When a Wife Walks Away After 30 Years: Midlife Crisis, Perimenopause, or Something Else?

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Imagine being married for 33 years. You think your wife is the model of loyalty and commitment, And then one day, poof, she's just gone. And she's not just gone gone, but she's living 2,000 miles away chasing a new job, a new life. And she leaves you and the kids behind. That's the story of one listener who wrote into deardso.com. And he's asking the question, is this just a divorce or is there something bigger going on here? Is it a midlife crisis, perimenopause, or something else entirely? So the gentleman calls himself Father of Five, and the subject line of his message is Midlife Crisis/Perimenopause. And he writes, I wasn't sure if you have touched base with midlife crises. My wife and I have been almost married for 33 years, and she is divorcing me. She started changing around 2021 and asked for separation in March of 2024. She was secretly having an affair. She was always the model wife for 30 years and would never act like that, I thought. I never had to worry about her being faithful. I just think this is more than just being a wife fed up with her husband. There is something else at play here. Something mental, I'm not sure. She has said that she has learned as a child she couldn't express her needs, and this carried on into our marriage. Last year, she brought up things that happened that she holds against me that happened 20 to 30 years ago, and I didn't know they bothered her. She thinks that as a husband, I should have known and I should have been there for her, even though she said that it's okay just go to work. I'm not sure what that means. She didn't have the ability to say, I need you to go here today, so she resents me for that. I read tons of stuff trying to figure out why she is acting like this. She put me and the kids ahead of herself all these years, and now she wants it to be about her. She took a job in April, 2,000 miles away, and she wants to keep working there even though me and all the kids are in our hometown with me. I just need someone to explain to me, is this some kind of reaction having to do with something like midlife crisis or perimenopause? And that is the end of the message from Mr. Father of Five. Well, Father, as I'll call you, uh, not super common but not unheard of in my little world. Now let's further define what my little world is to better explain possibly what's going on here, okay? In my world, and let me put the caveat out there, this is not representative of society as a whole. I will describe this and invariably somebody will come back and say, well, that's not me and that's not my friends. I, I know I'm not describing every single human on the planet Earth. Again, I'm describing my little world and people that come to me. Okay, with that out of the way, men that come to me are typically what I call very anxious in nature. They're anxious in their temperament, and they're very anxious in what we call their attachment style to their partner. They're the guys that are always pursuing, and they're very needy. They need a lot of validation. They need a lot of reassurance that everything's okay. He doesn't like it when the wife is acting a certain way, and he's always pursuing and chasing and all that fun stuff. We all know the guy. In fact, most of you listening to this are probably that guy. Guess what? I was that guy. But wouldn't you know it, guys like us tend to match up with women that are the polar opposite. And these women are what we call very avoidant in nature. More specifically, keeping with the psych vernacular here, they are very dismissive avoidant. They are the type that want nothing to do with very needy people. They don't want to be needed. They want their independence above all else. And when somebody intrudes upon that independence and says, I want to go to counseling, they're like, oh God, no. I want to sit and talk about this. No, just leave me alone. I want to, Here, read this book that I'm reading. Look at this YouTube video about relationships. Listen to this podcast by this Dad Starting Over guy. No, no, and no. They don't want to do any of that. And that often also coincides with, and I don't want anything to do with you sexually, romantically, or anything at all. So begs the question, what the heck are these people doing in relationships? Well, they, of course, ironically, tend to seek out guys like us and, latch onto men who really, really need them. And around and around they go with the woman running away and the man chasing. And, but I say the woman being avoidant, let's be honest here. For most cases, it is the man that is the avoidant one. He doesn't want to talk. He doesn't want to open up. He doesn't want to explore feelings and all that stuff. He just wants to be left the hell alone. But where a lot of men, a lot of avoidant men differ from a lot of avoidant women is that those avoidant men will still, want to get it on in the bedroom in a very cold and, you know, kind of calculated way. There's nothing really deep or emotional to the process. It's just a means of getting his