Can I ask you to read this and give me some perspective please......
I'm M,44 and got married to my wife in 2000. She is 7 years younger than me, and is also the younger sister of my close friend. We have 2 children, m8 and f9 - soon to be 10. We dated/lived together for around 2 years before marriage. I have a senior position in my company, she has hardly worked apart from the last couple of years.
When my first child was born, I was at the time addicted to online gaming. I didn't do the right thing and was not supportive. My wife has always held this against me, even though that has not been the case for 6/7 years. As a consequence she started to set herself up with a social life separate from me.
We moved house and began to mix with new people from the childrens school. My wife through herself into this and began to see people almost everyday. She also cranked up her drinking level, and I was unhappy about that. I didn't want to go out because of the things that would happen when she was drunk.
This turned into me being a party pooper/not wanting to socialise and she was telling people how I was older than her and not as much fun. So it wasn't great, but not critical yet. No arguments, no problems that impacted the children - but her drinking was getting more out of hand. I was also suffering from work related stress/depression.
Then we get hit by something worse. Her mother was murdered in Jan 2009. I wont go into details but it was bad. My wife pretty much had a breakdown. Self harming, bulimia, cutting herself, hitting her head on the walls and floors. Massive mood swings. All exacerbated by drinking, which to be fair, I was doing also. She had a huge tattoo on her back which she knew I was not happy about. On the day of her mother funeral she said she wanted to have a party to send her off and was doing cocaine with people she invited. I hit the roof, as I saw it as a betrayal of trust by not just her, but the friends that she had done it with/got it from - parents from school - and told them so directly. She apologised eventually, but continued to associate with them.
We got through the trial, but her behaviour continued - it became noticeable to other people, she was drinking during the day and there were times I now know when the children could have been endangered.
She had always fantasised during sex about other people, which I was willing to go along with as a fantasy, but not actually enact. I knew she had "obsessions" with people and would fixate on them. She ended up being unfaithful twice, both times while drunk, both times with other women.
Last year the drinking came to a head and she was admitted to a clinic for a 5 week period of therapy and drying out - I was left to look after the kids. I was resentful to a point as she just decided one day to go - no warning, and just expected me to deal with everything. I also felt (as did others) that for a good part of it she didn't take it seriously, but treated it as a holiday.
She came out and has remained sober ever since, and I believe she has also stayed away from drugs. She had a recovery plan, and was supposed to go to AA/12 steps. She did, but even now, after over a year, she does not have a sponsor, and I don't think she has ever shared.
I began to get the feeling she was using the meetings as a social event. When she came out of the clinic, she had made a lot of noise about whether we should remain married (we had therapy prior to her going in) but she was also told as part of her therapy that she should take things slowly and not rush headlong into decisions. I make a big effort to change my behaviours again, to reflect things she has said, make time for us to be together and so on.
Come to this year and I realise that she is distant, and although we get along without arguments we aren't really connected. Sex is infrequent and seems a chore. To cut a long story short she had started a friendship with one of the dads from school (also married) and although she swore blind they were never physical, she had hidden email accounts. Either with his encouragement or as a next step from her friendship with im, she also set up a profile on an adult site and was messaging men, women and couples and exchanging photos. Again, she swears it never went further. She said she was looking for excitement.
I told her to leave, and she moved out and I stayed in the house with the kids.
We are now 4/5 months down the line. We went to therapy a couple of times, and I was prepared to let her come back if she could commit to trying - weekly sessions, probably seperate beds, total honesty and communication.
She said that she wanted to be on her own for a while, and I said it was a deal breaker, as I couldn't see how she could say she was trying to fix things if she was so fixated on being out of the house - that I felt it would give her license to do what she wanted while having a safety net to fall back into if she didn't like. So we made the separation permanent, and started to talk about divorce.
She has got a new place, and we share the kids. We don't particularly speak, unless it's about the kids - who have coped amazingly well. When we have talked she always comes back to "love you but not in love with you", "want to be alone" and so on. Since coming out of the clinic she has cut herself off from many of her older friends and sought the company of those she has met in AA.
From a bit of reading and family/al anon sessions I have been to, I think she is still feeding an addictive personality - she's just replaced the booze with something else - obsessing about her life/hanging out with other addicts who wont be judgemental/she has got more piercings done and so on - like a mid life crisis.
Today I pressed her on some things and she revealed that she had started a sexual relationship with a man from her AA group older than me. She said there was no physical attraction, she just got some comfort from it. This is after telling everyone around her for the last few years that we were incompatible because I was older than her.
I also feel cheated on her reasoning - she says in one breath that if she missed me she would have tried to make a go of things, while in another admitting that ever since she came out of the clinic she was distancing herself from me.
So where do I go. I'm by nature a "carer" - I know I can't fix the things that are wrong in her, but I'm also caught about not wanting to just give up - especially when I feel the injustice that I don't think she has even tried....