Hello all, I am a newby, but have been reading these forums the last couple days and have picked up a lot of useful information.
Here is my story:
My wife and I met 4+ years ago. After 1 year of dating, she moved in with me, a year later we were engaged and year after that we were married and bought a house together. We moved very quickly with a lot of these steps. Throughout that time our relationship was good and bad. She would try to be flirty with me and I would push her away. I really wish I didn’t do that then. It wasn’t always like that though, but I now know there wasn’t consistent intimacy in our relationship. There were a lot of challenging things going on in our life during this time with her going through 3 jobs that she hated and her finding out she was infertile. There was so much stress on our relationship and it all started to boil over when we moved into our new house.
Now, after living in our new house for 2 months and just before our 1 year wedding anniversary, my wife says she wants to separate. We had been fighting a lot off and on and things were at a bad spot, so something needed to be done. At the time, I wasn't sure her leaving the situation was a good thing. I wanted us to go to counseling and try to work on things. Her reasoning was that we couldn’t communicate and we didn’t have any of the non-sex intimacy in our relationship. We went forward with the separation (I even helped her move into her parent’s apartment). At first, we started going out on dates once a week and things went really well, she said she was starting to miss me again. At that point I pushed for us to see each other more and this pushed her away and we began arguing again. She pulled away completely at this point. About a month ago, without telling me, she ended all communication and would not respond to my texts and phone calls. This was like a shot in the heart. The more she pulled away, the more I kept asking her more and more to talk about things and see each other. I turned into a crazy person. I started having crazy anxiety and couldn’t sleep. We went out to lunch one day and she said that we are so different and that she is not sure she can ever get over the resentment she has. She is saying extreme things like we never had intimacy and she can never get over these things. I have read that I shouldn’t take a lot of things she is saying to heart right now because she is so hurt and full of resentment. When we had lunch, she would not say she wanted a divorce, she said everything but the d-word. It was almost as if she wanted me to handle it but I told her, it is not what I want. I told her that this relationship was important to me and that I saw more of the great times we had together and was willing to put in the work to get us back there and that I wanted to give her everything she always wanted that I didn’t give her before. I understand now that by pushing her and not being patient wasn’t the right decision and now I am trying very hard to use the 180 technique. I think she may be trying to use this technique on me right now, but since we really don’t talk about our relationship right now, I don’t know for sure. During the separation, I read the Divorce Busting Book. This has helped me get a perspective on what I should do. We haven’t spoken in 3 days, which is a lot for me, considering each day feels like an eternity not speaking to her. I definitely believe our relationship can be great again and it hard to explain, but we have done so many great things together and I don’t feel that she trusts her emotions enough right now to pull the trigger on a divorce. This gives me hope but I want to handle things patiently and take things slow, but saying that is easy said. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I also have one question. Her birthday is next weekend, should I text her happy birthday if I am currently practicing the 180 technique? I feel like I should, but am not sure.