rocks off, so to speak. We all know those guys. Well, when you know it, us anxious dudes tend to marry the female version of that. Yay. Now, exploring the avoidant wife thing further, where does this avoidance in the men that I speak to with their wives, Where does this avoidance tend to come from? Well, what I've seen is, and again, this does not apply to everybody, but this is something I hear quite often, is that the men will say, my wife was the type of girl when she was little who kind of had to take care of herself. She couldn't depend on mom because mom was, oh, probably in and out of a lot of different relationships, not the most adult-like person in the world. She was a little narcissistic in some ways, always worried about herself and worried about her image. She may have had a substance abuse problem, who knows, but she just couldn't really depend on mom for much at all. What about dad? Dad out of the picture. This is again what I hear a lot of the time. So here's this girl kind of having to take care of herself, and often they are very successful at that and they become uber independent. They can cook for themselves, they can take care of their homework, and oftentimes these girls become very, very successful at school, like top of the class. And they go to college and they succeed there too. And then they go out in the workforce and they uber-succeed there too. And they become very, very controlling of themselves and of everyone around them. Everything has to get done in a certain way. They don't leave a lot of things to chance, and they certainly don't leave a lot of things, anything, in the hands of others. Because everyone tends to let them down. They have a very certain way of doing things, and gosh darn it, it will be done in this way. This pertains to their romantic partners, their siblings, their work colleagues, whatever it may be. They're known as kind of the controlling you-know-what. And when it comes to romantic relationships, they tend to pair up with, as far as long-term romantic relationships are concerned, let me qualify that further, they tend to match up with kind of the Mr. Nice Guy, the pushover dude, yes dear, whatever you say dear, the people pleaser guy, the very anxiously attached man, do you love me now, do you love me now, because that's a guy that they can kind of control. That's a guy that will take direction well. She's the director of the movie and he knows his part. This is his part. And when he veers from that part and says, I would like to start exploring and talking about other things, Miss Director, she's like, no, no, dude, 'Just say your lines, do what you're supposed to do, and stay out of my hair.' If that sounds familiar to many of you, well, that's what I hear again and again. So these gals get in relationships, they get in these marriages. They're not the most romantic relationships in the world at all, but it's one that everything happens according to her plan. She's very much directing the husband, the kids, and she just takes on everything. She volunteers for everything at the school. She's managing all the kids and their homework and all their events and everything else. Plus, she's a really hard worker at the office. And everyone probably looks at her and says, "I don't know how she can manage all of this." Well, unbeknownst to a lot of people, this woman represents kind of a ticking time bomb. The analogy I often use is as if she is hanging on by her fingernails on a cliff. Just waiting to fall and to collapse, but she's just hanging on as hard as she can. And then life comes along and something, someone, a set of circumstances, whatever it may be, keeping with the analogy of hanging onto the edge of the cliff by her fingers, something comes along and stomps on her fingers and she falls and she collapses. That's something that's stomping on her fingers could be something horrible happened with her very dysfunctional family. Mom died, dad died, brother died, whatever it may be. Somebody got a lot of trouble. Her sister got arrested for something, something. Because of the chaos that they come from, this is not unusual. A lot of family drama, you know. They'll be— they'll get text messages and phone calls or emails often about, listen what your sister did, listen what your aunt did. And she's very embarrassed by this. She doesn't like the fact that she comes from so much chaos. And sometimes there's one too many stories and she just lets go of the cliff, so to speak, and she falls and collapses and all hell breaks loose. Um, it could be something along the lines of perimenopause that you alluded to here in your message. Uh, hormonal shifts are very normal, and for some people, very, very debilitating and very— calls into question a lot of things in life. Who am I? What am I? What's my role? You know, when something like estrogen drops in your body, your natural instinct, if you will, for lack of a better word, to be a caretaker to be a nurturer, that kind of goes away. And you're left with, "I really don't care about any of you shitheads. I'm gonna worry about me from now on." And they leave and go 2,000 miles away. That could be it. But usually from