Superesse, I'm glad you LOLed - I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek with that statement.
Honestly, the first 45 years of my life were charmed. I was very lucky in a lot of ways, and when WS had his brief EA back in 2014, I didn't have a clue during or after, so I was pretty happy until 2020. When I look back at my life pre-pandemic, I can't complain. It's only the last 5-6 years that have been bad, and while they have been emotionally wrenching on a personal level, they could have been worse. (They almost always can, short of death, right? Though there were many days when death seemed preferable!)
If only WS had learned his lesson 11 years ago. The object of his affections turned him down when he proposed taking things beyond a "good friendship", and she even warned him against cheating and that it would only lead to regret. Unfortunately his takeaway back then was that it happened because we weren't having enough sex, so he asked me to improve frequency in the bedroom, that happened, and he was content for a while until he met and fell head-over-heels for his LTA AP.
Life has taught me some hard lessons these past few years, the biggest being that I was never as in control of my life as I thought. Hubris was mine because it seemed like when I did all the "right" things, I got the rewards I expected. Covid and then DDay taught me how naive I was. Now I try to live without expectations, but that means I also live without trust in the future. Que sera sera.
