Play Blue’s Clues or Maybe You Lose

I hang out on The About Marriage boards a lot and have noticed a fairly frequent pattern to the story of a man losing his wife or having her caught up in an affair. To be fair, there’s about an equal number of stories of wives losing their husbands, but I tend to focus on the guys to be honest.

So anyway it all goes like this;

Phase One: “Hey I’ve noticed that my wife has been doing *list of blindingly obvious things pointing to an affair*  is this something to worry about?”

Then the board tells them to keylogger her computer, GPS tag her car, put a motion activated camera somewhere, yada yada yada…

Phase Two: “OMG you guys were right!!!! She was doing it with *my best friend / her boss / old boyfriend / loser with muscles* what do I do?”

Then the board trots out the standard gather evidence, expose, Plan A break it off (carrot and stick), or Plan B social nuking and if that fails divorce.

Phase Three: Actually phase three takes a while and goes around and around for about 1-6 months as the affair fallout plays itself out. There’s ups, there’s downs, there’s drama galore and sometimes it all comes together and sometimes it just doesn’t. Usually the board does pretty well though and eventually it moves into whatever way it resolves finally as Phase Four.

Phase Four: “Actually about three years ago my wife wrote me letters a couple times saying how miserable and unhappy she was in the marriage”.

Oy….

Back in the day I used to watch Blue’s Clues with the kids. Seems like a tearful letter from a wife to a husband needs to come with a big blue paw print on it. What’s that Blue? Have you found a clue?

I’m not saying that the husband ignoring blindingly obvious clues justifies the wife having an affair or leaving him. I’m just saying most women don’t just “suddenly” turn feral on the man they walked down the aisle with. Maybe picking up on a red flag early on could save a lot of grief… and money.