what I've seen, it's kind of a combination of things. And it's just, what you don't see is behind the scenes, all this stuff is just piling up and piling up in her, and then along comes somebody and stomps on her fingers, and she lets go of the cliff, and away she goes. Sometimes in these situations, when a guy comes to me and says, my wife is acting very erratically, she's doing this, she's doing that, she's acting very young, very youthful. The phrase I often use is the woman's acting very much like a rebellious teenager. And it goes along with a lot of other little pieces of evidence, leads me to say the next question, which is, all right, dude, what's his name? And the guy says, who? I said, her affair partner. Because this is very much woman have an affair 101. This is textbook. And your wife is exhibiting some of that in the very short story that you've outlined here. And you have said, yeah, she was secretly having an affair. So, man, you kind of have a perfect storm of issues here going on, which all sounds like all of which are contributing to her problem. You talk about she recognizes that she wasn't able to share her feelings as a kid and everything. That's very common in women that are very avoidant. She was not— there was no caretaker there. There was nobody to turn to to say, I'm scared. I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm upset, I'm confused. And when you have nobody to turn to with all those very real human feelings, you're taught over a period of years that you're not that important and what you're feeling doesn't really matter. Just deal with it. And as a kid, that's very debilitating and it has consequences down the line. And I have a feeling you are seeing the consequences, unfortunately. The grenade has gone off and the shrapnel is flying everywhere, and you and the kids and others are getting injured in the process. That's what I've seen. Again, that does not apply to everyone on the planet, but in my little world, I see that over and over and over again. So what do you do? You let her go. This was just bound to happen. It was just a matter of when. And you got the perimenopause, you got the affair, you get all this other stuff. Just, it's built up. There's nothing you can do, my friend. There's nothing you can do to get through to her, so to speak. That's what a lot of guys say. How can I reach the— I know the sane version of her is in there somewhere lurking underneath all this BS, and how do I get to her? Just, you know, grab her by the shoulders and shake her, you know, just metaphorically shake her and say, you know, you snap out of it, what are you thinking? It's like, you don't. You just let them go, let them do their own thing. You turn the page on this chapter of your life, Mr. Anxious, and you let her go. I know you want to grab onto her leg like a little chihuahua and not let go of her, and— but she shook you off, buddy. She's gone. She's 2,000 miles away. Let her do her thing. Let her figure her stuff out. Her relationship with her children, which— who I assume are adults by now— that's between her and the children. Be there for the kids if they need, you know, work emotionally through all of this, but you certainly don't get to dictate what, uh, their image of mom is from here on out. That's what a lot of guys like to do. Your mom's evil, your mom's terrible, she abandoned you. No, we don't do that. We just let them, especially adult children, deal with, with that with mom. And you, my friend, need to move on. And what I bet you're going to find in the coming years here as you move on to the next chapter of your life is you probably overlooked a lot of stuff in this relationship. It was not perfect all these 30+ years. You probably have already come to that conclusion. She had a lot of very avoidant tendencies in her, probably. All this controlling behavior that I talked about, probably some of that, you know, touched a nerve, didn't it? You're probably grinning and nodding going, "Well, how does this guy know all this?" Because I lived it and because I know plenty of guys who did the same. So it's time to move on, my friend. And if I may suggest, sir, if you've listened to my stuff, you've heard me say this a few hundred times, but I created a community for guys just like you. The community is called the Brotherhood, and you can learn more at Help for Men or jump right to the join page at helpformen.com/join. We have guys from all over the world that get together and talk about stuff just like this. Guys that have been through what you are going through and guys that are currently going through it. Compare notes, talk and help each other out, attend some live meetings that we have, talk on the discussion forums, get together in person at our live annual conferences that we have in the States and in Australia as well. So check it out, the Brotherhood at help4men.com. And Mr. Father of 5, I'm so sorry you're going through this, buddy, but your life is not over. And as a lot of men can attest to, it may have just begun. How about that? All right, brother, thanks for reaching out. And guys, thank you for listening, and we'll catch you on the next one.