I think we are all aware of the phenomenon of men suddenly leaving their marriages with no warning, with nothing more than a final "It's over". No months of discussion, no signs of unhappiness, just that final pronouncement. Well, now they have a term for it. It's called Sudden Wife Abandonment.

The term was coined by Vikki Stark, a family therapist who was married for 21 years until her husband announced that their marriage was over while she was preparing dinner. She called it Sudden Wife Abandonment, and started the Sudden Wife Abandonment Project, with the apt acronym "SWAP".

Ms. Stark decided to put a call out to other women who had found themselves in this situation, and discovered that there seemed to be a distinct pattern in men who suddenly and without warning leave their marriages. First came the announcement that they were leaving, without any notice or warning. Secondly came some pretty bizarre reasoning for their decision. One man told his wife that he had decided that Aquarians and Capricorns just weren't suited to each other. Another told his wife he was leaving because he couldn't stand the drivers in his neighborhood. The final piece occurs when men then tell their wives that they had never been happy in the marriage, leaving the women to question all of their past memories.

To combat the belief that she had been mistaken about her marriage for over two decades, Ms. Stark went back and re-read greeting cards her husband had given her the year before. By doing this she was able to convince herself that her marriage had not been a sham. It turns out that in the vast majority of cases, men are suddenly abandoning their wives because they have already found someone else. Because these husbands know what they are doing is wrong, they still feel the need to justify it to their wives.

Stark has created a website for women in her situation, Runaway Husbands, and has written a book on the topic as well, titled Runaway Husbands: Making Sense and Bouncing Back from a Divorce You Didn't See Coming. Hopefully with these resources in place, fewer women will feel so crazy when it happens to them.

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