Hello..

I'm sure this won't be the most popular post, but I have to give a decent amount of context for any advice to be helpful to me (imo). And I'm sorry in advance if I get more emotional and incoherent as this goes on. This will also be quite long.

A few weeks ago my wife and I separated (my choice) after nearing 4 years of marriage and just passing 7 years of being together. My wife was my best friend the day we met, and to this day the only other person on this planet I ever had an equal rapport with is my guy best friend from childhood who's, for all intents and purposes, a brother to me. But he moved many states away and I have to plan a special trip to even hang out with him, so all I have are my parents, wife and three kids (all boys).

Things haven't been the best between us for a long time now. After the first kid, who will be 6 in a few months, our romantic connection naturally dipped quite a bit. It's hard not to guess why. We knew that, some post-partum for her didn't help, but we realized the kids will eventually grow and things will breathe and we'll be closer again in time. But she ultimately would never recover from that post-partum hell.

Two years later, after the birth of our second son, we decided to get married. We still loved each other, that wasn't an issue, and our honeymoon was the kind of fun we always had together. It will always be one of the happiest memories of my life even if it may be bittersweet now.

When we returned home to our six month old second child and our other two year old, things were fine for a while. But slowly over time she started to give up again. At this point I had been in my new career for two years, one I worked very hard to get myself into, to build a life for our family. And I need to be very clear here, I do not desire for her to be a SAHM and never have. The only time it was ever the expectation was during the first year of our oldest child's life, we didn't have a babysitter. (We both agreed to it btw, it was as much her idea as mine) Naturally, she lost her job (a good one, but one that's ****always**** in need, so it wasn't a big deal).

However, by this point she was far from the driven woman I met and grew to know and love. I never expected her to not change, but I definitely never expected her to start giving up. About a year into marriage is when our relationship went off a cliff. She stopped caring about herself, which I understand how difficult it is raising our kids, but I still had to be the glue that held us together. I never expected her to not have any issues with her weight, we just had two kids pretty much back to back, but she neglected it as she started to give up, only spiraling her more and more.

And then that's when the shit-talking started. Not just me (and when it was, it was behind my back to my own mother... seriously why would she think my mom wouldn't tell me?? Unless that's the point??), but also shit-talking to herself, about herself. Gross, fat, ugly, every chance she could say it about herself she would. She even killed her hair bleaching it and shaved it all off on a whim.

Anyway, she started to take a little bit of agency, and as her breasts were quite big before children, they were much bigger after two of them. I was supportive, you know? "Yeah, maybe the weight of them and the pain/tiredness comes from this, if you want to do it we'll do it." That came, she had it done, a generous amount was extracted, but nothing changed. Just got worse, actually.

Now she had scars she thought were too ugly, and any little bit of energy she could've gained from losing that literally weight, was drug back down into more self-pity. No amount of convincing her that I love her no matter how she looks worked before, and didn't work again. By this point I was basically just... the provider for the family. While she's on her 6th random job she'll quit in two months because of some minor inconvenience. But finally she at least decided to return to her career... sort of.

She took a cleaning staff job for an adjacent career she once seemed to hope to have some day. That job came and went. And did I mention during this whole time I didn't ask her to ever pay rent, or the electric bill (which she runs up by keeping every light on at all times)? Or... anything? She paid the internet bill (her choice). Bought groceries (sometimes). Every other dime of her money went to either random shit from Amazon, that would be a novelty for two days before it inevitably sat out taking up space somewhere. We're talking $2200ish a month when we were renting in just the two major bills alone versus her $100 internet, and sometimes paying for all the groceries.

I told her many times this isn't what I wanted, as I said earlier, but she continued to tell everyone behind my back that this is what I wanted. That I want her home watching the kids, working as little as possible, because I want an "old fashioned marriage" (can I take a moment to say fucking fuck that? It's total hell and I'm subjecting myself to abuse from my superiors in the workplace to make it happen. Something I have been open and honest about with her from the beginning.)

But then we get to our third and youngest son. He will be a year and six months old in a few weeks. We got pregnant during the only time we were intimate in over six months. I know how it sounds, and while I do have *suspicion* of cheating, he's the spitting image of me. All three of them are. There's no doubt they're mine. But she has basically given up since then.

She's doomscrolling Facebook and TikTok all the time, and she already had been before then, but just being around her is miserable. She refuses to get help, with *anything*, unless it's a possible physical ailment (except for two of them, which we *can* get into in the comments if needed), and once again we went through the process of sorting out a physical issue that was supposed to give her energy back, because she was having heavy, painful periods very irregularly, and too often.

