My wife and I were married for 8 years and together for 13 and we have 2 kids together. I should have seen signs early on, from fighting before we were even together and her always upset with me about something. We even fought on our wedding day. But I loved her and cared about her, and still do. But as the years progressed our fighting continued. Nothing physical but always screaming at each other and once the fight was over we would never discuss it and just keep on moving, even after several attempts to try and fix the situation I was met with no communication and just sweeping things under the rug.

Things continued to escalate after we had our second child as she was no longer working and I had to put in a large amount of overtime just to keep our heads above water after just purchasing a house. After coming home one night she threw her ring at me and walked out the door because she felt I was giving her 0 attention and was doing nothing to contribute. I fought to stay together and changed everything almost giving up sleep just to provide her what she wanted.

After a year of this I broke down because I continued to show her I wanted her but she never provided me with any emotion or intimacy as she felt all of that should fall on me. She said things would change and they did for roughly a month but then it went back to the same old story.

For every single one of the major family deaths she had during our time together, I was there through it with her to support her and comfort her. When my uncle passed away I was devastated. I asked her to be there for me and she refused stating it was too hard for her and remained drinking with friends while I went to be at his bedside.

I was set for a promotion at work and was looking forward to advancing my career but when the time came she told me if I took the promotion then she would not be able to get the position she wanted, after starting to work again, so I turned it down and still regret doing so to this day. But I kept on going. And then to top it off she never received the position she thought she would get.

Our relationship after this went stale. We hardly spoke with each other and when we did it was an argument. We spent the majority of our free time sitting on the couch staring at our phones. It began effecting me in a way I can only describe as shutting down emotionally. Our friends group no longer wanted us around because we would just fight about something dumb and insignificant. I started noticing we were struggling more and more financially and when I would ask to see the finances (she insisted she be in control of all the bill payments and finances), I finally dove deep and found in a year she spent close to $8000.00 on a phone game she was playing.

From then on the fights got worse we told each other we were no longer in love with each other anymore and it continued to spiral. I finally had enough of the fighting and the arguing so I went into therapy to see what I could not only find out about our relationship and get insight but to understand myself and the first thing my therapist said to me after breaking down in front of him, a man I had just met, he asked why we weren’t divorced yet and the only thing I could say was because of the kids.

I no longer wanted to work on a relationship thatI was getting zero effort back on in return and so I finally made the decision to separate and leave. One of the things that broke me to my core was one day just before I was leaving I laughed and my daughter told me that she had never seen my smile before.

I say all of that To explain my situation and provide the back story.

We have been separated for 3 weeks now and she is constantly blowing up my phone wondering what I’m doing and where I’m going and wanting to talk and hang out. As of now I have the kids one week and she has them the next when I have them I don’t reach out at all I handle business and get things done. But now she’s telling everyone we know that we’re going to work things out and things will go back to normal but I don’t want that. I don’t have the energy to fight for that anymore when the one person go was supposed to be my everything never once fought for me especially when I tossed in the proverbial towel. So I guess my question is how do I deal with this when she feels that this is just a phase and this is not really happening? Am I crazy for leaving am I the only one whose been in a situation like this?