relationships, regardless of how started, fail mostly for the same reasons, because people do a poor job of using their brains to assess themselves, potential partners....and how they would work together (not to mention a poor understanding of the pyschological dynamics of intimacy). It makes sense and is predictable relationships which start as affairs have a high failure rate, not particularly cause they were an affair, but because affairs are more likely to include large numbers of people who have poor relationship skills in the first place. If we took a subset of the population (say women with low self-esteem) and tracked their marital success we would find large numbers in abusive relationships. Or we tracked people who are narcissitic, we would find large numbers of them in dysfunctional marriages, etc. etc. That an affair has occured is irrelevant, affairs are no different in any regard than marriage, in terms of human attraction. What an affair does reveal is a need to look very close at those who have experienced them and see exactly what happened, but then this is so for everyone who (by whatever means) is revealed to have significant issues....be they controlling issues, doormat issues, abuse issues, anger issues, goody goody too shoes issues,...etc. etc.
The fact is many marriages w/o an affair are also miserable, dysfunctional places, less than 10% of all marriages meet any real standard of exceptionaly safe, nurturing, healthy enviroments. From your examples it is impossible to know what the condition of the first marriages was, but clearly the ws (and/or the people they chose) were not marriage material. Nor is it clear why they wanted to go "back" it may be simply to take advantage of the previous bs benefits, which of course makes the ws a bad choice for the bs to remarry. From observations (such as you just made, and many others) I have concluded that many people can marry and have kids and stumble along...but that there are not that many people who have the emotional/psychological capacity for the deep safe, nurturing, intimacy we think of when we talk about "marriage".
IMO one should not "give up" easily in anything....but neither should one obsessively pursue something either. I don't think it is all that difficult when crisis finally presents itself to determine whether a given marriage, or marital partner is a safe, healthy, nurturing place (or has a good chance of being such)....amd if not, ending it is the proper outcome (from a mental health standpoint). IMO someone who singlemindedly pursues a dysfunctional marriage is themself demonstrating some very undesireable traits, closely related to obsessive personality.... The one example you gave "friend" is IMO how life should unfold, she moved on, remarried well (as one can and should having learned from the marital failure how to properly assess partners), and fortuneatly is not going to take back the ws, who by his own subsequent actions reveals he is an idiot anyways as he defaults to the next "best" choice.
<small>[ October 10, 2003, 07:55 AM: Message edited by: sufdb ]</small>
