TL;DR I am rattled by the abrupt change in my wife's personality when she declared she wants a divorce. She says this is who she has been for a long time, but hid it under the surface. It has made me distrustful of close relationships with anyone.

As a man who is about to get divorced, something I ruminate about is how this person I shared so many terrific life experiences with can just discard me like a piece of garbage. I have years of photographs of the two of us having the best, most fun moments of our lives. We are exploring interesting places and trying new things. We printed many Christmas cards of us as a family with glowing smiles. I opened myself up to share all of my interests, fears, hopes and dreams with this woman, and I like to think she did the same with me. For many years I felt accepted by her in whole and that made her an incredibly special piece of my life's story and I wanted her to be happy too.

What disturbs me most about my STBXW wanting a divorce is the quickness and ferocity in which her attitude turned. Days before she went on her affair getaway, she told me that she loved me, we would kiss in the kitchen, we would cuddle on the couch, she would scratch my head. Then after screwing her ex-boyfriend she returned home to tell me we are getting a divorce and that she hates me down to really detailed personality quirks. In the 3 weeks since, she's looked at me and has spoken to me with an expression of extreme contempt, as if my presence disgusts her. I found a stack of old romantic holiday cards from me going back years with heartfelt handwritten notes that she threw in the trash. It feels like a stranger is living in my home.

This came on very suddenly from my perspective, but she repeatedly tells me that she's harbored these feelings toward me for a very long time and has just chosen to reveal it now. When I look at the years of old photographs now, I wonder who that person really is next to me. Did she have hidden contempt all those times she complimented me, smiled at me, did nice things for me, and made love with me?

On other posts I made about this people have suggested that she has a personality disorder like covert narcissism. Maybe she is a sociopath. Those are helpful explanations, but also bothersome because there are so many similar anecdotes shared here and other places about marriages ending with a similar chain of events, in particular with the woman cheating and/or going through an abrupt change in attitude toward her spouse. Could there really be an epidemic of personality disorders among half the population? This also aligns with the "red pill" view on marriage as well, a set of generalizations about male-female relationship dynamics I so badly want to reject but so far my personal life experiences has been unable to disprove.

Men don't typically seem to disguise feelings this way nor abruptly discard relationships so categorically. Shared life experiences with male friends are bonding experiences that are hard to break. My older brother, who served in Desert Shield, has a camaraderie with the other men he was with that all of them connect on. My dad would reminisce with his close friends about silly fun times they had years past as they made new silly fun times. Men don't get intimate each other so maybe the comparison can't be exactly the same, but I don't see men who have shared so much with each other discarding their friendships with such contempt, unless an extreme act of betrayal took place.

I am still processing in my mind what the heck is happening to me right now as I go through this divorce. The rapid onset of personality change in my wife is one of the most disturbing challenges I've faced in my life, right up there with other traumas like watching both my parents die of cancer. Witnessing this has changed me to the point where I will always have a wall preventing myself from fully opening myself up to another person and loving someone else to that extent ever again. You can't trust someone you are close to that she will stay who she is.