Aaron's WAW Story

[firedog31d6]

Hello family,

I have been browsing the BB's for almost a month now and I feel bad that I haven't posted my own story yet, but I just kept getting fascinated with everyone else's sitch's and never had time to do this until now.

My story,

Most of our problems were rooted in finances. I was a tight-wad, she was a free-spirit who liked to spend. Enough said there. I always had dreams of giving my family a nice, comfortable lifestyle and felt that I had let them down by choosing a low-paying career, so I went back to school and did some foolish things to try and become wealthy so my family could have a better life than I was giving them. I wound up spending so much effort and time chasing the Benjamin's that I didn't notice my wife's love tank was totally empty. She never told me, or perhaps she did, but I was to stupid to stop and address it. I just thought "one day, she'll see how much I love her because of all the sacrifices I am making for my family".

There is more to the story, but I'll skip to the meat and potatoes. In March of 07' after a rough year together financialy, she finally gave me the ILYBINILWY news which totally blew me away. It brought me down hard and fast. She asked me if I would move in with my mother for a while so she could "cool down" and figure things out for herself. Of course, I panicked!

It only lasted 2 weeks, but what happened to end it, was I called her up and made her a promise... and somehow it worked. I told her that I was a fool for not loving her over the years and giving her the affection she needed. I basically took responsibility for every problem we ever had and promised her that if she gave me one more chance that I would prove to her that I could become the man she married 10 years prior. She reluctantly accepted and let me come home. For the most part, I made good on my promise! I was determined to make it work. First thing I did was become more physically attractive.. I lost a bunch of weight (70 lbs to be exact), got a tan and have never looked back. I am now setting a goal to make next years firefighter calendar, so I feel that I have no issues with that anymore. Next thing I did was try to loosen up financially and show her that I was not going to worry so much about money. We went out more, bought more things, went shopping and so forth. Then I made it a point to change my behavior around her. You see, I used to have a pretty short fuse and would get angry with her and raise my voice too much around her. I stopped this and did many other 180's not even knowing then about DB principles. I just knew that I had to identify what didn't work before and do the opposite.

Anyway, it worked...within a couple of weeks, we were newly weds all over again and it was the happiest time of my life. I mean the sparks began to fly all over again.. we were even having phone sex one night right after getting back together which we had never done over 10 years. I was at work that night, she was at home. Our sex-starved marriage was re-kindled seemingly overnight and things were back on track. We both seemed to want nothing else but one another again! She smiled at me everyday and I smiled back. I told her everyday how much she meant to me and did everything I could think of to fill her tank.

Then about 7 months later, something happened. I don't know exactly, what the culprit was, but I do know that her behavior started to change pretty quickly. I remember we had an argument on super bowl Sunday back in Feb and she broke my heart when she told me that she hadn't noticed any real "effort" by me to change. Talk about taking the wind right out of your sails! I began to cry right in front of her and she immediately came and hugged me and appologized for saying that. Anyway, that seemed to mark the beginning of a rapid downward spiral that brought us to our current sitch.

Because of her behavior changes, I began to become suspicious of a possible OM in her life. She started becoming increasingly wrapped up in her job... going in early and working overtime...she began to withdraw physically from me.. started falling asleep on the couch...all this while seemingly making extra effort to keep her appearance flawless. She came home from work one day wearing a very high-cut pair of shorts and I noticed that she had been tanning. I confronted her about this and asked her why she was going to such lengths to look attractive while withdrawing from me. We hadn't had sex in a few weeks and here she was looking sexy.... obviously not to impress me right? She made light of my suspicions and told me to stop smothering her. This made it worse.. I couldn't let it go.. I started checking up on her and doing just what she told me not to do. I smothered her because I was certain that something... someone was pulling my wife away from me and by God.... I had to stop it!! I had worked to hard to get here and wasn't going to re-live the worst moment in my life all over again. Well, nevertheless... it happened. After smothering her to no-end.. she finally told me that she wanted to spend some time apart back in May.

She vehimently denies any PA with any OM's and gets somewhat deffensive when I have asked her. I moved in with my Aunt 2 1/2 months ago and the roller coaster began. I did just about everything wrong you could imagine. I would first call her up and try to beg and plead for forgiveness, asking her to go to MC... promising her I would change... do whatever she wanted... wrote her a blank check and said "tell me what you want and I'll do it" etc... Then when she rejected that, I got angry and would accuse her of cheating. Then I would go over to the house while she was at work and dig around in her closet trying to find some smoking gun that would confirm my suspicions once and for all. I found out that she had purchased another cell phone in addition to the one she had on my plan. She knew that I was looking at the old phone bills to see who she was calling and apparently wanted this new phone to keep me in the dark. I later found out that she was having the new phone bill mailed to her office. I confronted her about this and she says that she just wanted to have her own phone to use text messaging because our plan didn't include unlimited TM'S.

Anyway, I don't know if she's seeing someone or not, but I know that I wanted her back. Even though I feel that I have made extrordinary changes to be a great husband again, I still feel like a failure now because of her rejecting me again. I somehow feel that my changes may have come too little-too late or something... Cont'd