Ok, I'll do the best I can. On the one hand, my W says she wants complete emotional intimacy about thoughts, dreams, sex, etc. But, when she extends herself and doesn't get back what she expects, she attacks emotionally and then goes passive aggressive, which over the years has caused me to close off to her in some ways. Sexually, she was more experienced than me when we met, and more direct and frank about it. Truthfully, I was young, and intimidated, and my male ego expressed its intimidation in a manner she took as rejection, so she started to wall off her full sexuality from me. I saw this happen, and I really tried to get her to open back up, but she was too hurt, and wasn't willing to risk again.
She's also a dreamer, which is something I love about her, but while she really pushed for us to start the standard suburban lifestyle of a family home and three kids, she also didn't want to let go of her dreams of a more exciting life filled with travel and adventure. Particularly when the kids were little, I was just trying to get through each day and I took her expression of those dreams as just complaints about the life she told me she wanted, and which I was busting my butt to provide. I would discuss her dreams sometimes, but always in the context of "someday" when the kids are bigger, which she did not take as very satsifying. I felt she was being immature and irresposible, and I started to resent her for it, which caused me to wall off.
Through all this, we still loved each other, and we still maintained a decent family life. We revelled in the kids we created. However, our life became all about managing our day to day responsibilities, and all these things inside her were just building up pressure to get out. She was so unhappy and she just didn't see me as someone she could express her feelings to, which is really sad.
Now enter the OM. She had known this man when she visited this foreign country when she was young. That time in her life represented everything she felt she was now missing, and once she turned 40, she started to feel her life was slipping away. This man had expressed much interest in her back then, but she was completely uninterested in him, at least that's what her mother tells me. She initiated contact with him via e-mail, found him single and still interested in her, and they began an e-mail relationship. She began to share all these feeling and dreams that she didn't feel safe sharing with me. They got closer and closer, and she started telling me she didn't love me anymore. Last October she told me our marriage was over, and their relationship immediately turned sexual. They began an explicit e-mail, phone, and webcam relationship, and planned to meet in person to consumate. I didn't know about any of this until ten days before she was to leave on this trip, a trip she told me was for research for her PhD. When I discovered all this I was devastated. I managed to get her to cancel her trip by being tough, but I failed to convince her to stop the affair. She was too far gone, in full affair mode, completely obsessed, talking with him several times per day, texting all the time, e-mails, etc. She was expressing to him how she felt she found her soul mate, and how it's a miracle they found each other again, etc. Really blowtorching it, as per your other posting about affairs. She moved out a couple weeks after I found out about the affair.
I knew that often times these affairs die when the secrecy and taboo nature is removed, so I just went completely dark, and let happen whatever was going to happen. I was GALing, detaching, and facing the liklihood that my marriage was over. About a month after she moved out, she travelled to see the OM for a week. She was planning another trip a few months later, but I heard the OM was starting to doubt that they could have any real future together, so I presume due to the affair starting to collapse, she went again a month after her first trip. A couple weeks after that, her moods started fluxuating wildly, and she went through an emotional crisis where she was crying all the time, and eventually went on anti-depressant meds. That's when I heard they "broke up". My source is very reliable that they did indeed "break up", but I don't know what that means, since they still talk on the phone all the time, albeit much less than before. She still gets in these really bad moods for reasons she won't discuss, so I assume they have something to do with OM. My best guess is that they've made some decision to "just be friends" because of the distance between them, but she's still relying on him for emotional support.
I don't know if it's the right time yet, but if she's healing from the years of hurt in our marriage, how do you think I should start trying to rebuild trust with her so she feels she can share her dreams and sexuality with me again? Is it essential that the OM is completely out of the picture, because if it is, I could be waiting a long time. Should I give her an ultimatum of him or me? Should I wait for her to come to me, more than she already has? I think rushing things would be a big mistake, so I'm totally fine just letting things sit for a while.
Obviously our M is dangling by a thread and I don't know if we can rebuild it. It would be rough road back, but I've come to such clarity on where things went wrong, I would really like the chance to just "test the waters" between us and see if it could be different.
