She left - My Story, First Post

[gogofo]

I am 33 years old and so is my wife, we have two sons one is 4 and the other is 2. We have been together for 9 years, living together for 8.5 years, and married for 6 years.

Wife announced she was thinking about separation at the beginning of December 2013, then moved out 12/28/13. It was a big surprise for me as I thought we were doing good. She is living in a house that her parents keep that was vacant.

We take turns with the kids and juggle them around our schedule.

I think we have worked each other apart.

In the last 6 months she started a Doctoral program, took on additional high stress duties along with her regular teaching, and serves on many boards at the college and is the Faculty Senate President. High stress and busy to say the least.

In the last 6 months I have been managing a multi-million construction project that has been high stress and long hours an at times I had to leave at the drop of a hat and travel out of state 5 hours away for days or a week at a time. This along with managing my other clients and workers that normally take up most of my work week. I was basically on call and working nights and weekends without any previous notice. Again, high stress.

She said her breaking point was Thanksgiving weekend when I was trying to be home with the family, but was visually miserable and emotionally absent because of the overwhelming stress and work. She told me to go to work if I needed and she said when I closed the door "something broke inside me."

At this point in our lives we were so scheduled and committed that a normal day would be as follows: I would work 7 to 4, pick up kids, cook dinner, eat with wife and kids, put them to bed at 8, leave for my office and work until 10 or 12 at night. Other days she would get the kids, cook, we would eat dinner, she would leave after bed time and work until late.

We basically did not have time to be together and maintain our relationship and she felt alone and abandoned by me emotionally during this time. After 4 to 6 months of this is when she broke.

I have been reading DR and just started the LRT. I was reading other books and applying relationship techniques when we would interact, but now know that we needed to be together for them to work.

Last Sunday I asked to take her to lunch on Wednesday and dinner Friday. Big mistake and after starting reading DR I know why. At the end of the heated talk/fight she basically said she wants a divorce but is waiting for me to work through my emotions.

She has her "revisionist history" of our relationship and says it was bad for 5 years. We were good in our relationship in late April early May and I think our last six months destroyed us.

We never worked on our relationship, never thought we needed to as we got along very well. But as our lives changed we didn't adapt our relationship skills and the separation is the result.

Kind of a long rambling story, but wanted to explain a lot of the back story.

I need help with LRT and how to work through our small interactions. We had been having dinner as a family on Sundays, but that may have been killed last week.

Thanks.