WAW, not sure how to proceed...

[dearme]

On the "date night", how do you plan on letting her know? Certainly you don't plan on springing it on her.

How would you phrase the "ask"... because it ties a little into the second part... of knowing what you want and asking for it...

because "date night" is not just for your W, it's for you, too... it is certainly something that you want, because you want to do something nice for your W but you also enjoy it...

So again... how are you planning on asking? The words...

I thought I would do something like J3B suggested--letting her know a couple of weeks ahead of time that I made the reservations, where, and when, and tell her that I would really like/enjoy her company. I figured this allows her to decline if she is feeling pressured/pursued and gives her time to decide, while also implying (correctly) that if she decides not to go, I intend to go anyway and will just go with a friend instead.

Did she give the things you wanted and asked for? Because she was likely giving the usual things in a marriage... the things that most people expect in a marriage... but if she was really giving you want you wanted... do you think you would have maybe paid her a little more attention...? and reciprocated with giving her the things SHE wanted...?

Because... that's how it works...

If we give something they really, really want... they DO appreciate it... and there's a strong, human tendency to want to give back something just as meaningful to the giver, in return...

Your "darkness" might very well have been that the things she gave were truly not meaningful to you in a way that was profound enough for you to reciprocate...

Possible...?

Definitely possible... but I think what sums up our dynamic more is that she did give me what I wanted/needed, but because she was so...I don't know...ambiguous...equivocal...about what she really wanted/needed, what I ended up giving back to her, the way I showed her I loved her, was to return what she was giving to me. That is, I was loving her in the same way that I like to be loved.

You know, the whole concept of love languages was something totally foreign to me until just recently, but it very nicely sums up a big part of what went on in our marriage. It had never occurred to me that the way I like love to be shown to me (physical touch, words of affirmation) might not be the way my wife needed love to be shown to her (quality time). So I was inclined to give back to her as much as I could, because of how much she gave to me... But I gave in a way that came naturally to me. I gave her what I wanted/needed, not realizing that as much as I gave, it wasn't what she was wanting/needing. And because of my wife's issues, the thing that she contributed to this, she didn't feel comfortable/worthy of telling me that she needed something other than what I was giving. I think she felt like she should just be happy with what she got...that to ask directly for something different would mean she didn't appreciate what she already was getting.

And I think where she is in the marriage right now is that it's all been too much work, she's tired of the effort, she doesn't believe that any changes in me or our marriage can be permanent, and perhaps most unfortunately she's made a decision that she's not willing to take the risk. That's what gets to me the most...knowing that she has really intentionally walled off her heart and has made a cold hard rational decision about this.