I’m specifically looking to hear from men who have experienced something like this. I’m not looking for advice about whether I should divorce my husband. I’m trying to understand whether the change I’m seeing in him can actually be genuine. We’ve been married 15 years and have three kids. My husband is approaching 40. He was raised in a high demand religion that we left about nine years ago, but he never really dealt with what leaving did to his identity or his relationship with his parents. His family has been a major source of conflict in our marriage for years. I’m Latina and there were issues involving race and how I was treated that he struggled to confront. His parents didn’t attend our wedding and there was never any real repair. Eventually his relationship with them deteriorated badly. Then my dad died. Everything seemed to collapse at once. I was grieving. He felt abandoned by basically everyone. His relationship with his parents, his religious identity, our marriage and apparently his entire understanding of himself became tangled together. Eventually he became completely convinced our marriage was hopeless and asked me for a divorce. After deciding the marriage was over, his behavior changed dramatically. He started behaving sexually and financially in ways that were completely outside the man I had known for 15 years. He spent thousands of dollars pursuing an online sexual fantasy and seemed determined to experience this completely different life he thought he wanted. I continued trying to save our marriage for months. Then something changed. He started coming back toward me. Affection, connection, attraction, wanting his family and marriage again. He stopped the behavior. This happened before I discovered what he had been doing. That part matters to me because his reversal wasn’t initially caused by getting caught. Now he says he genuinely believed he wanted another life and then realized he had made a catastrophic mistake. He says the reality of what he was chasing wasn’t remotely what he thought it would be and he began deeply missing me and what we had. He’s now terrified of losing the marriage he was previously determined to leave. Meanwhile, I spent seven months learning how to live without him. So I’m asking men who have actually experienced something remotely similar: Have you ever reached your late 30s or 40s, become convinced you wanted an entirely different life, behaved completely outside your normal character and values, and then eventually thought, “What the fuck am I doing?” Did you genuinely want your wife and old life back? Was the reversal permanent? Looking back years later, do you recognize that period as a temporary identity crisis, or did it reveal something about what you actually wanted? I’m trying to understand how someone can spend months absolutely certain that he wants to destroy his old life and then become equally certain that the old life was what he wanted all along. That should have a much better chance because the post is now actually categorized by its question rather than by the specific sexual behavior. submitted by /u/Sad-Row-8844
Originally posted by u/Sad-Row-8844 on r/AskMen