago, when they were talking on the phone, he was expressing his usual level of undying love for her and looking forward to her return.
Second, he told her he has been seeing this woman while she’s been away. If you want to leave, fine, but if you leave to be with another woman (who you’ve been having an affair with) and you have never even told your spouse that there are aspects of your marriage that aren’t working for you, that’s pretty shitty, IMO.
Finally, he told her about the affair and ended an 11-year relationship (and 7±year marriage) OVER THE PHONE while his wife was all alone in a foreign city. Personally, i think breaking up over the phone is a pretty shitty thing to do if you’ve been going out for 6 months, let alone more than ten years.