Leo, Unfortunately, it's too late for any repair. Even if my wife finds out that her new relationship doesn't work, she realizes that she's done way too much damage to fix. I've done some serious soul searching and asked myself those hard questions. She is 15 years younger than me and when I met her I had just gotten a divorce. She pursued me and against my better judgement, I ended up falling in love with her. Because of my own family situation, I was never exposed to outward signs of affection between my parents. I tried to show my wife as best I could how I felt about her. Early in our relationship, I wrote her letters which was the easiest way for me to express the feelings I had a hard time saying verbally. When I met her, she gave the impression of an independant, tough girl with a sarcastic wit. My reluctance to start a relationship with someone so much younger than me was another reason that I felt I couldn't show outward signs of being madly in love. So we became the closest of friends and eventually married.
When I try to think about occasions where I wasn't there to help her through emotional issues, nothing comes to mind. Obviously, I am not a therapist and she never came to me with what were outward signs that the demons from her past were causing her pain. The reasons that she tells me now for wanting to leave is that she feels the only way to correct her emotional and physical problems is to have the chair pulled out from under her. To start from scratch as it were. Although that isn't quite what she's doing, I think she is almost embarassed to admit that her problems have become too overwhelming and she doesn't want me to see that she is in fact very vulnerable and it will be much easier to start a new relationship where she can be the softer more needy person that maybe she never wanted me to see.
It saddens me deeply to think that she can't let me be the person to help her with that because I would never think of not being there for her.
And so now, I am trying to cope with the idea that she is still my closest friend but has found someone else who she feels will be the person she really needs.