I can remember back to not so very long ago when the bomb was dropped and my wife "wanted space" that is was such a total shock and also the fact that "space" or distancing ourselves from each other was so totally and completely the opposite of "working on our relationship" that I couldn't believe that is what she wanted or that it would help in an way, shape or form. We had been living apart for more than a year and had been emotionally drifting apart for years and now she is telling me that she wants MORE of the same in order to figure out if she is going to remain married, how preposterous that was in my paniced and uneducated mind! And even from what I did "know" it seemed like if we had grown apart from the physical distance and the lack of time together and lack of attention to our marriage that spending time together and working on our marriage would be something to improve it. So to have my wife come to me and instead of saying "hey our marriage is in trouble, we need to work on it, we need to spend time together and reconnect, we need to go to MC and figure out some better ways of relating to each other and fulfilling each other's needs for emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, then I'd have been all for it, in fact that is what "made sense" to me. Her asking for even MORE of what got us to the horrible state we where in seemed crazy and would just finish off killing our relationship.
Anyhow that is what my POV was, especially with my wife and where we were at the time, I'd been waiting for more than a year for her to quit her job and move up here with the family to where SHE wanted to live so that just added to the feels of betrayal. Plus here is the person that is my best friend, who I've always worked with and pulled together all these years when trouble or crisis faced up and she is telling me she doesn't want anything to do with me, doesn't want to work together on this problem, it was completely personal in that respect, she wasn't cutting anyone else out of her life, just me, because I was the problem, even if it wasn't 100% me personally it was because I was her husband.
Who knows what the "right" or the "best" way to solve our problems would/could be, maybe pulling together and putting our efforts into our relationship and each other would have be the perfect solution, maybe me giving her all the space she wanted and never pleading or begging would have been the way to have fixed it, I really don't know, because it takes two people it seems like the lowest common denominator is the one that rules the relationship since you can't make one person feel anything they don't want to deal with, so the other person is forced to the same level in the relationship.
