I have been thinking a lot about Don's dilemma, and I think we all know that its a toughie.
The issue is clearly about what we will or will not accept within our relationships...a difficult assessment to make when we have on our "rose coloured glasses" !!!
So here is a bit of applied psychology which hopefully you might find interesting. It is called a modified Maslow's Heirarchy and is a common psychological tool.
If you have a spare hour, sit down and take a sheet of paper and write down all the qualities/traits/physical/mental and behavoural characteristics you would like to have in your "perfect partner"
Be honest, be detailed and be as trivial as you want. Dont leave anything out...if big boobs are on your wish list...put them in
You can end up with hundreds of individual things that you "wish" for.
It works just as well for men and women, so you girls out there can do it too.
Now go away, have a break, get a cup of tee/coffeee/beer or whatever and come back to it after a while.
Now...be brutally honest with yourself and cross out ALL those individual items that you know deep down are not so vital...big boobs might be one of them...or not
Cross out those items that you truly believe are in the "nice to have" but are not in the "essential to have" category.
I venture to suggest you will cross out about 50 % of your list..that is about the usual number.
What you are left with are the absolute critical characteristics that are basically non-negotiable for you in your Partner and if they are not fulfilled, then you run the real risk of problems sometime down the track.
For Don's specific case, I think that "no dependant children coming to live with us" would be on the "must have" list.
What Don has done (and it is difficult, but admirable) is to say ...I dont love her enough to compromise on one of my critical components. That takes a strong and brave Man to do it.
Most of us would attempt to make the compromise, believing that true love conquers all...Don has got the truth of it.....it does not conquer all and he knows his limits.
Remember, it is not the good things about our partner and our relationship that bring it down, it is those things that are real or imagined red-flags and those things that were always outside of our real needs......in many cases we made the original compromise because of emotion...maybe we should not have.
Have fun...give it a try...knowlege is power.
David