I don’t know what I want from writing this, apart from a place to vent, to be heard and understood.
Yet again, I’m trying to talk to my wayward wife and tell her how I’m feeling, only to be shut down. The whole conversation gets turned around, blamed on me, and then ends up being all about her.
It’s getting to a hard part of the year for me, and for the first three years she was there for me and understood. However, things started to change ever so slightly a couple of years ago. I always told my wife that I knew all the signs and I would look out for them. One of the signs was that she started to lose weight.
I have been noticing her losing weight for some time, and I have said this to her directly. After all, this was the first thing I noticed at the start of her affair all those years ago. I started noticing this about 12 months ago. When I used to bring this up, she would reassure me that she isn’t losing weight and has no intention to lose weight as she didn't need to which I agreed. I listened and sort of accepted what she was saying, but I never really believed it.
Fast forward to now. I understand that this could all be because of the time of year we are about to enter. I also understand that I have no right to say what my wife does with her own body. But this isn’t about that. This is about more than that in my head.
Instead of her understanding now, it feels like she is gaslighting me. She is saying that she knows she isn’t losing weight and that’s all that matters. She has basically said that I’m hurting her feelings. She says it’s wrong of me to question her weight when she knows she doesn’t need to lose any. That’s the thing—she doesn’t need to lose any weight, and I’m questioning why she is losing it and for who. She is 100% loosing weight and i have shown her pictures to show this.
She is now saying that I don’t understand how this affects her and that it’s wrong for me to say she is losing weight when she isn’t. She is using phrases like I’m constantly on at her and that I don’t do anything around the house— the exact words she was using last time.
I don’t think she is having another affair, but I do think I’m starting to annoy her more and more. She holds it against me that I’m not further along than I should be after all these years. She knows I’m struggling. I have told her this, and she has left me to deal with it alone. She ignores my cries for help when she can see I’m having an off day. Things have changed in the bedroom. It feels more like she is doing it once a week just to say we are doing something, rather than because she wants to.
Whenever I say how I’m feeling, she turns it around and says, "Well, what about me?" She seems to think that my feelings don’t matter anymore because it’s all about her. She believes I should be past this by now. SHe has used these words.
People say you should talk to your spouse about how you’re feeling. But what do you do when the person you are talking to doesn’t listen, or worse, turns it around so you become the one in the wrong and it becomes all about them?
Don’t get me wrong—if she were here now, she would probably say exactly the same about me. But the fact is, I’m struggling and I need her to listen and understand without judgment or making it about herself. If it wasn’t for the affair, we wouldn’t be where we are now. The way she sees it is that if it wasn’t for me acting the way I am now, we would be past this. Her words are that it’s not her that’s breaking up our family—it’s me, because of how I’m acting now.
It feels like I’m being manipulated and gaslit into questioning myself. Is this really my fault, is she really loosing weight or is it really in my head.
