Walk Away German Wife (WAGW)

[PortlandDad]

Thanks for the bump and for the comments keyzblew,

I'll start out by saying that I do love my wife; at the risk of sounding like a total sap, she is the most important person in my whole life. In fact, I totally obsess over her. Just hearing her voice on the rare occasion when she calls is enough to salvage my entire day. I desperately want to work on our marriage and I want it to succeed. I know that I neglected her and made her feel like she was second-best for so long but now that I want to treat her the way that I should have been treating her for all these years, she has shut me and our kids out of her new life.

Thus far I have respected her wishes. I have given her time to be alone and the of course with her in Germany she has all the space and solitude that she wants. I don't initiate contact with her and I let her call me if she wants to talk. I still maintain a healthy dialogue with my mother-in-law who lets me know the goings-on as best as she can, but even she is now mostly separated from her daughter. I allow the kids to call her whenever they feel like it, but even that contact is seldom and has tapered off as the months have passed.

I'm pretty sure that our move to Oregon, and my invalidation of her wishes to move to Texas were both body blows to our already shaky marital foundation. Not only did it move her away from any support that she had in Utah with my extended family and her friends, but it also torpedoed the chance to get her parents to move in with us.

In my earlier pleadings with her, we talked about the possibility of moving to Germany to be together: I even looked at the prospect of finding a job there briefly. The biggest problem is that my german language skills are pretty anemic, despite being married to a native speaker for 18 years. My biggest reason for not actively pursuing a family move to Germany has been for the sake of our kids. My kids speak even less german than I do, which has also been a continual source of contention between us: she claims that I never supported her teaching the kids german, or encouraged them to grow up bilingual. I don't want to uproot them from the US and take them to Germany where they would be years behind their peers in school, especially since they would have to come up to speed with the language. I promised my wife that if she would come back for 6 more years, that I would study and improve my german skills by taking classes, reading books, having her tutor me, etc. and that we would go back to Germany together when the kids moved out (our youngest is 12). It is a promise that I am willing to keep because I do love her and I do want to grow old together with her, but it seems that she is now in the mode of not wanting to come back under any conditions.

We haven't received any C for our problems, mostly on account that she says she doesn't want to work on the marriage any more. She says that she is happy where she is and that she doesn't want to be married any more. I understand her sentiments and I do validate her wishes when I do talk to her, even though it hurts me so much. I just can't understand why she would leave her kids behind. Our current parenting plan would give me full custody of them and she would only see them for 6 weeks during the summer. Our kids were (and are!) her life and I just can't fathom why she would willingly remove herself from their lives so completely. I know that DB coaching would help me, but I am unsure how effective it can be since I am already in the LRT with her and it does not seem to be working. I guess it is time for the after LRT...

I don't intend to give up on our marriage. I love my wife too much to do that. She told me back in November before she left that if she found out that I was in any way sick or ailing that she would stay and wouldn't leave. At the time I was having an endoscopy for a lump in my throat: it turned out benign. Likewise, I have been treating this WAW situation as an illness of hers and I would never abandon her while she was sick or ailing, either.

Thanks again for your kind thoughts and ideas!