Hey guys, hope everyone is having the best day possible.

I have a question, but some background first. My wife and I were married for 14 years. Some good years, some bad years. We were never the super romantic type, but we loved and cared for each other, and it showed.

For the last year, things have downhill rapidly. I smell a rat. Everything I read on here, and online tells me she’s cheating, but I don’t have any evidence. The only indication of this is that she has “checked out“ lost all respect and affection for me, it’s like I don’t exist. All efforts to dissuade her from divorce have failed.

She is the type that our friends and family know as the happy, positive, “good girl”. Someone who is trusted and respected. The kind of girl everyone wants to hang out with and emulate.

We’ve had millions of arguments over the years. I have not been the supportive, most emotionally available husband out there. I treated her poorly a lot, but nothing that I feel would be a dealbreaker.

Our last fight was particularly nasty regarding the things we said to each other. I said that I wanted to change, and work on things. I was more than willing to go to couples therapy with her, and have been in individual therapy for a month working on myself, but this is to no avail. My therapist said that I’m doing great, and my wife said that she has noticed many positive changes in me, still, she’s 100% done.

Since she told me she wanted a divorce a week ago, we’ve had a couple of talks. Some good, some not so good. Two days ago, during a conversation which was calm and friendly, I came right out and asked her if there was someone else. I told her at this point, I really don’t care if she was having sex with someone else, (her bad, not mine) but her lying about it to me would be worse.

She said that nothing was going on presently, and nothing had happened in the past. She repeated this assertion several times calmly, not defensively. She said this has been a long time coming, and her reason for checking out and deciding on divorce was that she had felt unloved and mentally abused for years. She also doesn’t think that the two of us living together is a healthy environment for the kids. She’s probably right about the last part.

As I said, I don’t have any hard evidence that she is cheating. There haven’t been any big shifts in her schedule over the last year. We are fairly busy people with our family and kids, so there’s only a couple times during the day where she might be able to sneak off, mainly while I’m at work. She works from home, so you never know what might be going on.

I’m just wondering, from men who were with similar types of women, what did you find as evidence, or what pushed her over the edge to confess? My Spidey senses are tingling.

It’s either that, or because of the stress of the impending separation and divorce, I have a wicked case of confirmation bias, finding what I want to find, and feeling what I want to feel.

Let me know what you think.