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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s a classic midlife crisis. Sounds a lot like the husband in Maggie Smith’s divorce memoir. My ex husband also had a midlife crisis but no affair, instead he basically admitted he had gay fantasies. But when I left him he doubled down so much on the perfect husband/father schtick that he even convinced my parents I was the bad one. So now he has my parents and I have a different life. But at least my current partner actually likes me (and women). [/quote]

It’s midlife crisis meets the Talented Mr. Ripley given that the ex-husband was predatory from the beginning with the love bombing, rushed engagement, pressure to sign an unfair prenup, ongoing financial abuse, and continued leveraging of her family and social connections. Fox in the henhouse where the fox eventually dropped his rooster mask.[/quote]

NP- It was pretty obvious to me to the guy was a sociopath of sorts. But I wonder if many readers felt that way? It came through to me through the various points you mention, yet throughout the book she seems oblivious to it and in denial, even saying at the end she doesn't want to know if there were other affairs. She came off as a naive person so wrapped in her privilege she cannot handle big revelations about how fake her marriage was from the start or be honest with herself about it all. It was also interesting how much time she spent pondering petty and trivial things like who at the club said exactly the right thing to her and who did not.[/quote]

While she is somewhat tone-deaf about her privilege, I think this tendency to fixate on seemingly unimportant minutia is really human.

I experienced a huge betrayal and humiliation a while back, and despite going through therapy and rebuilding my life, sometimes when I am visited by thoughts that touch on what happened, my brain will do ANYTHING to avoid actually thinking about it or feeling it. I know what happened, I'm not an idiot, but sometimes it's very painful to confront it directly and feel even a little piece of the shame associated with it. I can do that in therapy but not randomly in my everyday life, and certainly not publicly in front of the world.

Recently I was in a doctor's office and discovered a person who knows the person who betrayed me worked there, and my brain did these insane gymnastics just to get through the appointment, just anything to avoid really thinking about it. And after I left, you know what I thought about? Worrying that person will tell other people in that doctor's office about what happened, and I'd be freshly humiliated in front of a whole new group of strangers, and I had to find a new doctor. Yes those are petty, unimportant thoughts in the grand scheme of things, but that's just how your brain works and protects you from the weight of really awful events in your life.[/quote]

But this person you say betrayed you, sounds like a big deal and not that unimportant. It's not like the person just made one wrong comment to you, or like an acquaintance said nothing to you at all because perhaps they did not feel it was their place, and then you wrote a book and called them out on it. That is the level of pettiness she rises to, making a list of who said and did what and how this was support and this wasn't, or it wasn't the right sort of support...[/quote]

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