I feel like I don’t really know my wife anymore

Long one this, sorry peeps.

First, some important context, which I need to write here to avoid burying the lede: 12 years ago, I cheated on my wife. I got very drunk at a work party, and made out with a colleague to whom I was attracted. We got to the point of finding somewhere private and undressing each other before something — to this day I can’t really say what — snapped me out of it.

I didn’t confess to my wife immediately. I kept it to myself for two weeks before someone made a stray comment to her that made her suspicious, at which point I told her the truth.

After those two weeks, I’ve never not taken responsibility for my actions, even when my wife has tried to say that there were other things causing me to make the choices I made. Yes, we were going through a bad time in our marriage (so much so that I had been trying to get her to go to therapy with me for a year and she’d been refusing, saying that marriage therapy is only for couples who are going to divorce anyway). Yes, I was drunk. But I still made the choices I made, and there’s not been a single day since then that I haven’t regretted them.

After confessing, I found myself a therapist, and we went to marriage counselling. And it seemed like in the therapy room we were doing great. But the weekends were terrible. We lived rurally at the time, and long drives to pretty much anywhere would become long arguments — or rather, I would sit and drive and whilst my wife demanded details, screamed and shouted at me, and made derogatory comments about me and the woman I cheated with.

Eventually, after about six months of this, when it had got to the point that I was having suicidal ideations during these arguments, I decided to leave. My wife begged me not to go, promised that everything would change. But I left, and found an apartment (after living with a friend for a couple of weeks), and for six months we would only see each other at therapy sessions (with a new therapist this time).

In those six months, I made a lot of changes. I decided to stop drinking, because it never brought me anything good and I always felt shitty the next day. I took up running, and I started to improve myself.

And after six months, we decided that we should try again, so I moved back. And for the last ten or so years, we’ve been pretty good. We went through another rough patch in 2017 or so, and there were a couple of weekends where things got bad enough that (on my therapists advice) I took some time out and stayed in a hotel some place to get some space. We saw another therapist together during that time — a good one who really did help us — and eventually we got through it.

I’m giving you all that information because now it’s 12 years later, and we’re in the process of buying our first house together (having rented for as long as we’ve been living together) and things have become weird over the last six months.

My wife regularly asks me if I think we’re strong enough to buy a house together; if we’ll last. Also, she’ll almost weekly have a day when she’s *convinced* that I’m about to leave her. Not that there’s someone else, but that I’m just going to leave her. She described me as a “deeply unhappy man” once, even though I’m not, and insisted that I can’t possibly be happily married to her.

At least every couple of weeks, we’ll have an argument — always late at night, when I’ too tired to fight and she’s too tired to not fight (being tired makes her argumentative, and she freely admits this) — in which she accuses me of covering up stuff about when I cheated: there must have been more going on, it can’t possibly have been just that one night.

TV shows that feature infidelity have seemed to trigger this need to question me again, so I’ve started avoiding the ones that I know feature that particular plot trope.

We’ve had an open phone policy since my infidelity, but she’s not checked my phone in years until these last six months, when she’ll want to do it at least a couple of times a month. I don’t argue, even though I want to, because I know I’ve nothing to hide and it would just look like I was trying to keep something from her. I draw the line at my work emails (because I have a job that needs a security clearance and I’d be breaking the law showing her stuff on my work phone) and that’s caused friction enough.

Finally, there’s sex. We’ve always struggled with sex, as long as we’ve been together (we’ve been dating since she was 18 and I was 19). She wanted to wait to have sex until we were married, which was fine with me, though that didn’t stop us fooling around. After a few years she decided she didn’t want to wait, so we had sex, but we then had more struggles, first with pain (which was vaginismus; we worked through that together), then with the fact that she feels guilty for getting aroused and starts calling herself names when she does. There are things that she loves in bed — oral sex, for example — that she won’t do because she’s ashamed of loving them (she loves receiving oral but is ashamed of how quickly she orgasms from it, and she loves giving oral but then worries that it’s ‘all she can do to turn me on’ even though I reassure her it’s really not).

Most recently, with all the stress and work we’re both doing (we both work far too much and we know it) our libidos haven’t been at their highest, and we don’t seem to sync up well — I’m a daytime person, being way too tired by the time we go to bed — and she’s a night time person, very averse to doing anything *before* bedtime, which is usually 11pm / midnight. For years I’ve suggested scheduling time to get intimate with one another, and she’s always hated the idea. She wants things to be spontaneous. This has caused us other problems because she’s ashamed to tell me what she wants, and my asking her what she’d like, or what would feel good, or even weather she’s enjoying something, is a real turn-off for her. She says that if we really had a connection I’d just *know* what worked.

The reason I’ve written this huge essay however is what happened this last weekend. She told me — again in a late night argument — that she’s not happily married to me (though she got quite pissed at me for saying that she’s ‘unhappily married’ when I tried to reflect back to her what she’d said). She said that sex is hopeless and we’ll never succeed in having it. When I suggested going back to therapy she told me that she’d only do that if we pulled out of purchasing our house (we’re about a week away from signing the paperwork at this point) because she couldn’t risk that kind of investment if we were in therapy. After the argument eventually dissipated she was horny so we had sex… but after she came she told me that she didn’t really feel the connection with me anymore, and that she wanted to sleep.

But then after that night, and all this week, she’s been… normal. Stressed, yes, but sweet, kind, loving, funny… all the things I’ve always loved about her. We’ve flirted and kissed and cuddled, and though she’s been open about not wanting sex right now because she’s so overworked and tired, there’s been no anger to it.

I feel like I’m getting blown about by all this, and I’m worrying that my marriage is going to fall apart despite my trying to be the best husband I can be, and despite my trying to keep everything hanging together.

I kinda don’t know what to do, which is why I’m posting here. Help?