Your post was extremely hard for me to read and has left me on the verge of a complete meltdown for the last 3 hours.
I think the question you posed is critical to the situation I'm in and why I'm sat here contemplating a lonely saturday night watching TV on my own or going to the cinema alone instead.
OK, here we go, I hope I can explain this properly. This is a long and difficult post for me to write...
My wife has always had a fear of losing her self identity. Her last boyfriend talked of proposing and she ran away. After we got married, she took over a year to change her surname to mine and then only when I said I would really like it if she did. She has never changed her name in professional circles but this is not uncommon in science.
She has always felt that having a child would completely rob her of her identity. She would become 'just another Mom', instead of an independent woman. Despite the fact that she works with many extremely successful mothers and I offered to put my career on hold for our potential family, I think this has been one step too far for her. She enjoys being around kids but has never felt maternal (I think her mother also had a role in this because during a conversation they in her 20's her mother told her she never expected kids from her).
I did know her feelings and I have always wrestled with how to deal with it. I remember late one evening at one of her family parties we were both drunk, we were discussing our plans for the future and she started shouting about how she never wanted kids and ran inside. I broke down in tears because I couldn't understand how my wife could be so devoted to her family and yet would refuse to start OUR family. Since that evening I always hoped that maybe her biological clock would start ticking and that she would be able to overcome her worries.
I never pushed her in any way about starting a family but after a minor crisis which led us to counselling for the first time we did discuss it at length because it was highlighted as an issue in the one session we went to. After discussing it at length outside MC, we BOTH decided that now was a good time to try. Almost all of our mutual friends were having children. Both her younger and my younger brothers had started families. I was worried about my age (I'd be in my late 50's by the time our first child left home) and she felt it was a good time in her career to be able to do it. She started taking folate supplements of her own volition and I got myself to the gym, started losing weight, and our sex life was better than it had been in years. Things were going great until she actually thought she may be pregnant. She was devastated and was really worried about the fact she still didn't want a baby and that I did. So, if we did have children she would resent me and if we didn't I would always resent her. At the time I tried to mollify her by saying we didn't have to do anything if she didn't want but two weeks later after another argument based on her family she left.
Since that time I don't think I have helped the situation and I believe she has lost a lot of respect for me. We have discussed the whole child issue since she left and she is now saying she may want children in the future but not now. Due to my now crippled self esteem (which has always been low) it is difficult for me not to take that as I may want children with someone else but not you. My response to her at the time was that I would 100% support her decision in this, it was her body and I would happily accept whatever she wanted both now and in future. I then followed it by saying having spent two weekends with my brothers small children I wasn't 100% sure anymore anyway! I said this jokingly as I was trying to keep the situation light but on reflection it may have been a bad thing to say.
Were there other areas of our marriage in which this sort of disagreement was happening? Certainly our social life had not been great in recent years but she always said she was happier spending time at home with me rather than going out so I thought it was OK. I know I made mistakes by not taking her out enough but I have apologised for that repeatedly to no avail. I have also suffered from depression and panic attacks due to work issues which I never faced up to until now. I believe they fit in with the nice guy syndrome I'm looking in to. Previously, I had pretty much ignored them because I felt that I could rely on my wife to help me through but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
Right now, I'm completely lost. She refuses to discuss things any further. She just talks about being done and how she is convinced she is better off without me. In the meantime I am floundering around trying to hold it together, spending a small fortune GALing, reading self help books like they are going out of fashion whilst desperately clinging to the hope that she doesn't actually mean what is coming from her mouth. All I want to do is address the issues whilst every single piece of advice (and again I really want to thank everyone who has contributed here) I have received says stay away and give her time. Well, everyone that is apart from my family who just want me to divorce her asap as they can see what a state I'm in.
