Some advice please! Apologies for the long-winded lead in to my question:
I have recently made a life changing decision to move abroad with my wife and young family, this decision has been discussed for some time, and was driven by my wife, who had become bored in our sleepy UK town. We've moved here, are one month in and things are hectic, exciting, but hard. We are working, looking after the kids, dealing with local bureaucracy, but the reason we are here is for a lifestyle change, and I feel we are moving towards that goal.
However, over the past two years, the passion and intimacy I used to love between my wife and I has ebbed away. I still love and fancy my wife enormously, but I crave physical intimacy which she seems reluctant to give me. She doesn't ever compliment me on my physical appearance, or pinch my bum, seek a hug of kiss me with passion anymore, despite me daily doing the same. The other night we had a heart-to-heart where I told her how I felt, that I was concerned for our marriage as I was beginning to suspect she has fallen out of love with me. She apologised for the way she had come across, and for the impression she had given me, and insisted that she still loved me, just that she’s not very good at talking about how she feels (which is true). Since that conversation, things have started to improve. She has been more physical than before, but the spontaneity with which physical contact is initiated between us is not really there, and I am almost always the one to initiate it. Our children are both under 10, and they are very demanding of our time. She dotes on them as any mother would, but I find that I have begun to resent them for the affection she shows them and the time they take away from allowing us to be together in the evening as a husband and wife, even just to talk together without interruption! Our youngest is often in the bed with us, and therefore marital relationship are virtually non-existent. I have suspected for some time that my wife was using our child as a shield to avoid having sex. When we are alone together (when the stars align!) I am ALWAYS the one to initiate things, and I am beginning to feel like some sort of pest, which I don’t want. When we had our chat the other day, I told her about my concerns, and that I had feared she didn’t love me anymore, and that I had even irrationally feared that she may have strayed with a male friend after a night out in London over 18 months ago. She confirmed she loved me, and said she would never cheat on me, and that the night out in question only saw her crash at a colleagues house on the sofa after she missed the last train home.
Despite this constructive conversation, the doubts remained, and I did a bad thing… when she was asleep, I searched her WhatsApp chat history and discovered the following conversation from last year, none of which I knew previously:
· She had reconnected with an old male school friend (we will call him ‘Dave’) at a school reunion two years ago.
· They arranged to share their preparations for a marathon together.
· They spoke via FB messenger and shared videos of them singing songs they had learnt to play on the guitar, a skill she taught herself during COVID.
· She met up with Dave early last year, after being out with uni friends (I was told it was work colleagues), during which she became very drunk, was taken back to his flat after missing the last train home and was ‘unfaithful’ (her words).
· She was confused, and angry about what happened, but accepted that she was a responsible adult and own her actions.
· She confessed to a friend that she had been thinking of leaving me before Dave tipped up, that he was a symptom of ‘the place she was in’.
· She felt she was in a passionless marriage, and that she didn’t love me anymore.
· After the night out when she was unfaithful, she had a session with a counsellor during which she was made to realise that part of the problem was that she was beginning to resent me for what she saw as ‘clipping her wings’. She said she had lost respect for me. She said she felt like she was suffocating at times. Dave provided escapism, but then they crossed a line and it all became ‘f*cked up’.
· After the night in London, she decided to remain friends with Dave, and they eventually attended the marathon together in a major European city, where she rented a flat for them to stay for five nights. The flat had a double bed and a sofa, and she asked for the sofa to be made up for Dave.
· Whilst she was in this city, I was only able to speak to her once immediately after the marathon, but my nightly calls were not answered or were rejected. She explained this at the time as she had been out with colleagues, which was ostensibly why she was there – to work and run the marathon. My suggestion that we join her as a family to support her was shot down.
· She did tell me at the time that she had met Dave in Madrid, as there was a photo of them together on her phone that I saw, but she explained she had met him there, the impression given was it was by chance, and that he was there supporting his brother. He didn’t run as he was injured.
· After her return to the UK, she saved some online quotes which reflected her mood:
“Let go of the illusion that it could have been any different.”
“You will be happy again, you will be more yourself than ever, you will understand your heart better when you heal, you will be ok.”
“You don’t miss them. You miss the person you thought they were and now you know that was bullsht. It was a hurtful lesson, but thank goodness you learned it now, rather than years later. You saved yourself from a sht show. Congratulations.”
· She confessed to her friend after this event “And the thing is, it’s not even as though I want to be with Dave – he was just a symptom of the place I was in (I wasn’t thinking of leaving Ted because Dave suddenly tipped up – I was having those thoughts long before). But the way Dave acted was like he wanted more, but then at the drop of a hat he’s now head over heels for someone he was seeing before he started pursuing me!
All of this happened 18 months ago, and I knew nothing about it. Around the time of the marathon, I agreed to find work abroad in the country of her choice, which I finally did in the Spring of this year, and we moved out here lock-stock a month ago. Our house is rented out in the UK, she has found work here too and she clearly wants to make a go of it. I am determined to be a better husband, to not be so staid and to be mindful of her mental wellbeing. I have determined that I will show her all of the intimacy and physical contact she will accept, but will not initiate sex unless she wants to, as I feel I have been focussing on physical needs, at the expense of her emotional ones.
So, very long-winded background, but my question is this:
Do I:
A) pretend what happened between her and Dave never took place, and move on, embracing the opportunity of this new life we have together, or do I;
B) confront her with this truth, confess how I came by the knowledge and hope that the opportunity to discuss what happened will heal us and any sense of guilt she might have?
I forgive her, not unconditionally, but I understand how and why it happened. It hurts me to think that I was blind to all of this, and wasn’t proactive enough to deal with the route cause of her unhappiness two-years ago – working from home, realising she had been in the same town for 10 years, Groundhog Day with the mundane routine of life, and kids, no excitement in our lives, me being ‘staid’ and not having as many interests in common. All of these factors wore her down. We are determined to find time for ‘us’ again, to go out, share common interests, reconnect. I have started writing my feelings down as poetry which I send to her spontaneously, and she loves, but there is the lingering doubt, the sense that there is still an emotional wall between us. The ability to break down that wall is compounded by the fact that it is virtually impossible to find time together without the kids. We are in temporary accommodation at the moment, hopefully moving into a house in the next couple of weeks. She will be going away for work fairly regularly, spending one night away a week every other week or so. My current feeling is that I wait, allow us to move into the new house, settle into a new routine, establish a community where we will be living, a support network to share childcare with so that we can find time for each other. My concern is that confronting her with the knowledge I have will lead her to feel that she has to stay with me through guilt, not due to a renewed sense of love. I do not want to get a divorce - I want to fight for her, and for us with every fibre of my being.
Thoughts?