Thanks for the thoughts. I’ve been reflecting a lot over the past few days and reading a lot of what has been shared. I d also been giving a lot of distance and space, which honestly has been pretty easy as she’s working long hours outside of the house and I’m at home with my work and the kids. When she does come home, it’s only a short time before she goes to sleep. I’m getting a lot of quality kid time and also carving out time for me to work on me and think about how to be my best self and to be the most attractive to her that I can be. I’ve been able to exercise and focus on work, and I haven’t brought up our relationship at all since Last week when she told me she didn’t want to be married. At the time I told her that I know I can’t make her be happy and that that’s for her to figure out, but if there are things I can do to contribute to that I’m willing to do them, and that when she’s ready to talk, if that’s after this super stressful work time or whenever, that I’m committed to working on the marriage. Since then, no discussion of it and I’m waiting on her and ready to listen and validate whenever that conversation happens.
I’ve also been paying attention to her phone habits but not in an invasive way. She does text a lot, but that’s not super unusual as she has a few different friend threads that she’s always had frequent texts with. I am paying attention to how protective she is of her phone as she seems to be much less willing to leave it lying around than she used to be. I hear what several people have said about someone else being very likely and at this point I’m considering that this is the case until I find out otherwise (and know that I may never find out).
At any rate, I also recognize that with any issues, big or small, in the past I’ve always been the one to try to diffuse and get back to harmony, likely to my own detriment as that has likely fostered a sense of her owning the tenor of our relationship-going against the alpha male idea. She has a really hard time with admitting when she’s made a mistake or is in the wrong and I’m all too willing to admit my side of things, which just further enables that type of behavior. This time is different. I’m certainly working on myself to identify my part in the issue, but I’m not going straight in to try to “make things right.” I am interested to see how she responds to this different, detaching behavior from me. All this to say, I appreciate all of your advice and am planning to stay strong in not initiating a conversation, hard as that may be
