Hi folks, it’s been awhile since I last posted here. And I’m coming here now to see if I can find a few that have been in similar situations as me and to see what they did or didn’t do and how they would handle it if they could do it again.
The last 2 months have been hell. My wife of almost 5 years has made a few decisions, I’m 28 and she’s 23 years old. I know that age is a factor here, because we married young. But I have always loved her with all my heart and we have always been very close, we had great conversations, always felt comfortable around each other, and she always seemed proud to be my wife. But she started acting strange and distant when she came back from a trip to Las Vegas a few months back. She’d gone out there with her family and had done a bit of partying and had a long talk with her sister-in-law in which she had come to a few harsh conclusions.
She came back and was very distant. I kept on trying to get to the bottom of the problem and maybe I pushed too hard to find the answer. I was always pestering her to tell me what was wrong everytime I was around her. Finally she came out and said that I wasn’t the man that she wanted me to be and that she didn’t love me anymore and she had a lot of built up resentment because I had taken her for granted and hadn’t taken the time to make her feel special. She told me that she’d been holding in these feelings of resentment for 5 years, and she had just recently realized all of this. Then she took off her wedding ring.
That was a huge bomb dropped on my head. I thought we had a great relationship, but I guess we didn’t. I asked her to give me 3 months to make some changes, to which she agreed. Since the day she told me, our relationship has been a rollercoaster ride. The first half of February was simply horrible. I didn’t know how to handle the situation at all and my wife would tell me a new batch of things that were wrong with me every other night. I would either push to hard or not push hard enough, making her mad by jumping to conclusions and end up feeling stupid and depressed or keeping things inside and end up feeling depressed.
I decided that we needed to see a counselor because I really didn’t know how to fix our problems. My wife begrudgingly agreed to go with me. The week we started going to the counselor, my wife told me that we weren’t making progress living together and she wanted to move out. She told me that it would be a good idea because we could make a new start and maybe she could lose her resentment, we could date and she would move back in in 6 months or so. I didn’t like the idea that much, but she was persistent and I ended up helping her move out within the week.
While she was still living with me, she did a few things differently, not bad per se, but different. She started by getting a navel piercing, the next week she got a tattoo on her inner thigh, and the next week she got a job as a cocktail waitress at a strip club. All the while, she’s still a grad student getting her degree in secondary education.
She had been talking to five different guys on the internet during this time when we were having problems and all of these guys decided that they had fallen in love with her because she would talk to them until 3am in the morning and she would sometimes send them pics and videos of her. She didn’t know that I knew about all of this. When she moved out, she didn’t have Internet or phone connection for a week, so she spent a lot of time with me, which I enjoyed.
Then the next week came and she started to be more distant again because she could talk to guys on the Internet again. She’d still call some and we’d see each other a few times a week, but she shy’ed away from my touch and wouldn’t let me kiss her. She told me she didn’t want to hold my hand or have me put my arm around her, and for the next week she told me that she didn’t think that we should really see each other at all. This got the assumptive wheels in my head turning and I write her a lot of e-mails so I logged into her e-mail account to see if she had checked the mail I’d sent her and there it was. There was a round trip ticket for one of these guys that she talked to on the Internet to come see her that day and spend a week here.
I called her and told her that I’d checked her e-mail, which I know was wrong, but I’d seen the tickets and now I knew why she didn’t want to see me for a week. She told me that he hadn’t been able to board the plane because his ID was expired and that he hadn’t been able to make it. She was mad and it didn’t end on a good note. So I apologized for over-reacting and got her a card and flowers. She called me over the next few days, but we didn’t see each other. And then on Saturday, she called and told me that she really missed me and that she would like it if I came up to her work that evening and saw her. So I called a friend and asked if he’d like to go with me and we both went to the titty bar. She was friendlier to me than she had been in months and always had a big smile on her face everytime she saw me. That made me happy, and I went out to see I band at a club with a few friends later that night. After I got done there, it was about 1:30 am and I knew that she should be close to getting off work, so I thought I’d stop by her apartment.
When I got there, I didn’t see her car, but I did see that all the lights in her apartment were on. So I walked up and when I got to her door, it swung open and there stood the guy that she’d gotten the round trip tickets for. My brain snapped, I had a few options. One option was to spring through the doorway and break his nose with a swift hit, but I took another option. I just walked by and pretended I wasn’t related to the situation at all. I got in my car and drove to her workplace, walked in and asked her to go eat with me. She said ok, but she knew something was wrong by the look on my face. I didn’t even have to say anything. She started crying and said that she was going to tell me after he was gone, but she didn’t want to tell me while he was here because she didn’t want any trouble. She said that him being here had let her see that she still loved me and that she’d gotten him a one way ticket home for the next morning because she said he was expecting something he wasn’t going to get.
The next morning she came over to the house after she dropped him off and told me that she loved me and ended up spending the whole day with me. The next day she was distant again. And on Tuesday she told me that she didn’t want to hurt me or lead me on, but that she did love me and that she wanted to grow old and have kids with me, and I was her best friend, but (the big but) she didn’t want that right now. Right now she wants to enjoy her freedom, she wants to live it up a bit and date other people and have sex with other people. She says that she will eventually settle down in a few years and then she knows exactly what she wants when that happens….. me.
So now she wants to be my best friend with benefits of sex, but otherwise, she wants to be free to see and be with other people if she so chooses. She even told me that she wanted me to see and have sex with other women, which is hard for me to come to grips with at the moment.
Anyway, that’s my situation. It seems strange to me, but I know a lot here have been through some strange things. If you’ve been through something similar, did you stick it out? Leave? Go crazy? If you stuck it out, how’d you do it? Are you happy now? You know, the normal questions.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this woman and I’d do about anything for herand I want it to work out. And I don’t want to make her sound bad and I wouldn’t normally air my problems to a bunch of strangers, but I am just at a loss as to what to do. And I can see the problems that she says that we’ve had over the past 5 years, even though I was totally oblivious to these things while they were occurring. So I’m trying to improve myself as well and I’m hoping the pricey counseling sessions start to help eventually as well.