So glad I've found this community. Based on what I've read, you all really know how to help people like me.
I'll try to be as concise as I can. But I really need help.
My wife and I were married in 2010. We had lived together for a year prior. We had our challenges. I had lost my job a few months before getting married and that put me in a bad place. I would talk to other women on the internet and she caught me. It took some time, but she forgave me. That was my last foray into doing anything inappropriate that would violate the vows I was preparing to take.
We started right away for a baby after getting married, and it only took a couple months to conceive. We now have two girls -- 3 and 6. They're the absolute best and I spend as much time as my work schedule allows with them.
Her work schedule and mine always seemed to butt heads -- leaving us little time for ourselves. We rarely, if ever, had sex -- to a point where we got used to it. We were like best friends that lives together and enjoyed our time together.
Unfortunately, I was a poor listener. A poor compromiser. I was there for emotional support when needed, but was the kind of guy always trying to fix the problem -- not just letting my wife talk it out the way I should have. Essentially, over time, she became detached and became very close to the very definition of a walkaway wife.
Last July I noticed her distance growing wider -- nothing I could really put my finger on, but enough to make me notice. Im early August I eventually asked her if there was something going on she needed to tell me, and she told me she had essentially been having an emotional affair with a man who lived back in her home state, about 5 hours away, someone she dated before me who was unhappily married.
Unfortunately, I blew up. I didn't handle it the way I wish I should have. I yelled and begged her to stop. I thought if I could just get this guy out of the way, things could get back to normal. The worst thing I did was go to our best friends and got them involved. I thought my wife was in a dark place, and everything I read was that I couldn't confront her. I needed someone to talk to her and let her open up.
Looking back -- OBVIOUSLY this was a very bad decision. But I was an absolute disaster. My world had been turned upside down and my head was a mess.
She was very upset that I told our friends. She said I took her best friends away from her. I don't blame her for being upset. However, those friends have not judged and have always said they are here for us no matter what. Unfortunately, my wife wants nothing to do with them. Whether it's shame or something else, it doesn't matter at this point.
From late August through late January it was a struggle. My wife and I started therapy, but our therapist said we weren't ready for couples therapy. We started going on our own until he told her she didn't need to go anymore -- that she clearly was "on the landing" trying to figure out which way to go in our relationship. I kept seeing him and he's helped me quite a bit.
I feel like I've had a revelation about what it means to be in a relationship. How to really be a partner who listens and compromises. How to put my partner first when we're together and put myself first when we're not.
During that time, from August to January, she said she was not in love with me anymore, but was curious if she could get the spark back. So she stayed. She also said she was sticking around a bit for the kids. But at the same time, she didn't see any way for us to work. She didn't want to even try. Over those months, we had our good times and bad times. But never any sex. And eventually separate sleeping arrangements. Essentially separated but in the same house.
I did my best to focus on myself. But I know I couldn't help but be suspicious that something was going on. And that probably shown through.
She said I was obsessed with worrying if she was still talking to him. And she said she wasn't. She said he was always the symptom to our much larger problem. I agree with that, but he was also the only way I could figure out if she was really giving us a shot or not -- if she was still talking to him, then we weren't getting a fair shake and she didn't have an interest in working on us.
In October we had a blowout fight. It was mostly her just screaming at me and demanding a divorce. I later found out it was because she discovered I was looking at the phone records. (Again, a bad decision on my part ... getting my crazy to go away took way too long) Around this time her Dad got her a "burner phone" to use just in case things got bad with us. I didn't really understand the rationale, but I didn't fight it.
Fast forward to early February when I discover that not only that she had sometime in the past several months been physical with the other man, but was planning a weekend away with him in two weeks. She had been lying to me that it was supposed to be a birthday weekend with her girlfriends.
I waited a day to compose myself and see my therapist. The next night I told her what I knew. I calmly told her how upset I was and that we needed to discuss where to go from there. But that I needed time to figure that out.
Soon I came up with three conditions for her to continue our relationship. To see if we really wanted to give it one last try.
1) She had to stop talking to the other man, 2) She needed to start going to therapy with me, and 3) She needed to start doing mechanical exercises to try to improve our relationship (e.g. the Love Dare)
IMPORTANT NOTE: This was all before finding out about this website and some of the strategies.
A couple days later she said she had a couple conditions herself 1) That I wouldn't make her do anything she didn't want to do and 2) That I would keep on the positive changes I'd already made
Obviously, those were ok by me.
The next day, she called me at work and said she was in. She was willing to try.
The next couple weeks were positive. We joined a gym together. We did more laughing than we had in a long time. We hung out together at night and watched some tv.
Then, another bomb dropped. My oldest daughter told me Mommy was talking a lot on a strange phone. Not her normal phone. My wife told me she had been talking on it, but only to her family, and that was just because her Dad, a known penny pincher, had been paying monthly for it and said he would take it away if she didn't use it. Obviously, that was very hard to believe, but I chose to believe her.
Since then, I've heard some positive things, but mixed with negative. For example, "you're the man now that I've always wanted. it makes me so sad that it took another man for you to change. Why wasn't I good enough to make you change?"
I haven't had a good answer for that. And I never will. Sure, there were a couple times that she said we should maybe try therapy, but that was mixed with her telling me she would tell her friends what a great husband I was. I never knew things were as bad for her as they were.
Right now, I have a bad feeling she is still talking to the other man. But I can't confront her about it.
Based on what I've read here, I shouldn't push her to therapy until she becomes more engaged. I also think we should stop reading the Love Dare (but now I'm worried she'll have more questions if we stop).
I know I should just focus on being her friend. Continue improving me. And hope for the best.
But I'm just so anxious all the time. I worry constantly that she is still talking with him, and that means our relationship is doomed. I love her, and I finally know HOW to love her. But I worry it is just too late.
I'm waiting for some more positive sign. Like her asking me to sleep in the bed again. Or to sit next to her when we watch tv. That seems like all I can do.
