Tara, thank you for your words! I left my first (still going through divorce with him) a year a nd a half ago because I loved him too. I found many ways to love him, after being neglected for 2 decades plus, I had to. I needed an education. I had waited on him to finish school for 20 years. When I finally started back to school and had the light at the end of the tunnel, it was time. He knew all along. We had talked about it. I had talked about my evolving love for him. I talked to him all along the way, hoping that something I said would spark something in him. Only after there was a threat (another man) did he start to put energy in to us. After 25 years of marriage. He learned how to do laundry, he learned how to make just 1 dish the kids liked. He took us to an opera in Chicago. It was sweet, but oh, so late. How I loved him was not going to change back. I knew he was incapable of having the staying power needed. Good man, perhaps. Good father, not a chance. All hell broke loose a year into the divorce as well. He was not the man his words said he was. He was the man his deeds told me he was and my heart was afraid he was; a narcissistic man with all permission to be so from his family and cultural upbringing. We leave because we love them, then sometimes find out that they really were the problem all along, even though they said you were. Yay, for life's twists!