Well, the hysterectomy was a success, but nothing changed. If anything she's been worse, and I just don't know what to do. I worked my ass off with the company I'd been with to support my family, and got a promotion about a year ago, right before her surgery. But it didn't matter, because all she did was quit a decent job she had to work at McDonald's. Fucking McDonald's, and they couldn't even give her shit for hours, either.

Work started getting too stressful for me. They wanted me to basically clean house, and a lot of bad things happened on that road. I begged, and begged, and begged for her to step up and get back into her career and just deal with it a little bit for once, but she wouldn't. In fact, half my problem was that she didn't support me emotionally when I had a really bad day. I even started having mental breakdowns and having to excuse myself from work more and more regularly until finally it was almost a daily occurrence. I started talking to a therapist and was more able to manage it, but the crippling loneliness and lack of support made it hard to keep putting myself forward.

Well, one fateful weekend a few weekends ago, we had the power go out during a bad storm. The kids and her were at her parents, and I basically stayed home house-sitting until it came back on. It didn't come back on that night, until the next afternoon it finally did. Well, I did a lot of thinking during that time, when it came time to tell her to come home and that dread started sinking in again. I delayed it an hour, then two, then before I know it I'm a breaking down crying mess who couldn't bring himself to tell her to come home, so I can be just as alone as I always am. Especially once the kids go to bed. I know it's weak, and I'm probably getting a lot of disapproving heads for saying it, but it's not necessarily worse for the kids.

She yells and screams at the kids a lot. The energy she gives off just kind of sends them into overdrive. My oldest used to be so excited to tell her whatever was on his mind when she'd get home from whatever random part-time job she held at the time, and she'd just brush him away. Ignore him. Then yell at him or groan angrily at him to move when he got in her way. But she's not like that around her parents. If there's one fuckin good thing here, it's that I know when they're with me they're happy, fed and not being yelled at all day/night/whenever. And when she's there with them, her mom (bless this lady I love her she's so sweet) sets the expectation already that she can't act like that, my wife is definitely reluctant to step out of line around her (not of fear due to her being strict or anything, she's one of those gentle, truly God-first women that's super sweet with everyone).

I really don't want to take this to divorce, but I honestly don't know what to do. What do we do with someone who has given up as much as she has? Divorcing her can't be the only thing I can do, right? Is there.. as fucked as it is to say, any way I can leverage this situation to convince her that we finally need to do something about *us* and start getting her back on track?

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I would also like to add some context that doesn't fit anywhere in particular:

My wife doesn't really talk to me. We never fight or argue because she doesn't talk. Since the separation, she's mentioned to me and also my mom a few times that "we need to talk," but she never does. She never shows up to talk, either. I live in our home, she can stop by to talk anytime. But she never does.

No matter how down in the dumps I feel, even if I'm crying, she doesn't say anything. I could pour my heart out, and it's like talking to the wall. So much so I all but stopped trying to. Take the long way home from work, cry and scream in the van or whatever, then get home. That became my life for the last 10 months or so.

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When I went states away to visit my best friend in end of April/early May, she barely texted me. Called once for something random. Got my laptop out to video chat so I could see the kids once while I was away, and then never again after that. Couldn't be bothered. Going home from that trip was the first day I felt the dread that eventually pushed me over the edge, and I felt it every day after until I told her not to come home.

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I have to initiate everything. Doing something, going somewhere, being intimate, what we should eat for dinner, who's driving, what we should do when something goes wrong, literally everything. If I don't go out of my way to do something, it doesn't get done. Someone needs to mow the grass? Well, she stopped ever doing that because "I told her I wanted to do it." We never even had that conversation. I had to find out because I came home from work one day and my mother was mowing it while she "watched the kids" (watched her phone, more like it).

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She also constantly tries to trip me when I walk past, and laugh about it. And smacks me hard on my ass, sometimes with wet towels, no matter how I make it clear I don't like it. I'm insanely ticklish and she tickles me ruthlessly, sometimes pinning me down and convincing the kids to "get me" as well. I haven't been able to comfortably hug her, on the rare occasion I even get a hug from her, in like a year. I always have to worry about her fucking tickling me relentlessly.

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And lastly, she doesn't ever clean anything up. I don't ask her to do all the cleaning, I've only asked her to clean up after herself. But she doesn't. "Everything is a table." I've said it a million times whenever I have to apologize to my mom for the way we live, but she takes stuff out and doesn't put it away. Every counter, every square inch of everything, always has to have something on it. Am I cleanest, quickest to tidy up person in the world? Of course not. But my other solace has been slowly cleaning up the house. I got the entire living room and kitchen done, and even cleaned up a few of the cabinets, but there's still so much stuff. I can't walk in my walk in closet. I can't walk around in 75% of my bedroom still. It's just... she goes way too far. And I've even heard her parents house is now like that. Of course I know that all too well, it only takes her a few days to wreck the whole house again..