I will try to give a outline of where I am at. I have been with my wife for 14 years, married for 10, with two beautiful children. Basically, the problems started early last year when an old boyfriend got back in touch with my wife on Facebook. She asked me if it was okay and I said it was. But a few weeks later I woke up in the middle of the night and found my wife IMing with him. I asked her the next day what was going on and she said that she was devasted when the broke up 17 years ago and was trying to work through with this guy why they broke up as she had thought they would marry and it hurt her deeply when they broke up. I was a bit shocked by this revelation.
A few weeks later I came across an email from him on the home PC saying that my wife was his soulmate, he still loved her, that in his heart he knew she should be with him not someone else and that they should meet up to work out whether all the old feelings were still there. I confronted my wife who said that she had made it clear to him that she was committed to us and was not looking to leave me. I told her I wanted her contact with him to end.
A few months went by and I was contacted by this guys wife out of the blue on FB saying that he had left her and it was all my wifes fault. I also found out that my wife and this guy had met up a number of times for coffee although my wife maintained it was no more than that. This guy and his wife stayed separated for a few months but are back together now as far as i know.
My wife then told me that we had been drifting apart for a number of years, that I deserted her emotionally a number of years ago, that she was no longer in love with me.
She has also told me that she has never had an orgasm with me, that there is not the same spark with me that there was with this other guy, that she will always regret breaking up with him as she does not think she will ever feel for anybody else like she did for him.
Despite all this my wife maintains she is committed to us and does not want to break up, but I think that is more due to the kids then anythink else. We rarely have sex and she point blank refuses to break off contact with the other guy saying I have no right to tell her who her friends are. She tells me that she may never get over the invasion of privacy of me reading private emails of hers and basically tells me that my whole response has pushed our marriage to breaking point.
Beyond all that she seems to have a gigantic chip on her shoulder about us. She tells me that I emotionally abandoned her years ago after the birth of our first child. That I let her down. That she always expected her husband to look after her and that I didn't do that. She is always complaining that I do not do enough at home and am not involved enough with the kids. My job does involve long hours at times but I am either there or at home. I try to help when i can - most mornings getting the children up in the morning, getting them breakfast and dressed, dropping my daughter at kindy on the way to work, washing clothes on the weekend etc. But the fact of the matter is that my daughter is in childcare 3 days a week and while I am working my wife is doing art classes, French classes etc and then saying I don't do enough. I don't begrudge her doing the classes - I think it is a positive way for her to recapture a sense of self worth and defining herself as a person not just a wife and mother. But I get no appreciation for how hard I work.
And we live in a very expensive neighborhood because my wife wants to. She says that I do not appreciate the job she does raising our kids which is not true. according to her she has sacrificed her career to have a family. I do not get any appreciation for how hard I work to support our family as she says i would be doing that anyway. And she seems to think I have a choice about working late or weekends when a lot of my colleagues were laid off for not working hard enough.
I have tried to work through some of the issues with my wife. I have agreed that at times in the past I have been distracted by work, that perhaps at times I could have juggled things a bit better. But if I try to point out times or ways when I have not felt amotionally supported my wife does not want to hear it. It seems she has it in her head that I am a bad husband, all the fault is on my side, i let her down, i didn't look after her etc.
Unforunately, at the times that I supposedly let her down she never told me what she wanted from me. So i am now held to account for a time when I had no idea that there was actually a problem.
At the moment I am just lost. My wife has such a sense of victimhood about her. I have read a lot lately as well as had some individual counselling and have tried to apply some of the advice I have come across - that we both have to set boundaries in our relationship of what we consider acceptable, we need to speak in a non-judgemental fashion about what we need from each other, what we do that upsets each other etc. But it all seems to do no good. My wife just will not admit that if a relationship is going through a bad patch that we both must be contributing to it. She just wants to lay all the blame at my feet.
We tried marriage counselling earlier this year. After 4 sessions the counsellor said that all they could help us do was separate so we didn't go back.
So at the moment I just don't know whether there is anyway back. And all the criticism that my life has levelled at me is eating away at my confidence. You begin to have doubts about whether you are a decent, worthy person or whether you really are this person your partner paints you out to be.
