Here’s something that I often hear from wives who have been left: “How is this fair? He gets to go off and live a great life with his girlfriend, and I’m left picking up the pieces. I’m alone with all the responsibility for the house and kids and I have to fight him for any bit of help I need.”

“How is that fair?!”

In a desperate attempt for the runaway husband to have to suffer consequences for the emotional damage he’s done to his ex and kids, some wives proclaim that wife abandonment should constitute a crime—an actual legal crime—that can be prosecuted in a court of law.

Wives want justice. When someone harms another, we expect that justice will be served and the offending party will have to pay.

So when women tell me that they want justice and that’s all they can think about day and night, I tell them this story, that I heard somewhere years ago, in order to encourage them to let go.

The story goes like this. A guy, we’ll call him Mike, was driving his rental car out of his friend’s driveway in L.A. when, out of the blue, a Mercedes comes speeding down the street and t-bones him right on the driver’s side, causing his car to spin around twice, during........

© Psychology Today