Hi everyone. While I can't say I'm happy to be here given the circumstances, glad to see there's such an active and empathetic forum for people to give and receive advice. Thanks in advance.
For background: I'm 37M, she's 31F. Together for a little over seven years, married for a little over two. We met through mutual friends; we went to the same university and generally, my younger friends were her old friends. We hit it off quickly and I thought for sure I had found the one. We met and live in NYC.
We're both the children of difficult upbringings. I was adopted into a very loveless marriage, full of fighting and obvious tension. My mom was an alcoholic, my dad completely unable to express an emotion other than anger - on top of that, they were both grieving the loss of their then 18-year-old son to a car accident a few years before I was adopted. They fought all the time, didn't sleep in the same bed, and basically appeared to despise each other, clearly only staying "together" for the sake of my brother and I. Long story short, I learned very quickly to be independent and only rely on myself, to hide from tension and anger and compartmentalize it, and to be a people pleaser in order to not exacerbate things. These are all things I work on with my personal therapist.
My wife is an only child, with a father that was there physically but at all emotionally, up to the point of literally telling her that he never wanted children. Her mom is a nice person, but very prim and proper, super judgmental. The various difficulties of that upbringing, I'm sure she works on with her therapist.
Anyway, as I said, my wife and I met, we hit it off and fell in love quickly. We had so much in common; both ambitious in our professional lives, in harmony on politics and religion and other key aspects of compatibility, with a large dose of physical attraction built in. It wasn't without ups and downs, but I was so excited and hopeful for the future when we got married.
Fast forward to today, a little over two years later, and we're separating. Her choice, terming it a "trial separation". It's hurting very badly, but I've read just about every article on here and elsewhere on the topic, and I'm taking the approach that my best move is to grant her the space that she needs, work on myself, not to overstep boundaries, and be patient. But it's hard, coming home and realizing that she's packed up her books into boxes, seeing her not wearing her wedding ring, things like that.
As for why, there's a few paper cuts but nothing huge: no affairs that I know of, no abuse. We are in different places in our professional lives: I've risen to the C-suite of my company, and she chose to remove herself from the working world in order to follow her lifelong passions of art and community organization. This created a difficult power imbalance, which was compounded by lack of seeing eye-to-eye on finances; she would ask for more safety in terms of saving, and for lifestyle changes in order to feel more comfortable. I was reticent and stubborn to change my behavior - damn my independence - which made her feel not heard, and not in a true partnership. There have also been instances of trust violations: no affairs, but little lies about stupid things that built up a wall.
On her side, I think the dropping out of the working world is a bit of a function of a mid-life crisis, not knowing what she wants out of life, not feeling fulfilled by her current direction. She's thrown herself headlong into her volunteer and political work, causing us to spend less time together. Also playing out in the background is while she's always been upfront about being bisexual, the #metoo movement and Kavanaugh and everything has made her more aware of her queerness.
We've been attending marriage counseling for about a year and a half, with mixed success. In the early stages, it was a lot about the emotional labor of her having to manage our lives, our household, and so on. Later it was about finances, security, and our sex life. Again with the benefit of hindsight, I can point to a few areas in which I wasn't hearing her, wasn't a true partner. I'm just surprised and embarrassed at how quickly the bond we had has turned; two years is not a long time. But the past six months have been tough, not communicating well, not spending as much time together as we used to. I thought we'd work on it, that we were married and loved each other and committed to counseling and we'd fight through it. I guess she reached her breaking point, and I took that bond for granted. I feel like I didn't do enough.
We had a healthy sex life up until about a year ago, when it tailed off and over the past six months, basically nothing. We both have healthy libidos and when we were really aligned, if I didn't make a move on her a few days, she'd either pounce on me or ask me if anything was on my mind. Over time it's trailed off, partially because of the routineness (both to blame) and partially because of a lack of focus on my end to her needs. The dropoff has made me feel awful about myself, and in talking about in couple's therapy I made it about me - why aren't we having sex, why don't you find me attractive, etc. There were obviously root causes to it that we didn't get to and/or I didn't internalize, and again, I feel bad about that. Lots of things I'd do differently.
She's moving out in two weeks, and since the news, we've been cordial and kind to each other, but awkward and distant. Right after she told me, I had a work trip overseas during which I was a wreck, making the mistake of calling her to talk through some of the pain I was feeling. I also wrote her a long letter explaining some of the areas in which I feel I've failed her, and committing towards fixing them together and to her. At the very least, she can't say she doesn't know how I feel, or that I don't recognize areas in which I've hurt her. Since then, I've been emotionally upset but deadset on asking her for reassurance or relying on her to solve things. We have committed to keeping going to marriage counseling, and she's forthright enough overall that if she really were done, she wouldn't be separating, she'd be serving me papers. So there's a little hope there.
I love her very, very much and my goal is to reconcile. But I know there's no letter I can write to convince her, no action I can perform to turn the tide. She's hurting too (and I know she loves me), and she's sad and upset that things didn't work out the way she thought they would, either. She's framing the separation as removing the dark cloud that was surrounding us living together, and giving us both space to understand what we want. The most painful thing is to see photos of our wedding day around the house and thinking about the goals and optimism we had on that day.
Anyway, I'm sure there's more to it to share, but that's probably enough of a wall-of-text for now. For the time being, the most loving thing I can do is hear her when she says she needs space, to be mindful of her boundaries, commit to working on myself, and in time, remind her of the man she fell in love with. It's scary to detach without any security of her reaching back out to me again, but I can't control that.
Thanks for reading and listening. Open to any advice.
