Hi OP,
I’ve been an occasional lurker but your thread made me sign up so I can talk to you. Apologies in advance, this is a long post.
Reading everything you have written, I was in exactly your shoes around 12 years ago. My ex wife had a long term “friend”. I was deeply uncomfortable about it but she would not give him up and I felt unreasonable asking. So somehow I believed her complicated stories and reasonable excuses, then over a good many years the inconsistencies started to add up. In the end I found out she really had been having an affair for our entire marriage, starting before we were married and active throughout. He even came to our wedding FFS.
Regarding your recent update about the childhood issues and the past, my ex wife also had a series of incredible stories about her past and her tendency to put herself in danger (sorry but unless you were there at the time, that Indian kidnapping story is a classic fantasy). My ex could have come up with the same stuff.
At a guess your wife is highly intelligent and can be incredibly charming. I suspect you feel lucky to have her and you are more than a little crazy about her. I bet also you go through a regular rollercoaster of emotions because you never quite know if she’ll be sweetness and light or if something will set off the dark side that makes you and everyone around her incredibly unhappy.
When you raise things that aren’t right, does it escalate into a crisis? Do you find yourself wishing you hadn’t raised it and thinking you are being unreasonable and unfair to her? Do you doubt your sanity and judgement?
I did all this and the rest. I have never seen any pattern so similar as what you describe.
So… what can I tell you, based on my experience and where I am now (happily married with well adjusted and loving kids). The good news is, you can fix this, and it will get better. The bad news is, you will have to leave her. You can’t fix her, she has a lifelong pattern of deceit and your relationship, I am sorry, is fundamentally a tissue of lies, probably right from day 1. I’m sorry but this is the truth (Matrix has pretty much told you this also I know).
I see you are hoping you can change the bits of her you don’t like, or at least understand them. I’m sorry Mark but after 15 years that is never going to happen. I tried this too but it’s a delusion. I know you want to make it work, I really do. But you can’t. What is more you need to isolate your children from the long term damage of witnessing a relationship that is completely dysfunctional. It will be hard, devastatingly hard but you have to do it. This is a very manipulative and clever woman. I suspect she is also quite damaged and that is not her fault, but sadly there is nothing you can do about that – she has to sort that out herself and it may take decades. Look up Borderline Personality Disorder when you get a chance.
One other thing, I bet if you tell her you want to leave, she will beg you to stay. She will try everything and tear at your heart strings. She may even threaten suicide (my ex did, very plausibly, multiple times). This is most likely a threat she won’t follow through but if she’s like I think she is she’ll push it to the brink, hoping you’ll back down. Please, stick to your guns not only for your sake but for your kids. This will be the hardest thing in your life to do but you have to.
You’ve already seen the outright denials of bare facts. What you will also get is minimisation of what happened, as a drip feed. You’ll be told it’s over now. You’ll be told that what happened was an occasional “mistake”, and it wasn’t much anyway. You’ll probably also be told it wasn’t as good with him as with you.
Stick to your guns. You’re clearly a decent person trying very hard in circumstances so bizarre that few people will fully understand it. Even counsellors will struggle. A turning point for me was speaking to a counsellor and I said to her “does it have to be this hard to make a relationship work?” and she said simply “no, it doesn’t”.
Good luck.