Struggling with my marriage a bit. My wife works a stressful job at a hospital and I work from home. After we get our two kids down for the night, she just wants to relax and watch TV or read a book before going to bed around 10 p.m. I want to talk to her and have quality time together and really spend more than 1.5 hours together a night.
I hate complaining to her but I finally brought it up a couple of months ago, and while things are better and she's making an effort, I'm still sad knowing that I will likely never be her top priority in life ever again. It's work, kids, then me. She also refuses to look for a different job because she finds what she does so fulfilling, even though it basically wipes her out by the end of the day.
It got to the point where I started worrying that she was having an affair and even went through some text messages on her phone. I didn't find anything inappropriate but it did reveal she has a much more robust/vibrant social life at work than I knew. Her job requires her to text and call people all day long in all sorts of positions in the hospital, and she has built good relationships with many of them (women and men). So work serves as her social outlet, and when she gets home, she doesn't really care to sit and have a long chat with me.
It feels bizarre because our relationship has done a 180 since she started this career and we had kids. For years before, she chased me in the relationship and while I loved her and we spent quality time together, I was the somewhat ambivalent, detached one at times. Now I'm desperate for a closer connection with her because it feels like she's barely my wife. I occupy maybe 5% of her energy/thoughts/attention. Not sure what to do or change, especially since she has already changed and been more affectionate/talkative to me, but it still feels like it's not enough. I hate being needy so I just deal with it on my own, but sometimes I think that we are taking the first baby steps out of the 100 or so steps that leads to a divorce.
