Maybe we have a disconnect here on the process. What I am saying is that you are confronted with a situation you cannot tolerate much longer. You are trying to do your part but your wife has detached, is indifferent and does not care anymore (which I think is just her way of getting your attention, but it needs to be "gotten"). You want her to make a choice to re-engage in the marriage. Assuming she is logical, you need to present her with the best choice you can, hoping she will choose logically.
First this means cleaning up your act, stopping the controlling behavior (which you didn't openly admit to but which I pulled out of you - bad), acknowledging her feelings and righting the imbalance in the marriage. These changes need to be real for them to be an attractive choice for her (I sense she has some trust issues here).
I suspect, and you confirm, she wants the affection and security of the marriage. She wants to stay but she has drawn a line and lost hope. She is content to just survive. You are not happy with that prospect. So you present her with the choice of working to improve the marriage or split.
She may be ambivalent to these choices. So make a contrast between the two. One should be appealing and the other not. Working on yourself will sweeten one choice. The other may be less appealing but she may not truly understand that (especially if she is shut down). This is where you want her to feel the consequences of this other choice. Stopping contact is no different than how things will be if you divorce. If you say she is uncomfortable with that, then I think she would be reluctant to make such a choice after experiencing the loneliness of it for a while. And there doesn’t need to be a time limit. Leave it open ended so she has complete control. That puts the burden squarely on her shoulders. Does this make sense?
So staying distant is only a temporary thing to set a boundary and let her choose. If she chooses the marriage, then you two can work together with the benefit of her enthusiastic support (this should be a condition of acceptance). If not, then you split anyway. Before doing this, you need to be comfortable with either outcome. Since you already told her your wanted to divorce, I assume that is the case. This only puts some teeth into it.
But what I am feeling from you is a slow realization that maybe you had more to do with driving her away than your realized. Because of this, she may actually accept divorce. She may just call your bluff (and I think you are bluffing, trying to re-establish control) and that scares you.
I also think it may not be necessary for you to ever present this choice. Improving yourself may be enough for her to stay in the marriage without you needing to force her into staying. This would be the ideal path, don’t you think?
I am the pursuer in my marriage. My wife avoids like crazy. Usually the situation is reversed, where women want intimacy and men avoid it and the emotional entanglements. Since I know I pursue out of a fear of abandonment, I have a pretty good guess you do too. Fear is a sign of weakness, and with a healthy ego, this is hard to accept. You seem intelligent, so your intellect makes it all too easy to turn things around and exert a little control over the spouse to keep her from running away. Over time she gets tired of this and the tactics need to be stronger. Your wife does not sound nearly as assertive nor does she seem to have a need to control too, as mine does, so you may have avoided a lot of the control battles that I have encountered.
But you can still hold major sway over the relationship if you will just confront yourself, reign in your fears, stop the controlling and address the sense of panic that comes from not controlling.
Now, have you ordered Passionate Marriage yet? “Addiction to Love: Overcoming Obsession and Dependency in Relationships” by Susan Peabody is good for the pursuer/avoider dynamic. And for good measure, pick up a copy of “Narcissism” by Alexander Lowen or read up on this website: http://samvak.tripod.com/.
