Hi everyone,

I'm going to share my story and do my best to remove bias or sugarcoat things. I want genuine feedback regardless of how harsh it might be.

6 1/2 years ago I started dating my future wife. We had been best friends for years growing up but lost touch as adults and reconnected. It was truly something out of a movie, and for two years that was the case. We had some major issues regarding traumatic experiences I caused at this time. There were some sexual kinks I had discovered prior to our relationship but barely fleshed out or knew anything about or my interest. Unfortunately instead of handling this properly and discussing it with her, she found out in terrible fashion. She found a bag of items I had from previously and was shocked, she also found pictures on my phone of compromising things, and she found messages of me to a dominant to meet and discuss my kinks. I will never ever pretend to be the good guy in this situation, I would have never blamed her if she left. We talked through it though and stayed together. We ended up getting engaged then married, I pushed her to pursue her dream of law school, we bought a house together. The rest of our issues are two fold, she is type A and I am incredibly laid back, we fell into patterns of her controlling everything and feeling like she was my mom. The second issue is that she brought up bringing my kinks into our lives, to serve a purpose of bringing us closer and getting what we wanted together (me getting my kinks satisfied and her getting the things she wanted done around the house or in general). She is terrible at establishing boundaries however, so when I would bring up ideas to push things further I did not realize how uncomfortable she was. It escalated to a point where she snapped suddenly one day over something comparatively meaningless, something not being cleaned properly. She gave me an ultimatum of go to therapy to figure everything out or get divorced. Obviously this was a shock to my system, and over the next month and half I've been doing all of those things. I've been taking charge every single day, I handled everything over the holidays, have processed my kink issues and many other things in therapy, and she has noticed the changes. She said she still doesn't trust me that it's real though so I just keep working. We basically didn't speak for a month until Christmas, over Christmas and New Years there was real change. We were so in sync, we were the versions of ourselves we always should have been. Now that there was a chance of reconciliation she confessed to me that while we were apart she had gotten close with someone at school. They bonded over their failing marital situations and things escalated. She assured me that she was putting a stop to it now that we were figuring things out and we've been very candid with each other. Things have slowly been getting better but still not there yet, I knew I still needed to work on things myself to move forward. We had been working so well together, she saw how different I was at Christmas, being engaged, taking care of everyone, how personal the gifts I bought were. Then New Years we were a well oiled machine, she had been planning a party for her friends. I worked so hard cleaning the house, we got everything ready together, we went shopping together and we just flowed better than we ever had. This was the version we could be, this is who we always should have been. This past weekend she went to visit her best friend in New England and we barely spoke. I didn't know where things stood or anything but I just wanted to keep working. So I made the decision to let go of the things of the past, I bagged up all of the kink items from 4 years ago and threw them out. I also bagged up the items from our failed exploration into these kinks but set them aside, I thought we could dispose of that together. When she got home she saw them in the trash and freaked out, she said I was still just as selfish and how could she trust me. I am still so confused, I did think about us but in the current state of things thought I needed to let go of that on my own. She thinks I should have discussed it with her before making a decision like that. I know we've been dysfunctional, that the versions of ourselves we were couldn't stay together, but who we were becoming, could make something amazing. She says she should have left 4 years ago, and she is probably right, but she didn't. She stayed and we got married, and regardless of how long it took I am finally growing into who I need to be. So I guess I just want to get my story out there and ask, is our dysfunctional past too much to overcome? Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Any thoughts on how to improve our situation? Where we live there is a mandatory separation period, we have until the end of May before anything can change so I would like to survive the next few months, if we can fix this that would be ideal,but at the bare minimum I don't want things to keep getting worse. We are both in therapy individually but as of now have not started couples therapy. I'm pushing for it but as of yet she thinks it's too late, I'm hoping this is not the case.

TLDR: On paper perfect couple suffers traumatic betrayal early on, moves forward to marriage but issues left unresolved bubble over years later and leave us on the edge of too far gone. In the process of fixing everything as much as I can, but unsure if reconciliation is possible. Please offer any tips or experiences you may find helpful.