Sitting in my house all alone...

[Navyguy]

Hello everyone, here's my story. I thank you all in advance for the time and care you put into this board. It really seems like a special community. I have a WAW which I still love dearly.

I am a 31 y/o civil engineer military officer, my wife is a 30 y/o homemaker. We met in September 2001, and got married in April 2004. Neither of us had much previous relationship experience. We have been through a lot together, and I want us back together more than anything. Since we were married, we have had 2 absolutely wonderful kids, D5 and S2, lived in 5 different houses, and I did 2 6-month deployments.

I think she has been unhappy since our daughter was born. She had (and still is) completely detached from me and has had the wall up ever since. She has never been good at communicating, and I think that comes from her childhood, she had a very emotionally/physically abusive father. She has always kept everything bottled up, and the few times she did try to talk to me about her unhappiness (which I now know was very difficult for her) I always came up with excuses which ended up making her feel bad and she would give up, resent me for it, and then act happy again for 6-12 months until she tried talking to me about it again. Of course, I always thought it was a little thing and was clueless to the fact that I was destroying our marriage.

My wife sent me an ILYBINILY-type e-mail while I was deployed to Afghanistan in May 2009. That is when I finally realized that she was truly unhappy. There were tons of warning signs and I missed them all...I have no excuse for that other than inexperience and ignorance. I have devoted my life to working on becoming a better husband and father since I got that devastating e-mail.
I think the vast majority of her discontent came from the first few years after our daughter was born. I was not there for her like a good husband and father should be. After she was born, I continued to live my life like I didn’t have a daughter. I had a video game addiction and I regularly would go play golf or go mountain biking and leave her at home with our daughter. I would always ask her if she cared if I went, and she never said she did, but apparently she really did. The video game addiction was probably the worst…she saw it as me saying a video game was more important to me than her and our daughter, and looking back I’m sure she was justified in thinking that. I always thought I had a good balance in life, because I would still do things with her and our daughter on what I thought was a regular basis, but obviously she didn’t see it that way.
Around the time our son was born, I started to turn things around, but looking back now I don’t think I had my whole heart into it, and I think I over-compensated at times but still continued with some of the bad behavior as well.

After I got the ILYBINILY e-mail I started really researching what could be wrong. I came across the WAW story on the internet and it instantly spoke volumes to me. I ordered DR while I was in Afghanistan and read it cover to cover twice prior to coming back home. My wife picked me up from the airport and I told her that I was a changed person and that I was going to prove it to her. For the past year and a half I have been trying to show her I am a better husband and father, and I do think that I truly have made some hugely positive changes in my life. I am now totally devoted to her and my kids, and she has acknowledged that I am really a great father now. I implemented many of the strategies from DR successfully, but at the same time, I screwed things up big time. In addition to improving myself, I tried to fix her too. I constantly did “temperature-checks” with her and wanted/asked/begged for her to recognize my changes and to let go of the past. She would always tell me that she was unhappy for so long and that she just needed more time. I would let it go, and things would get better for awhile, but then I would screw it up by asking her why things were still not good for her. Every time it would send us back to square one. I constantly wanted her to give back, and she just wasn’t there…and all I was doing was pushing her further away every time. We had recently both started seeing counselors separately and that has been a great experience for me. I don’t know how she’s been doing with hers, but I don’t think her counselor has been entirely helpful (more to follow on that one).

Over Christmas I pushed her over the edge. We travelled back to Colorado for Christmas and we had 2 days together in the car. I was concerned about the drive on the way and I worked with my counselor to come up with a plan to make it go smoothly. I think I had a good plan, but it went out the window after the first hour of the drive. I flashed my brights at a car about an hour after we left for going very slow in the left lane. I used to be a very aggressive driver and that was something else that really bothered my wife. She never told me that, but since our kids were born I have mellowed out a lot behind the wheel. Anyways, that incident pissed her off and I had no idea. For the next day and a half I had been trying to implement my plan for making the drive fun and working on our communication with each other, but all it was doing was pissing her off more, because all she could think about was me flashing my brights. Once we got to Colorado we had a couple good days, but then I got needy again. I started really pushing her to start communicating with me and tell me when I was doing something she didn’t like. She saw that as me trying to blame her for our problems (similar to back when she used to try to talk to me about problems) and she just lost it. She started throwing out every single thing I have ever done wrong (even a few from before we were married) and I just kept pushing the communication issue. She then told me about a conversation she had with her counselor. Her counselor asked her if she thought I was cheating on her. Her response was “no, but I don’t think I’d care if he was”. The counselor was very surprised by this response and told her that she didn’t realize how upset she really was. The counselor then told my wife that she needs to decide if she can get over the past and forgive me, and if not, it’s not worth trying to save our marriage. She became more upset than I have ever seen her…she could hardly breathe she was crying so hard. This broke my heart…so I decided that we just needed to stop talking that night and try again tomorrow. So I did, and by then she had already decided she had had it. We had been staying at my parents house together, but that day she packed up her stuff and went over to stay with her sister (our families are both from the same town). I thought it was only going to be for a couple nights but it wasn’t…
Our plan for the trip was to go home for Christmas, and then after new years I had to go to California for 2 weeks for a class and she was going to stay in Colorado to help her sister who was due with a new baby on January 11th. Her sister had the baby on December 23rd, so I figured she would be coming back home to DC when my class was done on January 14th. A couple days after the huge blow up I asked her when she was planning on coming back home, and she told me she didn’t know. I was completely devastated when she told me that. For the next couple days until I went to California I kept trying to talk to her and talk her into committing to coming back. Every time I tried talking to her, she would get so upset, and it would end with her telling me she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. I couldn’t believe that she would keep me away from our kids, and the thought of being apart from them was really killing me. After the first week in California, and a few bad phone calls, I decided that talking to her about things was doing nothing but hurting my cause. I went online and read the DB website and that is when I FINALLY came to the realization that I need to let go. I am now working on the last resort technique, but it has been a constant struggle. I think it would be easier if she was around DC and I could see the kids, but they are 2000 miles away. I told her that I am going to leave her alone to give her time to think, and if she or the kids want to talk or need me for anything, I’m a phone call away. It has now been over a week since I’ve been back home alone, and it is a constant battle to not pick up the phone and tell her that I need her and the kids back here and that this is killing me. She has called a couple times to let the kids talk to me, but she does not want to talk to me. We’ve talked a few times about some logistics things, and I talked to her a bit last night about what her counselor said to her and told her that everything I have learned says that her counselor was terribly wrong. I also proposed some phone or skype counseling, but she did not respond. I asked her to think about it. I have been thinking about taking a long weekend to go see the kids in Colorado next weekend. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not. I really, really want to see them and I miss them and they miss me terribly.

Basically, I feel like a lack of experience, perception, and communication has destroyed my marriage. I feel like I would be such a good husband if she would take me back…and I will NEVER again pressure her to “fix” herself. I’ve been thinking about sending her Michelle’s youtube WAW video, because I think it would speak volumes to her and give her some hope, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not…again she’ll likely see it as me trying to fix her.
I love her so much, and all I want is to make things right. I feel like I have let her down terribly and failed as a husband and failed my children. They can’t have their daddy right now because mommy can't stand to be around me. Thank you all for taking the time to read this. I really look forward to becoming part of this community, and I hope that someone reads this and it prevents them from going through what I am right now.