Why should this LW be considered creepy? It wasn't as if she was his high school girlfriend. They were married for what sounds like around ten years. They have a child together. You don't "just move on" from a ten-year-marriage, especially one involving a child, from which you never can move on. Anyone who can, without at least occasional regrets, either is not human, is abnormally well-adjusted, or both. (Or escaped the marriage from hell, in which case you have your own special set of traumas.) And you're probably always mapping your first marriage onto the second and wondering how not to make the same mistakes--wondering, "was it me? Or was it her/him? How do I not screw up this one?"

Sometimes we focus on little things to avoid having to confront bigger issues. What he's really asking is, "Why does she seem to want to please this new guy in ways she didn't want to please me when we were married? Is there something wrong with me?" Because the fact is that she has grown her hair longer. Yeah, there are all kinds of possible reasons (and thanks, Nat, for the long-hair tips!) that could have nothing to do with him. But then again, it could. Not because he's inherently a loser, but because they just weren't good together.

I don't see anything wrong with having a friendly chat sometime over coffee, where he asks her, a little sheepishly, this question that's been nagging at him all this time, and makes clear that he wants an honest answer...and is prepared for whatever comes out. I suspect that whatever it is, it will translate, "Because we just weren't very good together."

And then he'll see, hopefully, that he and his second wife *are* very good together, and realize that a failed marriage does not mean two failed people.

Oh, stop it with all the self-righteous posturing about Sanford's right to privacy and how sleazy all this is. Yeah, it is sleazy, but Sanford's a public servant (nominally, anyways), and if there's anything I relish, it's deriding a man with a midlife crisis who gets busted cheating on his wife. It's not tawdry to publish those emails. We have no reasonable expectation of privacy, after all. It IS tawdry to commit adultery, no matter how much you dress it up in Argentinian candlelight and second-rate Harlequin novel speak and middle-aged male angst.

Oh, and he was talking about her breasts. Sorry to all who hoped this indicated some kind of secret homosexual double life. That would have been too good to be true. No, this was just a humdrum, middlebrow, run-of-the-mill extramarital affair.

Seriously. I think our marriage is just about perfect right now. We've endured all kinds of stresses, but I think the stress of parenthood would have sucked all the joy and romance right out of our marriage. Instead, our marriage is a sanctuary from the rest of the world, one to which I retreat more and more at the same time I see my old classmates on Facebook posting nothing but pictures of and status updates on their children.

I'm sure there are lots of people who would respond that they just couldn't imagine life without their children, and that's fine. It's a tradeoff you have to make. I made it, and it wasn't easy at the time, but I'm glad I did. But what was best for Dr. Trench and me wouldn't necessarily be everyone's cup of tea.

Oh, by taking cover when you hear thunder. This whole thing started as an inappropriate friendship in which Sanford was involved in this woman's personal life. She was not a family friend, but someone he'd met on some junket. That should have been his warning right there.

I'm truly shocked by the number of people who think that the sophomoric, bathetic mooning of this middle-aged, married father of four, fundamentalist Christian and supposed public servant deserves any sort of sympathy whatsoever. Obviously you've never known what it's like to have a parent or spouse desert the family for the supposed "lightning strike" of "true love."

It's not teh gays that are destroying marriage, it's this utterly adolescent and hormone-induced idea that you should follow your bliss, no matter how fleeting that bliss is or how many people you hurt in the process who truly love and depend on you.