I need advice

Sitting here thinking of when it all started, at that stage I believed I could be a better person, a better husband and father. I wanted more out of life. I wanted to be drowned in love, I wanted people around me to care more about me and to see me as someone they want more then they need. I also wanted my wife to love me in the way I love her.

So I started changing the way I do things, I changed the way I think of people around me and I started becoming better. It was a difficult change to do on your own and with no one knowing that I feel I needed to change.

My focus was shifted more to my family and my wife especially – But it seemed the more I try and be better and the more good I wanted to be to others, the more I am pushing them away. I recall my wife saying ‘’why all of a sudden’’. And I could never explain to her in a way that she could understand. I think she maybe thought I did something wrong, and acted out like this out of guilt.

There were things that I noticed that just did not make sense to me. My wife also changed her attitude around me and I would not say in a way that I anticipated. She slightly distanced herself from me, stopped calling me on the nickname she gave me. She stopped initiating any contact – Like a hugs or small gestures she always did. I also noticed that If we visit my parents, she never greets them with a kiss and a hug like she always did. I felt that I was losing her even more now.

I am a very loving person and I am also a contact person. I love to love and I love to touch. My wife always complains about me rubbing, feeling and touching her all over for long periods of time. I would not say hours – but it probably feels like that to her. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s like therapy to me. And I enjoy feeling her.

My wife and my mother has had a super special relationship since we were married. She has a better relationship with my mother than I have with my mother. My mother always comes up for my wife and always takes her side on anything. My mother always tell her, she is her little girl. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer and she had 2 stokes in hospital. After this my wife has completely distanced herself from my parents. She never wants to go there and she also does not speak to my mother anymore. This kills me as I know how special there relationship was. I try and ease myself on the fact that my wife has lost her mother to cancer a couple of years ago and maybe it hitting her hard for loosing another mother to cancer. But my mother is still okay – she has a bit of short term memory loss due to the stokes however she is being treated and she is also getting chemo therapy for the cancer. But my wife has no interest. ???

On multiple occasions I have noticed something weird from my wife – she goes to the shop and stays away longer than it usually takes. She went to the shop across the road one night to get coffee and she stayed away for more than 45 minutes – I got in my car drove to the shop and she was not there. When I came home she stopped here a couple of minutes later and told me she was at the shop. I told her she was lying because I was there and she was not. She told me that she drove home on a longer road to finish a song she was listening to. She was rattled, shaking while I confronted her and this made me worry. But I left it and we went on.

I never stopped looking for signs as this was not regular behaviour from her. She was two phones, a personal phone and a work phone. The personal phone is fort-knocks, with passwords and face recognition etc. So I do not have access to the phone. And I usually do not look on her phone. But one night, after she went to bed, I got her work phone and I saw a sms on there from a number saved under ‘’SARS’’. Saying ‘’BABY, YOU CAN CALL ME NOW” This freaked me out at first but it did not make sense to me. I looked up the number and found out who the guy was. My wife is not stupid. Why have chats on her work phone it she could of done so on fort-knocks. It bothered me for months. I never confronted her because I was terrified of what would come out. I went through her social media profiles and checked out her friends list. A couple of days later – she cleaned up her accounts removing a lot of people. And still kept my mouth shut.

I tried to keep myself composed and left everything. We then went on vacation for a couple of days, driving with my brothers car, she connected fort-knocks to the radio and played music. She then received a call from someone, the number was saved under a name. and she told me to decline the call. She was sitting in the back of the car. I declined the call and asked her who that was. She told me that she does not know the person and he is calling her all the time and she will block the person. Later that day she told me that she blocked the number, I replied by telling her that this does not make sense. Why will someone just call her all the time? Why is the number saved on her phone? She just said she does not know why and she does not know where he got the number.

After that time went by and I this still bothered me – It was driving me crazy. One evening I confronted her and told her I want to know exactly who the person is and what is going on. She then only revealed, who the person is, it was an indian guy that also stays in our city. The guy contacted her on facebook and told her to add her on whatsapp. This guy was calling her between 3 and 4 in the mornings but I could see that she did not answer the calls. I do not know if she deleted some notifications. But atleast I have seen something now. She told me she deleted the whatsapps chats after she realised the guy was just trying to make small talk. And she never had any more chat with the guy after that. This came to some relieve but still did not make sense to me. I just wanted the truth.

I looked up the guy and got information about the guy- The messages my wife shoed me gave me the thought that maybe this guy is harassing her. I drove to his work on day and wanted to confront him. I was worried about what I will do, I was relieved to see that he was not at work and the place he had on facebook as his job was a place that closed down. I went home and thought of other ways to handle this. I then noticed that this guy is friends with someone I know. But it was my wife’s work friends husband. I let it go for a couple of days and I went to this friend for a business matter and after we were done I asked him about the 2 guys – the guy that sent the message on her work phone and about the guy that he knew. He then told me about many things that he knew of about my wife and his wife. And they have had multiple ructions about other guys in their marriage.

He told me about all the guys his was had gotten involved with and that the person that sent the message to my wifes phoned was infact on of the guys his wife had a thing with.

So My wifes friend from work is talking to other guys on her phone??? Surely my wife must then know about this. why is this happening on her phone and why is she allowing it? Why is she approving it?

He talked to me about the other guy that kept on calling her and he told me the guy is a washout. But if I would like to meet up with the guy he will arrange it.

He told me that he has a problem with my wife and his wife being friends, because they are doing this together. Using their lunch times to drive around and he has told his wife that she is not allowed to drive with my wife any longer. He has confronted my wife before about the issues.

My wife knew about all this, She was been part of all this and she never said a word to me.

I left his place shocked! I did not know what was happening, all this coming out now, like this.

