Help Me Save My Marriage

Hi everyone,

I'm new here (as I suspect lots are in this section) and looking for some advice on how I can save my marriage.

So, the background. We met each other almost 11 years ago now when she was 18 and I was 7 years older than her. She lived with her parents very close to me and about 3 months after meeting we started dating. I wasn't very experienced with relationships but I was happy and she was too, we spent lots of time together going out, staying in and generally in each others company. We had a fantastic holiday together where I think she was a little disappointed that I didn't propose, so I knew things were going well. About a year later I got talking to someone at work, through email and text message. She was older than me and I think interested in me, and although I enjoyed talking I never wanted it to go any further than that. Around 6 months later my wife to be found some text messages on my phone and confronted me, I didn't really have an answer for her but the feelings that I had then really hit me hard, the relationship I was in gave me everything I could ever wish for so why on earth was I jeopardising what I had for something that I just a plastic feeling? I've never ever had any contact from that person again, the following month I proposed and then got married a year later.

Almost 5 years later and now we have 2 kids, one 3 years old and the other soon to be 2 years old. I thought everything was good in our relationship, we were focussed on bringing our kids up and our careers were starting to really take off. Every so often we had a bit of a bust up where my wife confronted me and wasn't happy with the intimate side of our relationship, how she always made the first move and I was a taker not a giver. This changed me temporarily but I fell back into my old ways and nothing was said until a number of months later. I guess over the years this has come up 5 or 6 times, and I'm not sure I can explain why I didn't put more into permanently changing myself.

Then in April this year my wife sat me down and started to talk about how she felt we were drifting apart, how things weren't right as there wasn't anything between us. She asked me what there was for us when the kids left, what we shared, and in all honesty I was so stunned by what was going on I struggled for an answer. A few days later it came around again, and again left me in tears. We then went on a holiday with her family (who were completely unaware of this at the time) and had a great time, but then a few weeks after we got back it came up again, and this time I was told that there was someone else. Nothing physical but she had feelings for someone else that she worked with, and had been going on since before Xmas, at a time when I was really busy with my work. We had a counselling session and off the back of that and some great weekends as a family, my wife said that we should put that behind us, and sort things out. We would try to be closer intimately, I would try to give her more time to herself (I used to play golf once every 2 weeks leaving her with the kids and not repaying the favour), and generally treat her better.

3 months later and it's come up again, this time more seriously. She doesn't think that we've made progress (we had sex more frequently but only for the first month or so, then after a night where she told me it was her week off, we stopped). She was happy that I was giving her more time now but she just didn't feel like she loved me enough. She loves me as a Daddy, but not as a husband. Then the real kicker - the affair she had earlier in the year (around 3 weeks before this first came up) was physical. Only once on a business trip, but still. She says that is behind her now and while she doesn't want to leave me for him, it's opened her eyes to how she thinks she should feel for someone.

I don't really know what to do from here. We have a counselling session tomorrow night but I fear that we are going for different reasons - me to try and mend things and her to find the most amicable way of splitting. I appreciate that we haven't spent as much time on us as we should have done, but I keep thinking that with our lives how they are, we've been distracted from that. I will do ANYTHING to get us back on track, I love her so much, she is my angel and my champion, but she seems to be be putting up a mental barrier now and either trying to drive us apart of prevent us from carrying on. It pains me to say it but only now I realise that we weren't making much time for us in amongst everything else that we did.

So much of our lives together is so good, the kids, our jobs, our friends and family etc I know the core needs work but truly believe that we can work on it together and solve it. I'm not sure she believes this and it scares me so much.

We still live and sleep together although with next to no physical contact, home life is still great we are so on the same page. Everything I do is focussed towards keeping her happy and letting her enjoy life, but I so want that life to be with me.

I've spoken to her Mum a couple of times but not sure my wife has spoken to her properly, she knows of the problems and other person but not of the physical affair. I can't speak to my family as they think so highly of my wife and I don't want that reputation to be tarnished.

Please give me some advice on what to do. I feel so alone and on a knife-edge, but knowing that this situation is all but out of my hands. I never once thought in a million years that we would be in this situation, we have friends and acquaintances that seem to be in much worse places than us yet we are the ones struggling. I'm having difficulty trying to come to terms with it and some evenings once she's gone to bed I'm in tears trying to understand what's going on.

Thanks for listening to me.

Source: http://talkaboutmarriage.com/general-relationship-discussion/54646-help-me-save-my-marriage.html

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