gonzo, absolutely.  This whole argument was so long ago, I'd completely forgotten until this all happened, and somehow it all came back to me, which tells you something.  It's so crazy that an intelligent man could come up with such a completely delusional self-serving rationale that absolutely totally defies logic: by definition if you're doing something that makes your wife consider divorce, that means the thing you're doing is more important to you than your marriage.  Otherwise you wouldn't do it!  So the idea that his extramarital affairs aren't "important" because blah blah blah, doesn't hold water.  It's economics.  You don't trade your baseball card for a different baseball card unless you value the new baseball card more than the old one.  You do something that destroys your marriage -- then by definition the thing you did is more valuable to you than your marriage was.

And since men are supposed to be the rational ones and women are supposed to be emotional and irrational, I don't understand why I'm the one who thinks this way.  Unless that stereotype is all BS too.