I don't love you anymore

[nova]

Hello everyone. I’m new to the board. Had hoped I would never end up on a board like this, but here I am. I suppose the long and the short of it is that 4 days ago I came home from a two month business trip abroad and found that my wife had moved most of her belongings out. She had left a note stating that she wanted to meet for coffee that afternoon to talk. It was there that she told me that she did not love me anymore, refused marriage counseling, and that she wanted a divorce.

Now a little background I guess. My wife and I met our freshman year of college. She always described it as love at first site, but at the time we met I was in a relationship with someone else. Over time, my wife and I grew closer and my gf at the time grew further apart, mostly due to it being a long distance relationship. My wife and I started dating about four months after we met. We dated throughout the rest of college about 3.5 years. We were very close, did almost everything together, and by my senior year, I knew she was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life on. After graduating, we went on a weekend trip together to a mountain/lake resort town, and I asked her to marry me on May 24, 2008. She said yes. I was the happiest guy in the world. After we got engaged, we moved into an apartment together and both attended graduate school. We got married on July 24, 2010. It was just a small ceremony, but we were so happy. We lived in the apartment for about a year after getting married, so that she could finish her master’s degree. On May 16, 2011 we moved into our townhouse that we bought together. Everything seemed so right.

Over the years we have had our issues, but what couple hasn’t? Most of it had to do with our communication. I’ve never been the kind that wears his emotions on his sleeve. I tend to keep things bottled up inside, and unfortunately when things get too much to handle, I tend to unleash everything at once, and then 15 minutes later, I’m fine again. My wife on the other hand, will hold onto something for days, and just be mad about it for a while before talking about it. We’ve always had communication issues, ever since we started dating. I know that I didn’t outwardly express my love for her enough, we didn’t talk about when things were bothering us enough. But despite our issues, I always thought we could work with them. I always loved her enough to look past our issues (although now, too late, I realize we should have been working through them instead of around them).

Then we had a big issue, which was totally my fault. My wife had applied and been accepted to a local police academy in the summer of 2013. I was never fully on board with the idea of her being a cop. I was afraid that she might get hurt, or that shift work would put a strain on our marriage. But she was so happy about it. She hated her previous job, and getting her acceptance letter made her the happiest I had seen her in a long time. Seeing her so happy, I just resigned myself to her being a cop. She had a really rough time in the academy. She came home every night tired, sore and emotionally drained. I took the wrong approach to helping her. I tried to push and encourage her: “You can do this. I know you can do this. Just keep pushing through.” Looking back, this “tough love” approach was probably the last thing she needed. She needed to be held and told that everything was going to be fine.

Well one night she was having a particularly bad night. She was extremely sore from the academy that day, and was lying in bed that night moaning from the pain. I tried to soothe her at first, but I had no effect. I had a bad day at work that day, and had to get up to go to work the next morning, so after a while of lying there, I did the most selfish and inconsiderate thing I have ever done in my life. I went and slept on the couch, and got a decent night’s sleep. A few days later, my wife got sick and had to withdraw from the academy. She was crushed. Nothing I tried made her feel better. She started seeing a counselor not long after this to help her deal with it, and continues seeing her to this day.

At the time, I didn’t realize what I had done that night I went to the couch. A few months later, on a night that I went out with some of my friends, I came home to my wife asleep and a letter on my computer keyboard. She wrote about how much I hurt her that night, and how rocky our relationship had become over time. I read the letter, and reread it. I was shocked and really hurt that she thought our relationship had gotten so rocky. I realized reading the letter just what I had done that night I slept on the couch. I left her. I abandoned her for my own selfish sleep. I felt awful. The next day we talked about the letter. It was the first time in a very, very long time that I had cried. We talked about a lot, from the night I slept on the couch, to me finally telling her that I had never really wanted her to be a cop. We were both emotionally drained by the end.

Things seemed to get better after that talk. We started talking more, doing more things, and just generally seemed more happy together. But that only lasted so long. Earlier this year, I noticed that she started withdrawing from me. She would never say “I love you” first, only when I said it, and even then it seemed more of a reply than an affirmation of love. I confronted her about this one day, and we had another talk. She said that although some things had gotten better, there were still a lot of things that weren’t where she wanted them to be. So we talked about those things, and agreed to work on them. I tried my hardest to do all the things that she wanted us to work on. I tried everything. I even went along with her to one of her counseling sessions, at her and the counselor’s request, but I felt very uncomfortable. I had never been to a counseling session before, and being a person who doesn’t outwardly express a lot of emotion or feeling, it felt awkward and forced.

It is kind of strange how our relationship was. At some times, it was like things were ok, not great, but good. We laughed, we talked, we did things together and it felt great. But most of the time, it seemed like we were just two people in the same house. And there was a tension on the air. I tried, I really did, to bring the better times out as much as possible. Making jokes, poking/tickling her to try to instigate something (although that just seemed to tick her off), cuddling at night. But often it didn’t work. I couldn’t pull the wedge out from between us enough. At first I tried convincing myself that I did, but that just made it worse when I realized that I hadn’t.

