Marriage: Footloose, But Not Fancy-Free

Running away, in American folklore, has always been considered more romantic than reprehensible. Each year, an estimated 100,000 middleaged, muddle-income American men flee the seemingly unbearable pressures of their jobs and families to seek a different life far from home. But for many of them, the heady wine of freedom soon goes flat. What then? After a few weeks, according to the Tracers Company of America, a New York firm that specializes in finding missing people, these runaways begin to act quite predictably. By sending up naive signal flags, they consciously...

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