Original Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/178kk0m/i_am_m29_thinking_about_leaving_my_wife_f26_after/

Well, it’s been a while and I can say for sure that going through this couple of months has been the hardest thing I have done in my life. But good news, we did not divorce and we are well!

Since my original post we have talked, fought and cried, but early this week I spend a few days in my parent’s house and she went to her’s. This time alone was crucial to understand that we were not ready to give up our marriage, even though I was 90% sure that I was for a while. While we were apart I talked to some friends and I had an amazing talk to my mom and dad, they were great and gave me good advice.

Yesterday I went back home and my wife and I had probably the most open hearted conversation we have ever had in almost 8 years of relationship. She exposed some things to me that she did not like and I finally understood the reason behind the “I do not love you as a man anymore”. You see, the way I behaved in some areas of our life was not ideal and I could have been a much better husband in those 1.5 years of mariage but I was blind to it all. It’s not 100% my fault but I could have prevented A LOT of the things that started to strain our relationship. I apologized and promissed her I was going to be a better man and husband and she forgave me.

We talked a lot, I explained her my point of view and she did the same, we cried, we huged, we cuddled and kissed and that day I realized we were meant to go through this in order to make our relationship stronger. Now we have unlocked the ability to have a proper conversation and I feel like our marriage starts now.

I have never doubted for a second she was the love of my life. Having her by my side is all I need and I feel I can face every the world throw at us now that she’s with me.

Thank you all for all your advices and shared stories, you helped me a lot!

28 comments

  2. Glad to hear that you are happier. Not sure why you got married before figuring out how to have a real conversation, but I’m glad you got there eventually.

  7. I’m glad everything worked out for you. Though I do caution you be careful going forward. Its good you are able to self reflect and recognize how you can be a better husband, but her bevavior was erratic not yours. From reading your post it sounds like you were gaslit into taking most of the blame. You didn’t give details on what you were doing that was the problem ,but what if you have an off day and do whatever it was unintentionally. Will she want to leave you again? Just something to consider. I do hope that it works out for you.

  8. I’m glad it worked out. For the love of god, please print this post and pin it to a wall or somewhere you can see it so you can read it over in the future when times get hard. It is a great reminder of why you are together and is an excellent testament to your love for each other.

  9. You are by no means out of the woods yet. Don’t take anything for granted. Continue doing all the work.

  10. And what has she been doing to contribute to your needs?

    All I’ve heard is about how you’ve done the wrong thing, whilst that is admirable, a marriage consists of 2 people.

    Has she been doing enough to make you “love her as a wife”?

  13. That’s wonderful news!!! Communication is key to a successful marriage. Never go to bed angry with each other and always give a goodbye kiss.

  14. Glad you guys talked. I know you’re being vague but this reminds me a lot of that article “She divorced me because I left dishes in the sink”. It obviously wasn’t the dishes, but stuff like can make a big difference.

  18. Ayo man, maybe it wasn’t intended, but besides communication, you are being incredibly vague about your behavior that strained the relationship.

    I looked through a lot of your previous comments about your relationship, and from what I can glean, you do less of the housework, but also appear to be the primary breadwinner. Additionally, you have complained in the past about the lack of intimacy, both in sexual and non-sexual interactions — although I’m not sure if this stems from the issues, or occurred prior to them.

    Based on my findings, unless I’ve missed some glaring piece of information, you either haven’t mentioned your behavior, have overstated the amount of housework you do, have overstated your breadwinner status, or you have been unjustly saddled with the blame.

    Understand that it takes two to tango, so unless you were the bad guy in all of these situations (or committed a truly heinous act, such as infidelity), there is plenty of blame to go around, not just a serving for you. Be very cautious with accepting blame… Never accept unjust blame for purposes of appeasement, only accept it because you are in fact, to blame.

  20. Bro, just get divorced. It’s not going to work out. You’ll be on here 6 months from now asking for advice again

  21. I have much experience with this. You have a LONG road ahead of you. For starters she HAS “fallen out of love with you” and the main reason you are both together now is because YOU want to be together, and she sees that. In other words, it is like your marriage has reset back 8 years to the beginning of your relationship.

    You spent 1.5 years of marriage and 6.5 years “dating” During the “dating phase” you probably were “wooing” her. The societal norms in US society is for the men to pursue and the women to choose. This has, actually, doubled down since the 1970’s during the 60’s and 70’s things changed there was more freedom in behavior and less rules on dating but that has gone backwards somewhat.

    Anyway, she got used to 6.5 years of you “wooing” her and once you got married, naturally YOU wanted to move into the next phase of your relationship which is marriage partnership. In a partnership she isn’t the gatekeeper anymore, you are not the pursuer. Instead, you BOTH need to be BOTH the “givers” and “receivers” of “wooing”

    If her thing is “being wooed” that is “recieving attention” then it’s only fair once you are married for her to “woo” you in return. That is she does not get to just sit back and be showered with attention anymore. This is now a partnership. She has to give that up and start fully participating in the attention cycle.

    Anyway, you are going to have to get back into the habit of “wooing” her but at the same time, you need to start talking to her about YOUR needs for attention as well. For example she cut the sex off, well having sex is the ultimate in partnership attention, that needs to get back on track.

    She sounds like she is a woman who wants to be married to a man who is the more dominant in the relationship, she wants a man who pays a lot of attention to her and takes the lead in the relationship. After you got married my guess is you relaxed somewhat and (understandably) felt it was time to stop being the one who was putting most of the effort into the relationship. You wanted to see her put in effort. So you backed off to the same level she was putting in. She was putting in 25% of the emotional effort you were putting in 75% of the emotional effort. So you backed off to 50% of the effort and figured she would step up. But she didn’t step up because she saw your pullback and interpreted it as you weren’t interested in her anymore.

    This has nothing to do with who was doing the housework. You were living together for 6.5 years and during that time she had no problems with doing the housework while you were bringing home the bacon. This is about emotional attention not physical effort.

    After you got married you should have forced the issue on emotional attention and told her she needed to up her game now. You both wern’t dating anymore and if she wanted a marriage where she was getting 3 hours a day of attention from you, then you should be getting that same 3 hours a day from her. (obviously you don’t keep a stopwatch here but you should know what I mean)

    If you had done that then after a while she would have realized “party’s over, I’m not a girlfriend anymore I’m a wife and I need to start pulling my weight” and after a few arguments she would have seen how much time this was sucking up for you and for her and likely reduced her demand for emotional attention from you and increased the attention she was giving you and things would have been equal and you both could then concentrate on the real reasons for getting married – creating a family, having kids, buying a house, whatever.

    Anyway good luck. Fortunately for you, communication/talking and so on with her is part of the “wooing” she wants, and if you can work with her to have real communication about the relationship, every day, and she keeps up with her therapy, then after a year or so you can probably rebuild a much stronger marriage, one based on a real partnership, instead of one based on this “dating phase” idea where you are constantly chasing her.

  23. If you don’t mind sharing, what kind of things were you doing or not doing that was affecting how she perceived you as a man…

  24. Because you gave us zero details in the original post AND in the update, people are literally just writing bizarre fanfic about your life (full of projection) in the comments. So congrats I guess. Maybe be honest about what’s really going on if you’re going to bother writing a post. Good luck!

  27. “Having her by my side is all I need”

    Whoopsie. A woman should not have this hold on you. Good luck dude.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like