Men Who Choose a Younger Woman Over Their Wives Are Often Not Prepared for These Consequences

Last spring Tom came in from the garage and set his keys on the counter without saying anything. That is not like him. He usually has something to say about the weather or the mower. He sat down at the kitchen table and told me his friend Russ had moved out. Russ and his wife Marilyn had been married thirty-four years. He had taken up with a woman from his office who was twenty-six years younger than him. He had rented an apartment across town. He thought he was starting over.

Tom and Russ have known each other since before either of us had kids. Marilyn and I were never close the way the men were, but we sat at enough cookouts and ball games together that I counted her as a friend. So we had a front row seat for the whole year that followed. We saw what Russ got, and we saw what he lost, and we saw his face change when he figured out the difference.

I also asked readers of this blog to write in. I wanted to hear from women who had been left this way and from men who had done the leaving. I got more mail than I expected. Some of those stories are mixed in below. I am not here to shame anybody. Marriages end for all sorts of reasons, and some of them should. But a man who leaves a long marriage for a much younger woman tends to picture only the first chapter. These are the chapters he does not picture.

His grown children do not take his side

Russ assumed his kids would understand. He told Tom they were adults and they had their own lives and they would come around. His daughter stopped answering his calls within a week. His son answered, but the calls were short and cold. By summer Russ was texting Tom to ask if he had heard anything about the grandkids, because his own children would not tell him.

A reader named Patricia G., 61, of Lansing, Michigan, told me her husband said the same thing. He figured their three kids would stay neutral. Instead the kids showed up at her house with a truck and helped her move his things to the curb. She said he never got over the shock of it.

Grown children are not neutral. They know their mother, and they know what she put into that house, and they pick.

The house he leaves is more than a building

Russ moved into a two bedroom apartment with beige carpet. He told Tom it was fine. He said he did not need much. Tom went over there once to drop off a ladder and said the place looked like a motel. No pictures. Nothing on the fridge. One pan in the cupboard.

Marilyn stayed in the house. The garden Russ planted thirty years ago came up in May like it always did. The porch swing he hung was still there. The pencil marks on the pantry door frame where they measured the kids were still there. He had walked out of all of it to prove a point about being alive.

A man does not just leave a wife. He leaves every room he ever fixed up and every mark on the wall.

Friends sort themselves out faster than he expects

The first cookout of the summer was at our place. Tom invited Russ because that is Tom. Russ said he would come and bring his new girlfriend. Then he called back and said he could not make it. I think he counted the cars that would be in our driveway and did the math. Those were Marilyn’s friends too. Most of them were her friends first.

By fall Russ was not getting invited to much of anything. Tom still called him. A couple of the other men did too. But the couples who had filled their weekends for three decades had quietly closed ranks around Marilyn. Nobody had a meeting about it. It just happened.

Social lives in a long marriage are built together, and when a man walks out he usually finds the friends were on loan.

The money goes further than he figured

Russ had worked it out on a napkin. He would keep the truck, Marilyn would keep the house, and they would split the rest. He thought it would be clean. It was not clean. There was a pension to divide. There was the house they had almost paid off. There was a lawyer, and then a second lawyer, and then the first lawyer again.

A reader named Dennis R., 64, of Billings, Montana, wrote to me about this part. He said he left his wife for a woman in her thirties and told himself he could afford it. He said the settlement took more than half of what he thought he had, and then he was supporting a new life that cost more than his old one. He said he was still working at sixty-four when he had planned to be fishing.

Starting over at fifty-eight costs what it cost at twenty-eight, except now there is a lot more to divide and a lot less time to earn it back.

Her friends are not his friends

Russ brought the girlfriend to a wedding in July. Tom and I were there. She was pleasant and pretty and she was polite to everyone. Her friends from work came too. They sat at a table of their own and they talked about things Russ did not know anything about. He stood at the edge of the group holding a beer and nodding.

I watched him try. He asked questions. He laughed when they laughed. But there is a certain kind of tired you can see on a man when he is working that hard to belong somewhere. He had that look all night. At one point he came and sat with Tom just to talk about the lawn.

A younger woman comes with a younger life, and a man does not get to pick which parts of that life he fits into.

The gap shows up on an ordinary Tuesday

A big night out can hide a lot. A plain weeknight cannot. Russ told Tom that she wanted to go out on a Tuesday. He wanted to sit down. She wanted to take a trip in September. He wanted to be home for the start of football. She did not know who half the people on the news were, and he did not know any of the music in her car.

A reader named Gail T., 57, of Spokane, Washington, said her ex husband came to her door about a year after he left. He did not want to come back. He just wanted to sit at the table and talk about something that happened in 1988. She said he looked like a man who had not been understood in a long time.

Love can bridge a lot, but a shared memory is not something you can hurry up and build.

