Hurting

Hello friends,

I hope this is an appropriate place for this, i'm desperate for advice...

After 15 years of marriage, looks like w'ere headed for divorce. A little background. i'm 42, she's 40, we have two daughters, 9 and 5 years old. She has always had higher status professional life than me, especially recently when she basically got a promotion to number 3 in a 2k employee company. I'm a recovering alcoholic, and will be sober 8 years in about a week.

I put my wife through a lot when I was drinking and using, and she put up with a lot and was as supportive as you can ask for. In and out of rehab, the whole 9 yards. I was a chronic relapser, until she finally kicked me out in late 2015. Saying if there is anyway for us to reconcile, i would have to sober for a sustained period of time, and then maybe we could work on it. Anyway, I left, rented an apartment with my humble income, and stuck to the path. We were agreeable during this time, and I would see my daughter all the time. Ironically, towards the end of 2016, I had one year of sobriety, and I was pretty independent, actually kinda happy and free. Although of course I wanted to keep my family together if possible. And right around then, she asked me back in. We went on, and had another daughter.

Fast forward to this last year. We've grown more and more distant. With her big wig job demands taking an enormous amount of space, but it's more than that. She hasn't seemed interested in me in any way for a while. We've had sex maybe 4 or 5 times in a year, and all of those were by my initiation, and the last few times i've tried, she's rejected me.

Things started feeling even worse when i noticed she had the time and space to go out with her brother and old friends a few times, but seems to never have time for us to get away form the kids and do something. In general, I feel like I have become her co-parent by not in any way a romantic partner. I'm not saying i've been the best at trying hard, but i for sure have tried more than she has.

Then things came to head this last weekend, where she made plans to go out with her brother and his girlfriend, and when I asked why she didn't ask me to go, she said it's because it was last minute thing and I know you have your AA meeting tonight. I was like, well I could have cancelled if you showed interest in me going, and that's when I spoke about the obvious. I asked her, what's the deal? are you just not into me any more? You seem to find time fore other things, but never us, and every intimate advance is rejected and is the furthest thing from your mind.

To make a long story a little shorter, she finally talked about what she was suppressing. And that is, the fact that I make her uncomfortable, because I generally have a negative outlook, and she is a positive social person. She said I have chip on my shoulder, and i'm always looking to put people in their place, and that she is looking to be nice to people and enjoy her life and to be a kind example to our kids, not one that his "job #1 is protecting his ego" And that she believed with long term sobriety, she would have those feelings towards me again, and hopefully had seen me change as a person to I guess a more pollyannish type, but that never happened even though i'm sober. And that she was never able to fully heal from the trauma I inflected on her when I was drinking/using.

But the examples she states as me being negative seem so trivial to me. I'm not the type to look for problems, but yeah, if someone flips me off for no reason, i flip them back off. If someone randomly says something offensive in front of my family, I confront them, when her dad randomly starts spouting off his political opinions, i start stating my own. If a contractor completely messes up a job on our house, I don't pay them.

Would my marriage and family have survived if I would have just smiled and kept my mouth shut more often? ironically all these behaviors were in a way, my way of protecting my family, not just my ego. Or at-least that's what i believe them to be.

Anyway, I told her I did not know the magnitude of this, and I can change it, I'll do a meeting a day, get more into the AA program and therapy and fix this. She said she does not have the capacity to be available to me in that way, even if i were to change. And that we should start making "arrangement".

Maybe if I didn't even complain about any of this, we would be fine today. It's almost like I gave her the ticket she needed to take it to divorce by my mentioning how I feel.

If you read all this, just know I appreciate it, and I would be thankful for anything you have to say. At this point... I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't even think straight.