Wife Wants "Space" With Nothing Loving Allowed

[dingoding]

My wife and I married in 2005, divorced in 2007 and remarried in 2009. We have a beautiful 2.5 year old daughter and two older children from her previous relationship. Things have been mostly good since our reconnection, but over the last couple of months things have started going downhill. She somehow convinced herself that she had ADD and got put on some medication. I was never a fan of this as she does not have ADD, and most likely was using it for weight loss even though she has a perfectly healthy weight. After a couple of months on the pills she started getting highly agitated and borderline paranoid. Me coming home from work 30 minutes late due to traffic or me going out to our country property to do some work for the day was being construed as I must be cheating or something else devious is going on. Let me make this clear, NOTHING was going on. I love my wife to death. This started many arguments and in her overly agitated state mean things were said all around. I recognize this and apologize whenever I can, but she just can't do it. On top of this, she has just been distant and cold and just not herself and going out with "friends" on weeknights until early morning. A few weeks ago I clicked on a wrong link while paying our cell phone bill online and it went to a call log. I noticed many long calls to a long distance number. My wife is a 3-4 minute phone conversation kind of person and these calls were all 45 minutes plus and always when I wasn't around, some at one or two in the morning. I confronted her about this and she stammered and stalled and then said she was talking to one of her girlfriends on her friends phone, then it was she has no idea what number that is, then it was none of my business and then it was a "friend", then she locked herself in the bathroom for 30 minutes and came out saying it was her new girlfriend that she met a couple weeks ago even though these calls have been going on for a month. She even called the number and a girl answered, I talked to her for a little while, but something was fishy about how she couldn't answer some simple questions without putting me on hold for 10 or 15 seconds. I apologized for jumping to conclusions, but something still didn't seem right. By now, I'm keeping an eye on her phone calls and they continue. Last week I placed a spoofed call (where her number shows up as the calling party) to this number and a guy answered "well hello there beautiful". I was enraged. I'm very close to her father and called him first to give myself time to calm down. He told me his wife (her mom) had mentioned that she has been talking to an old guy-friend of hers (who I know about and have known about for years) and she was apparently scared to tell me about it because she thought I'd get mad, which I wouldn't have. I called and confronted her about it. She just said she wasn't going to talk about it right then and sent me a text message later coming clean. No sorry, no anything like that, just the truth and I do believe her. The problem is she doesn't realize what she did has hurt me deeply and has really shaken my trust in her. She is convinced in her mind since she was finally cornered into telling the truth that she never lied to me in the first place and I'm making a big deal out of nothing. This has brought on all kinds of arguments where she has drug up everything I've ever done wrong for the last 8 years as if they happened yesterday. I try to remain calm and have a reasonable conversation sometimes more successfully than others, but she is just ANGRY. Somehow in her mind it's my fault her misdeed is causing us a problem. She ran off the her girlfriends house with the kids for the night and came back the next day saying she wants time apart, but living in the same house for us to both work on ourselves. No loving talk, no touching, no kissing, no sex, just two roommates. I'm having a very hard time with this as I am a good and loving husband and father. I'm not perfect, but I'm better than average and I'm confident in saying that. I've tried to give her a simple kiss on the cheek before she goes up and sleeps with my step daughter and it just enrages her. I'm kind of at a loss here. I feel like I'm being punished for her bad acting. I love my wife dearly, but this wall between us is killing me, literally, my blood pressure is spiking to dangerous levels. What am I doing wrong, or not for that matter? Is it wrong for me to think this is pretty jacked up?

[ThunderHorse]

Dear Ding Dong,

You do not mention your listening skills and challenges; to give your wife at least 15 minutes a day of unconditional listening. There are two chapters in the Married Men's Secrets Book on listening. There is a Thread under Communications Titled "LISTENING STRATEGIES FOR MEN" It seems that your wife needs to talk more than you are providing her listening time/opportunity.

The ADD medication may make her more talkative, and mare challenging to listen to. Women ordinarily talk in a sequence of feelings, and men listen in terms of logic, and problem solving.

What can you do to improve your listening skills? When do you offer to listen to your wife's random feelings? How can you increase your availability to listen to your wife? When can you telephone her, with time to talk/listen?

What has your wife asked you to change, that you have declined to change? If the country property is cutting into your listening time, can you sell the country property? Or lease the country property to someone who will take care of it?

Can you call her on your cell phone when you are stuck in traffic, and late getting home?

What changes can you make, just for the sake of change, to add interest to the marriage?

Good luck, best wishes.

//

[dingoding]

After speaking at length with a very experienced counselor, I've come to realize that the ADD medication she was on has likely triggered a bipolar manic state. In this state there isn't much I can do. I'm a pretty decent listener, but when the paranoid and downright delusional thoughts coming from her are so far detached from reality, any amount of listening is useless. She's been gone now for about three weeks and refuses to speak to me. Her only interests at the moment are going out and partying and hanging out with friends that perceive her as a victim. The night she left, she was in a full rage state and even called the police and told them i was shoving her and throwing her into walls, something that is absolutely not true. The police told her to leave and my daughter was to stay at home with me. She came back to the house about 30 minutes later with her guy friend, boyfriend, whatever he is. While he stood on the street in front of my house threatening me, she snuck my daughter out the back and took off. This is not the person I know by a long shot. These sudden and drastic changes, staying out late all the time, not sleeping, irrational irritability, uncontrolled anger, promiscuous behavior, etc. are textbook bipolar symptoms. I simply can't get through to her. She is staying at her parents’ house with all the kids now and while her father seems to understand what I'm saying, her mother just protects her and enables her to continue down this path. Her mother rules that house. I'm really at a complete loss here. I know the woman I love is in there somewhere, she's just lost, very lost.