His wife was on leave and was with him at work that day, but we discussed this in private. His wife saw there. A day after this happened he phoned me to tell me that he saw messages between my wife and his wife saying now that I and he are now talking us better be careful. When he confronted his wife she said she just made a joke.

I then did make contact with the one guy and he sent me all the screen shots about the chats between him and my wife. He also deleted some things on this chats that my wife did not delete. And he apologised about ever talking to her and he said he was sorry for causing any trouble in my marriage. My wife did tell me she block him but on his messages on facebook it showed that he tried calling her again weeks after she told me that.

Since then my wife has been acting strange and they have now found out that myself and her friends husband has been talking and they know everything that was said. Now They are very pissed off with me and my wife is not on speaking terms. She told he I had no right going to him as he is a stranger to me. And that I tried to sabotage their marriage. Obviously they had bigger problems now because of what they did. But I believe this is not on me. If there was nothing to hide there would be now issues in the end.

The couple has since made up and they are working on their marriage. But when all this came out to the wife’s the guy said I told him a lot of things about the wife’s which I did not. He even told them I have listening devices and trackers on her car and many other things. Some things that my wife told me in confidentiality about that couple I never disclosed to him. I had an issue with 2 people and I tried to sort it out. I did not say anything to him that will worsen their situation. He told me a lot of things which I did not disclose because I feel it has nothing to do with me or my wife.

I don’t know what to make of this. I am confused my wife is making me the dog in this whole thing. Telling me that she does not have to report to me if she does anything and she will not tell me anything again. And she will never tell me anything going on in her life.

I think there is some sickness in this whole story and I am not sure how to deal with this. Why is my wife hiding and approving all this behaviours from her friend at work. She basically chose her friend from work over me?

My wife started a new job a couple of years ago, which was out of her comfort zone and I remember how she was stressed out about her job, she felt she never did everything the way she was supposed to and she felt threatened all the time. She said it feels like she will be fired at any given time. She is overworked and she still does not get to everything she needs to. She is to this day still under a lot of pressure at work and I think it has a huge toll on her.

The work that she did forced her to take the emotion out of her job and the people around her, as she was now responsible to hire and fire sales people for non-performance. And my wife has always had a huge heart. She always cared more for other people than herself. And now because she needed to cope with her responsibility she has become cold in that sense. She has to do what is expected of her and even if she does not feel good about it – if someone does not person they need to go.
I feel in some way she has also adapted the mentality of removing the emotion from her work and maybe unconsciously adapted the same mind-set at home. I feel she lacks empathy – This is unbelievable for me as this is not the lady I know. She always had empathy for everyone. Looks she did not always have empathy for me but there were times that I saw it. She has always had a bit of a dark humour but this scared me beyond believe.

Something that has also been engraved in my mind it that she keeps on telling me, whenever we argue, If I want someone loving and caring I need to go find someone else. She has learned to cope emotionally without me and she is not going to ‘’baby’’ me. I don’t understand this… IF you love someone and you care about them and you cherish the relationship – How can you say this to someone?

Maybe I am different in that sense – If I get angry or furious in an argument. I tend to stay calm and think before I say something. I do raise the tome of my voice, I do swear but never swear at her, I do not criticize her character and I never say something deliberately to hurt her. I focus on the problem and try and figure out how to settle the issue and move on. But I feel she goes all in, she gets extremely aggressive, sometimes acts like she is going to hit me and she says cruel things, get into my character and blows out completely and I always walk away with a couple of scars. I am not feeling sorry for myself – I have known her like this for many years. I always try to avoid a fight because of what happens.

She keeps on telling me I have never been there for her, but I feel every time she is going through something and she is not okay – Not like she is taking it out on me but she treats me differently, she is irritated and she is difficult to handle. I always thought the right thing to do is to distance myself until she feels better. After years I know that was not the way to handle it – Because she feels I neglected her all the time. I avoided the conflict all the time because I did not want to fight, or become part of the problem she was going through.

So her view on our marriage was, I was never there and I treated her badly. I was not the best husband – But I don’t believe I was this bad? I’m a loving person. How could I make something feel like this about me? She never says things positive about me, or tells me anything that could indicate that I mean anything to her. It’s either I mean nothing to her or she does not want me to know that I mean something to her. I need to say ‘’I love you’’ first before she will say it.

When we were younger I would drink a lot and go out a lot with friends and come home late, and she never liked it. At that time of our life she always gave me a hard time about it. And I could never understand why she did not want to go out and have fun. She always told me that I am a father now and I have to act like a father. She told me to get friends that have children – that is the same like us. It took me a while to accept this and become more responsible. But I did.

I believe I am a good husband in ways like; I am not an abusive husband and have never lifted my hands on her. I get up in the mornings; make us a cup of coffee. We have our daily tradition to sit in bed, have a smoke and drink our coffee, have small talk and when it’s time we get up and start getting ready for work. When I am done, I make us breakfast and I go off to work. From work I go to the supermarket and get groceries. I come home and start with dinner. She comes home a little later than me, but most of the time she gets home dinner is ready. We have dinner in front of the TV and once we done, sometimes watch TV, sometimes we talk or sometimes she sit on her phone until she drinks a sleeping tablet and go’s off to shower and then into bed. We usually have a bit of small talk before we fall asleep. She needs to sleep early because she oversleeps a lot and she battles to fall asleep so she needs to dink a sleeping tablet to fall asleep quickly otherwise she tosses and turns through the night not getting any proper sleep.

I do get irritated and I also have bad days but so does everyone – I am not saying I am perfect. Sometimes I can also be a prick and I get very troubles and difficult if I have financial issues.

I have noticed for a couple of years now that my wife does nothing around the house to make it better or prettier. She is not a much organised person at home. Her stuff is always messy and nothing is organised. But she is a very clean person. And she looks after herself very well.