So Drained

[Hurt84]

It's been a few months since I've posted but long story short, last year my W had an affair with a client of hers. It ended after about 6 months which eventually led to her coming home. I accepted that blindly, being happy that she wanted to come home, and we never went to MC or dealt with any of our issues that had come to the surface through her affair. By March of this year things had turned rocky again when contact with OM resurfaced and since we've had this weird in-house separation thing going where she's sleeping in a guest room. Contact with OM stopped about two months ago after I confronted him which she was furious about but I had to do something.

At that point she basically sat me down and told me that she didn't want to be married anymore and wanted a divorce. It's not the first time she said it but its usually when she gets to the point where she had enough. Each time she basically wants me to give in and say, "Okay, let's end this" but I haven't and won't. I've told her that. It's not that I want to fight with her through any proceedings but I'm just not at the place where I want to end our marriage. This most recent time I told her that if it is really something she wants then she shouldn't wait for me to do something about it. Learn about the process, talk to a lawyer, etc. I almost get the sense that when she does say it it's to scare me and back off because when I told her to go ahead and talk to a lawyer, that's actually when things turned around for us.

Since then up until about two weeks ago, we've been getting along, she would initiate contact and making plans, rather then spending all her time downstairs I'd come home and she'd be waiting to talk to me about her day and so on. She is still sleeping downstairs but up until about a week ago I was hoping that would start to change.

Through all of this, she got a new job and made some new friends with her coworkers. That was great because I felt like her old job started a lot of our issues because of her hours and that was where she met OM. Along with that, one of her coworkers now is a bartender and she began going out when this girl was working. At first it was once here and there which was fine with me. I didn't know the girl and would have other things going on so I didn't have a problem not going. Then it started to become a more regular occurrence to where it is now a weekly, if not multiple times a week thing. It's also not just the girl she knows from work anymore, it's all the regulars from the bar she goes to hang out with, guys included.

I'm fine with her having her own friends, I really am. The problems for me come in here:

• I don't know these people for the most part - I met two of them once for a half hour - so I really have nothing to go on as to who they are. She's made it clear that she wants to have separate friends which just seems odd to me. I don't need to be friends with these people, I just want to meet them.
• These people are all like five years younger than her and at different points in their lives: just out of college, no full-time job yet, still living at home with parents, renting summer houses and going out to bars on the weekend to relax. It's just not the same place as we or our normal friends are: married, owning a house, some of our friends have kids or are about to have their second kid. I keep thinking she's going through some quarter-life crisis or something.
• She stopped wearing her wedding rings probably about two or three months ago except for when our parents are around and this week changed her Facebook around to hide the fact that she's married (yes, it's stupid) - I'm left asking, "What's that about?" She resent the fact that I ask about it. It's almost like she's hiding the fact that she's married to anyone that doesn't know. She tells me that they all know she's married but knowing how open she is about her life with her actual friends, I doubt she walks around broadcasting it.
• I don't like have to compete for time with her. It's one thing if she goes out every other week or something but when now that it seems like it's weekly, I can't get her to commit to do anything.
• She's going on a trip to Las Vegas with a few of them in November. When she first brought it up to me it was just a "girls trip" so I was fine with it - especially since I just went Vegas with a few of my friends. But now it's changed into celebrating one of the girl's birthdays so her boyfriend is going and his friends. I'm obviously not invited which is fine and would be weird if I was but I'm left guessing about the whole thing and she takes offense to me questioning her.
• The obviously underlying trust issue I have given her affair last year.

I know a lot of this is all over the place. I've had people tell me, "Why do you put up with this?" The only answers that I come up with are that we've been together for too long and I've put too much into our relationship just to walk away. If I was going to give up, I would have last summer when she moved out during the affair. The other thing I say is that this isn't her normal behavior. Since all this happened between us, she has taken every opportunity to skirt responsibility if she can. I do believe that there is nothing going on with anyone else (at least right now), I just don't like being marginalized. I also know that things have been a lot worse and there are people with bigger problems here on this forum. I just hate feeling like I have no control and it's almost like things are back to square one at times. I wish I could turn back the clock like two years.