He learns what she did without his noticing

Russ called Tom in August to ask how you get a wine stain out of a dress shirt. Tom put me on the phone. Then Russ asked where you buy stamps. Then he asked how far ahead you have to book a dentist. He was not stupid. He had just never had to know any of this. Marilyn had known it for him.

The girlfriend was not going to pick that up. She had her own job and her own apartment and no interest in managing a grown man. Russ said she told him so in plain words. He was not used to being told things in plain words. Marilyn had just quietly handled it.

A wife of thirty years carries a thousand small jobs, and a man finds out what they were one at a time once she stops.

The holidays stop being simple

Thanksgiving came around. Russ’s daughter went to Marilyn’s. His son went to Marilyn’s. The grandkids went to Marilyn’s, where the table they had sat at every year was still in the same spot. Russ ate at a restaurant with the girlfriend and her mother, who was six years older than him.

He told Tom later that the girlfriend’s mother asked him what he did for fun. He said he did not have a good answer. Everything he did for fun had been with his family.

A reader named Sharon M., 59, of Columbia, South Carolina, wrote that the first Christmas after her husband left, he drove by the house twice. She saw his truck slow down at the end of the street. He never came in. She said she felt sorry for him and she also did not open the door.

Traditions live in the family a man leaves, and he cannot take them with him in a box.

The grandkids ask questions he cannot answer

Marilyn told me about this one. Her granddaughter is seven. She asked why Grandpa does not live at the house anymore. Marilyn said he had a new place. The girl asked if he still loved her. Marilyn said of course. The girl asked why he does not come to her soccer games then.

Russ had not been going. The girlfriend had things on Saturdays. He had told himself he would catch the next one. By November the season was over.

Little kids do not understand midlife restlessness. They only understand who shows up.

The ex wife builds a life and it looks pretty good

This part surprised Russ more than anything. Marilyn cried for a few months. Then she cut her hair. She signed up for a class at the community center. She started walking every morning with two women from church. She had the bathroom redone, which was something Russ had been promising to do since 2009.

I saw her in the grocery store in October. She looked rested. She was not giddy and she was not pretending. She just looked like a woman who had stopped waiting on somebody.

A reader named Lorraine B., 63, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, put it this way. She said her husband left and expected her to fall apart, and for a while she did. Then she noticed the house was quieter and the bills were lower and nobody was criticizing her cooking. She said she was not grateful he left, but she was not sorry he was gone either.

A man who leaves expects to be missed, and it stings when she turns out to be fine.

The new relationship carries the old one inside it

By winter the shine was off. Russ told Tom the girlfriend did not like how much he talked about his kids. She did not like that he kept a picture of them in his wallet from when they were small. She said he was never fully there.

She was right. He was not. A man does not spend thirty-four years with a woman and then become a blank slate. He brings every habit and every grudge and every memory into the next room. The younger woman thinks she is getting a fresh start. She is getting a man with a whole life behind him that she was not part of.

A reader named Mark D., 60, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, admitted he did this. He said his new wife was tired of hearing about his first marriage within the first year. He said he did not even know he was doing it. He said he just kept comparing.

Nobody starts over at sixty. They just start again with everything they already had.

The regret comes late and quiet

Russ came by the house in February. He sat at our kitchen table where this whole story started and he drank coffee and he did not say much. Tom did not push. After a while Russ said he had thought he was bored. He said he figured out he had just been tired, and that the tired went with him.

He asked Tom if Marilyn ever said anything about him. Tom said no. That was true. She had stopped bringing him up.

A reader named Howard P., 66, of Toledo, Ohio, wrote something I have thought about a lot. He said he had a good marriage and a restless year, and he mistook the year for the marriage. He said he would give almost anything to have that year back.

Regret does not show up on moving day. It comes later, when the new life has become ordinary too.

Some of it cannot be undone

Russ and the girlfriend split in March. She moved on quickly, which is what people in their thirties do. Russ asked Marilyn to coffee. She went. He told Tom it was a nice hour. She was kind. She did not want him back.

She had already made a life that did not have a spot for him. The kids had made their peace with their mother being on her own. The grandkids knew Grandma’s house as Grandma’s house. He was welcome at the edges of it, and that was going to have to be enough.

I do not tell this story to say men who leave are monsters. Most of them are not. Russ is not. He is a decent man who made a bad trade on a bad year. I tell it because the men I hear from almost all say the same thing. They did not think it through. They pictured the first six months and nothing past it.

A long marriage is not a thing you can set down and pick up again when the new thing wears off.

Tom and I have had our own restless years. Nobody gets through thirty-plus years without a few. The difference, as far as I can tell, is what you do with them. Some people go talk to their spouse. Some people go talk to somebody with a license. Some people go rent an apartment across town. Only one of those gets you to the other side with your table still full.

If you have lived through this from either side of it, I would like to hear from you. What did the leaving cost that nobody saw coming?