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"  My spectacular midlife crisis began when I was 46 under relatively innocent circumstances. On a lark for a girlfriend&amp;#039;s birthday, a group of us piled into an RV and drove from Los Angeles to Burning Man, the weeklong pagan arts festival in the Nevada desert. My production partner of 10 years, a married dad I&amp;#039;ll call Mr. Y, joined as our chauffeur. His company wasn&amp;#039;t unusual; he and I were best friends, and we often shared long days while our respective spouses were out of town on business. We each had kids and a significant other, and our relationship was purely platonic; the lack of sexual tension made for comfortable companionship. In this particular case, he was curious to see the festival too. And yet strange things happen in the desert. The simmering heat, free-flowing beer, and surreal environment sparked surprising admissions from a number of women in the group, including some I&amp;#039;d considered happily married. A 49-year-old girlfriend was vigorously pursued by a 28-year-old in semi-medieval garb and a utilikilt, and we exchanged tearful stories about minivans and car seats and small children. Since when did it become okay for us to spend our evening hours eating Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, often washed down with a light chardonnay? The responsible, working-mom facades we had built back home felt flimsy and remote. Mr. Y listened to our conversations, and as we watched the 100-foot Burning Man effigy collapse in flames, I suddenly had my own realization about him\u2014that I loved him and wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. When I blurted out my feelings, Mr. Y admitted that he felt the same way, though he added, &amp;quot;I figured we would always end up together, but it would be decades in the future, when our kids had moved on and our spouses had gotten sick of us.&amp;quot; I was shocked. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to have an extramarital affair. Nor did I believe that, in my mid-40s, I would fall in love again. I had been living with my hardworking, kind, stable husband for 20 years. We had a wonderful house and two sweet, funny daughters, ages six and eight at the time. We also had fulfilling careers; he was a musician, and I was a writer and performer. His work involved lots of travel, leaving me alone for weeks on end. At first I&amp;#039;d felt abandoned when he was gone, but over the years I&amp;#039;d gained enough emotional distance to make his absences tolerable, which we both, as co-managers of our relationship, considered a good development. My single-parenting style often amounted to putting my children in front of the TV with stale Halloween candy as I sat in bed writing on my laptop, and e-mails between my husband and me were gradually reduced to home-repair updates and packing lists. Mr. Y and I returned to our normal lives, but our affair continued in secrecy. After four months of sneaking around, however, the intensity of our feelings, coupled with the horror and guilt we felt from all the lying\u2014the holidays were especially painful\u2014made coming clean to our families seem like the best path. We thought that if we were calm and loving and had a team of therapists standing by, the news could be broken gently. Our careful plans were shattered, though, when the cat was let out of the bag too early (on a fraught cell-phone conversation during a drive on the freeway, no less). The revelation exploded our households and devastated our children. It was too much for Mr. Y to bear, so he severed ties with me and attempted to reconcile with his wife. Meanwhile, I sequestered myself in a 750-square-foot shack filled with wine and tears and Ambien. Trying to regain control of my life, I wrote a magazine article that questioned the institution of marriage. That led to an ill-fated TV appearance during which I was asked, on air, about my affair. Hoping to avoid the issue, I stammered through an oblique answer and left feeling disgraced, guilty, and reduced to a bad cartoon, which arguably I was.  Yet with that scarlet A newly emblazoned on my forehead, a whole world opened up. Strangers would confess things to me that they&amp;#039;d never told anyone else. A woman I met on a plane, who was traveling to a spa retreat for her 40th birthday, revealed that her handsome, successful husband was unbearably mean and cold in private. In fact, she&amp;#039;d had a 48-hour affair at a sales conference several months prior and still fantasized about it every day. She felt trapped, though, because her children were preschool age, and their abundant lifestyle was largely thanks to her husband. I found myself coming to a new understanding of all this messiness and heartbreak that, behind the masks we create for ourselves, so many of us silently endure. Including my girlfriends, my beloved girlfriends. They came to my shame-filled hut with food and bedding and love and, for the most part, a total lack of judgment. One friend even brought over a bucket of cleaning supplies and washed my car for me. As often as there was pity, though, there was also curiosity. Many people in long-term marriages wonder what divorce is like, regardless of whether we want to act on it\u2014or even dare to acknowledge it. When asked, I was able to state truthfully that, at least in my experience, it wasn&amp;#039;t a magic fix. More than anything, as my friends and I huddled in my little home, I found a safe place to talk. The unexpected boon of this full-on soul-and-body &amp;quot;peel&amp;quot; is that I emerged from this time completely renewed. When I turned 50, two years ago, I felt like my odometer had flipped back to the zeros. My birthday party that year was a riot of Veuve Clicquot and conga lines. Leading the pack were my daughters, to whom I have become a far more joyous and present mother. The cherry on top of my happier life was that Mr. Y had once again become part of it. After four months of trying to mend his marriage, he met me for lunch. We were wiser\u2014not to mention emotionally exhausted\u2014so it was hardly a passionate reunion. But it was the beginning of a joint acknowledgment that our feelings for each other were still intact. We eventually got back together, but not as cataclysmically; instead, we put time and thought into getting it right the second time. Mr. Y and I now live together happily. When we look back at all the grief that immediately followed our affair, it feels like a bad dream. But I wouldn&amp;#039;t erase a single one of those difficult moments, any more than I would take back the great moments of my marriage\u2014like our wedding day and the births of our daughters. Even at the very rock bottom of it all, when Mr. Y was out of my life completely, I never wished that the events of Burning Man could be wiped from the past. Except, perhaps, for the sight of that utilikilt. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a2088/extra-martial-affairs-0514/>