Anonymous wrote:I see the E.P.L. behavior WAY more among men. I meet men all the time who left their families , but often it's for a "dream job", so it's more socially acceptable. Or for another (younger) woman, and the ex-wife is blamed for driving him to leave.

For some reason a woman leaving gets a lot more criticism. She didn't even have kids, right? So who cares?

Yep, no kids. Leaving people you don’t want to be with is a kindness.

I agree with you, OP.

And I understand your wrath. At this point in quarantine, I'm getting irritable, too.

OP, if you are looking for another good hate-read, I think you'd love to hate How To Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell or The Wrong Knickers by Bryony Gordon. You'll hate both of those women so much. In fact, come back here when you've read started one of them and we can have a cathartic hate-reading group together. It'll be fun.

Did you have a falling out with her, OP?

I see the E.P.L. behavior WAY more among men. I meet men all the time who left their families , but often it's for a "dream job", so it's more socially acceptable. Or for another (younger) woman, and the ex-wife is blamed for driving him to leave.

For some reason a woman leaving gets a lot more criticism. She didn't even have kids, right? So who cares?

Anonymous wrote:As a man in a sexless marriage who has to find APs for sex, I like these types of women. Divorced mid-40s trying to find themselves are the best in bed.

Of course. Their husbands don’t screw them anymore and they are delusional in the head. They think they are noble and so-French. Never prepared when it blows up in their face and fantasy life comes crashing down.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Just to be clear -- the book was published 14 years ago, about events that happened about 20 years ago. For context, not even half the households in the US had internet access until the year was more than halfway through. That was 5 years BEFORE Myspace became big.

The movie was 10 years ago.

You are rehashing old conversations and influences. It's not reflective of current conversations, nor does it drive them.

Seriously. Old news.

Eat Pray Love
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/541405.page

Elizabeth Gilbert [when she left 2nd husband for her best friend]
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/582467.page

Thank you, PPs. Let’s end this thread here and now.

Anonymous wrote:
Just to be clear -- the book was published 14 years ago, about events that happened about 20 years ago. For context, not even half the households in the US had internet access until the year was more than halfway through. That was 5 years BEFORE Myspace became big.

The movie was 10 years ago.

You are rehashing old conversations and influences. It's not reflective of current conversations, nor does it drive them.

Seriously. Old news.

Eat Pray Love
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/541405.page

Elizabeth Gilbert [when she left 2nd husband for her best friend]
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/582467.page

As a man in a sexless marriage who has to find APs for sex, I like these types of women. Divorced mid-40s trying to find themselves are the best in bed.

I see my ex-husband in that passage.

The book is still in wide circulation. The author is a public speaker with a huge following of unhappy self-centered people.

Umm. For middle aged women it does (45+).

The actual concept is just a “mid-life crisis.”

It’s just that we used to focus only on men as having them and blowing up marriages.

Nowadays just as many women are doing it.

It is very relevant today.

Anonymous wrote:Gilbert is a shallow, self-indulgent, and arrogant woman. This person is not going on a journey of self-discovery, whatever the f@ck that is. This person is abandoning her life. Instead of confronting her problems, instead of working through them, or processing whatever it is that makes her so inexplicably unhappy, she abandons them. And she abandons a husband who — at least as he’s characterized in the movie — is loving, charming, and more than adequate because she needs some more goddamn “me time.”

Just to be clear -- the book was published 14 years ago, about events that happened about 20 years ago. For context, not even half the households in the US had internet access until the year was more than halfway through. That was 5 years BEFORE Myspace became big.

The movie was 10 years ago.

You are rehashing old conversations and influences. It's not reflective of current conversations, nor does it drive them.

To be fair, I know plenty of middle aged men with the same mentality. They tend to frequent the same website

Ha. I know a woman like this who EMBRACES this book. Yep- Ashley Madison girl.

Gilbert is a shallow, self-indulgent, and arrogant woman. This person is not going on a journey of self-discovery, whatever the f@ck that is. This person is abandoning her life. Instead of confronting her problems, instead of working through them, or processing whatever it is that makes her so inexplicably unhappy, she abandons them. And she abandons a husband who — at least as he’s characterized in the movie — is loving, charming, and more than adequate because she needs some more goddamn “me time.”

Don’t we all, sister? Get the f@ck over it. And for what? So she can find herself? Or so she can find a better man? It’s hard to tell because this woman is as shallow, self-indulgent and arrogant at the end of her memoir as she is in the beginning.

I don’t like these kind of people. The Oprah types, who have to tell you how great they are in order to convince you. That’s all that Eat, Pray, Love boils down to: A woman trying to convince you of how great she is so that maybe you’ll take a similar journey — literal or metaphorical — in which you try to convince everyone of how great you are. There’s a scene in Eat, Pray, Love that’s typical of this white, bourgeois bullshit, where Elizabeth sends an email to all of her American friends to guilt them into sending a poor family some money to buy a house as a birthday present to her. Noble? Perhaps, if it weren’t so motherf@cking transparent that the gesture is less about helping out this family than it is about celebrating her goddamn selflessness. I know people like this — I suspect most of you know people like this. People who manage to work their good deeds into virtually every conversation, the same way that gym obsessed person will work his morning work-out routine into all of his conversations. Like we’re the goddamn beneficiaries of their good health.

The whole thing is an embarrassment to women.

I know many women like this in real life and they are all over this board. “Woes me. I’m so bored with my husband who works all day to support my lazy @ss. He doesn’t do enough around the house while I don’t even help contribute to the household income. I am so evolved and worldly. I deserve an affair or a year to go find myself.” They live in their own heads with zero sense of reality or personal responsibility.