After 16 years together and 25 of friendship, she wants out. Is there any saving it?
Let me start out by saying, we still live together, and she says she has not told any of her friends. However, she doesn't wear her ring to work, and swears she's not having an affair with a coworker. That said, I can't make that make sense. If you haven't told any of your friends that you asked your spouse for a divorce, why did you stop wearing the ring at work? For the record, most of her co-workers know me, because I used to work there.
My wife is also a person that does not like to invite judgment based on appearance.
Now, to get to the bulk, I'm not going to lie, I spent a pretty big portion of our marriage being kind of awful. I'm insecure, a bit autistic, paranoid, and every single woman I've ever been with in my entire life has cheated. I am, at best, a very hard person to be with. However, I love my wife more than life itself. I honestly don't know where I end and she begins, and that's the way I like it.
One of my biggest problems in this relationship has always been the huge gulf between how deeply I feel for her, and my ability to convey it outwardly in ways that matter.
I have never been physically violent, I have never hit her, I have never cheated on her, let me just put that right out there. There is not a woman alive that could make me cheat on her, my devotion to her is such that if we ended up divorced, that would be it for me, I would just be single forever.
I have been trying to correct every single complaint she has ever had about me, and I think I have been frankly doing really well over the last month. She doesn't acknowledge any of it, she doesn't speak to me, when I try to talk to her she tells me to leave her alone.
I am somewhat cut adrift, because again, she won't talk to me.
Our relationship has survived a lot of things that would have destroyed other ones, and I am really deeply struggling with the thought that we should have survived all of that only to die here.
I don't want out, I want to save this with every fiber of my being. She just gives me so little that I don't even know if it's worth trying.
I sent her a fairly thorough email, because she ignores my texts, covering pretty much everything that needed to be said, and received nothing in return.
I don't even know if all of my efforts are falling on deaf ears, or if she is actually seeing my sincerity.
This is literally a woman I have talked to at length, every single day, for the last quarter of a century, and now I have spent 3 weeks barely talking to her at all. Just completely adrift.
I have offered counseling, therapy, you name it.
I am so without information that I don't even know if she checked out because she's having an affair and lying to me about it.
tl;dr wife took off ring after 16 years, I want to save marriage, she might not and might be having an affair, I don't want to give up, should I?