At the beginning of this year I found out about an opportunity to go overseas and work for two months in Bangladesh. I discussed it with her, and she encouraged me to go, saying that it was a great opportunity to see and do new things in a place that you normally wouldn’t visit. So I volunteered to go. I left in mid-April and we were unfortunately on one of the phases where things were not going right. I knew I was going to miss her. But nothing prepared me for that first night. I could never have guessed just how much I would miss her. When I laid down that first night, it hit me. I realized for the next 8 weeks, the person that I love wouldn’t there beside me, and it was the worst feeling in the world. I lost it. I just started crying, and I couldn’t stop. We had been apart for a few nights before, but the length of this stay and being halfway across the world, I couldn’t handle that. I couldn’t handle the thought of being away from her for so long. That night reaffirmed to me how much I love her, that I needed her, and didn’t want to live without her.

So I decided that I needed to be proactive in working on the relationship. I always just assumed that things would work themselves out. I thought we could fix things on our own, that with time and talking, things would be ok. But after that first night in Bangladesh, I knew I couldn’t take a chance on that not happening. I couldn’t risk us trying to do it on our own and failing. So I looked into counselors and marriage counseling in general online. After looking through some things, I knew that I wanted to do it. I told her about my desire to do it, and she agree to take the names of counselors I had found online and look into them. I was really looking forward to coming back and working through things, and hopefully keeping our marriage on track.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Two days before I was to come home, I got an email saying that something had come up and that she couldn’t pick me up at the airport. After the email, she wouldn’t answer any video/voice chats, text chats, or emails. I started to freak out a bit. I flew back home June 15th. After my 19.5 hours in a plane back to the States, I took a taxi home from the airport. Once I got there, I found that she had moved out most of her personal belongings while I was out of the country. She left a note saying that she wanted to meet for coffee that afternoon. At our coffee meeting, she told me that she wanted a divorce, that she just doesn’t love me anymore. She had moved into an apartment across town, and put a retainer on a divorce lawyer. I was crushed. I was expecting to come home to her and for us to start working toward a better marriage, not to come home after eight weeks to an empty house and a request for divorce. I started to lose it. I asked her to go to marriage counseling instead of getting a divorce, like I thought we had planned, but she refused, saying that her mind was made up.

Two days later she came to the house and we started dividing up our shared items, furniture, dvds, paintings, etc. It was all too fast for me, I was still trying to grasp what was happening. But she had moved into an unfurnished apartment and said she needed the stuff. It hurt so bad to see the last ten years of our lives divided up like that, the memories that we had, the home we had built together. At the end of her visit, it had all become too much for me. I asked her again to go to counseling, instead of heading towards divorce. I told her if she wanted to move out, have some space, that was ok, I just wanted to work on our relationship, to fight for our marriage. That just irritated her, and she left, saying she couldn’t handle my roller coaster emotions.

She came back the next day (yesterday) to pack some more things up. I had been out fishing, trying to keep myself busy and to think and clear my head. She was already at the house when I returned, packing all of her remaining belongings into boxes. Again, I felt miserable the whole time, as she split our lives into piles and boxes. But I didn’t lose it this time. Sure, I cried off and on, as we came across something that reminded me of a good time or a particularly meaningful memory. But I didn’t beg her to stay, I didn’t beg for counseling. We even shared a snack and a beer. And then she left, and I completely broke down again.

This morning she came with a U-haul van and movers, to take her part of the furniture and the rest of her belongings. I couldn’t stay in the house to watch, so I took a walk, and then sat outside across from our house. The house feels so empty now. This feels so final. Aside from the pictures of us that I kept, it’s like she was never here. It’s so lonely. This evening she is coming over to take two of the three cats, one of which is my favorite cat that we have had since he was born.

She still hasn’t given me a real reason for leaving and wanting a divorce. All she has said is that she doesn’t love me anymore. But there has to be a reason. People don’t just fall out of love and refuse to try and fix things without a reason. She has told me there is no other man, and after ten years of being together, and knowing the type of person she is, I believe her. I don’t believe she would do that. But, as crazy as it sounds, I almost wish it was another man. At least that way I would know why, instead of sitting here wondering where things went wrong, what I could have done better, how she can stop loving me when I love her with all of my heart and soul. Wondering what happened to “Til Death Do Us Part.”

I don’t know where to go from here. I feel lost. I found myself just wandering around the house the other night, not sure what to do with myself. I am going to try and keep myself busy and doing things, because the moment I stop and sit and think, I start losing it again. And I’ve decided to go and see a counselor, because I don’t think I can deal with this on my own. I ordered DR and it should be here today, so I will start reading that as well, a hopefully I can get through this. And I have to hope that maybe she’ll remember what we meant to one another, and how happy we were, and hopefully she’ll want that back.