Wife dropped the bomb on me two months ago

[shouldistillhope]

BKS,

I will try and respond to your theory as best i can, cause it matches what i have gone through regarding trying to balance going out with friends vs. staying home and being a dad and husband. You might see some familiar things in your sitch as well.

When my W and i first met, i had 4 or 5 good friends that i would go out with almost every weekend prior to meeting her. We would go to the clubs and raise h#ll, go golfing and just about everything guys do together when they are not married.

I think this is where it starts as far as losing contact with friends and you can let me know if you see any similarities.

You start dating her seriously, yet she mentions that you're not spending enough time with her and she maybe resents the fact that you still want to hang out with your buddy's. She wants to start being the most important thing in your life so over time you start losing contact with them. At first, she is willing to hang out with you and your friends because she doesn't want to seem needy and controlling. Over time though, you end up leaving your single life and friends behind for the sake of your new relationship with this woman, and things seem perfect. You end up now spending more time doing things as couples with her and her friends and now your single buddies that you spent so much time with kind of go thier own ways and end up getting into relationships and married as well. During this time you establish new friends as a couple and you stop doing things with old friends because you don't want your new partner to think you refuse to grow up and you are worried she might see you as immature.

Then you start to take life more seriously. You plan a wedding and a future together all the while you are distancing former friends more and more for this new life.

You get married and start a family because thats what we all want, right? Now your lucky to see your old buddies once every couple months. They eventually move on and get married and start families of their own and move to different towns for careers or because that is where thier spouse lived.

Well, you stop seeing your old buddies except for maybe getting together once or twice a year, and if any of your single buddies are still around, wives don't want us to spend time with them because they are immature and we act like idiots when we get together.

We now start taking life more seriously. We start hanging out with her friends who are couples more and more. We feel we need to be more and more responsible because now we have children we need to raise and bills to pay and a household to help run. We become content to stay home and stare at each other every day. Wife decides she is bored and wants to start going out more with her friends. We become boring and stagnant. We are not as exciting as we were to them when we first met because we aren't as mysterious to them as we were.

We want to start going out more with our wives or buddies, but money always seems to be a concern. We can't afford it will be the mantra. We can't afford a babysitter or that restaurant is too expensive. So we stop trying to even go out on dates together as H and W.

I feel honestly that this is where i started losing my W.

We are no longer exciting to them. They become bored with us and we start becoming grouchy and irritable because this is not what life was supposed to be like. We start to bicker and argue because we are losing CONTROL.

We try to get back that control and stop being a team or a couple. They say things to us to try and get us to change, but we have already changed into what we thought they wanted us to be all along, stable, providing, and safe for them.

They want to be loved, respected and treated like they are still the most beautiful and special person you thought they were when you first met.

We lost our independence, and our sense of adventure in order to be a "family man." The very thing that attracted our wives to us in the first place in order to become what we thought they wanted. But we realize that they still want us to be independent and a family man as well. We forget how to balance those two things.

In short, we become co-dependant. We stopped being the man they fell in love with and we think that we cannot be happy without spending every minute with them, and when they want to go out seperate from us, we start trying to control them. Why should she get to go out on her own and i don't we ask ourselves, when in fact, the opposite is true. They start to resent us because we are always around. We are boring. There is no excitement in staying at home with us.

During BD, my W told me she wanted me to get out of the house more, to spend more time with my friends, I had become a shell of the man i used to be, but i thought i needed to be home all the time to be the responsible one for our kids. I started to resent her wanting to go out without me. She wanted to spend time with her girlfriends so she could have some conversation with someone besides the grouch at home who never does anything besides work, come home and drink a few beers and fall asleep in the chair watching tv.

It became more important for me to be with my kids because i had no friends anymore. They were all off leading their own lives and didn't have time to go out anymore, or our schedules never permitted it.

Now we are faced with a D. We don't exactly know what it means to go out and GAL because we don't have any single friends anymore. They have all moved on. We feel ignored and hurt because at the beginning, our wives wanted to spend all our time together so we change the way we act and live to meet their needs and over time we grow apart from each other.

It is important to shut off our outside distractions and pay attention to what our wives are telling us. It is important to look into their eyes when they talk to us and have a serious conversation with them so we can both share our feelings and concerns.

So many couples stop doing that. They only want to discuss their own individual feelings that they start ignoring what their spouse needs. It seems so easy to fix now, but it is broken for good and it cannot be fixed overnight.

One way or the other, we need to learn from this. Whatever path your life takes from here on out, we need to pay attention to what has happened to us to make sure it doesn't happen again. We need to learn how to be independant and happy on our own without being controlling.

We start to feel like we can't be happy unless our spouse comes back, but they don't want to be around us right now because we are making them unhappy.

I don't know if this adds to your theory, and i am sorry if this got a bit long, but i just wanted to share my viewpoint on what i see as similarities between our sitch's.

I get what your feeling, and i am also uncomfortable with being faced with trying to get out and meet new friends, but remember, you can become happy again. At the very least, our kids deserve to see us at our best.

Take care, i will try and stop by your thread as much as i can.