((((DadFMF))))

Hmmm, friends with benefits. It looks like your wife was lonely for a long time and she has decided to explore companionship and discover herself and doesn't want to be committed to anyone. That's what is involved in this friends with benefits life. It's a way of defining how one wants to relate with others without looking for a commitment or being committed or having to answer to anyone.
Also, it's a quest of "I want to learn to feel good about myself without having to depend on someone else to define that for me". In a way what she has said to you by her actions in bits and pieces here and there is that she doesn't want to go back to living a life that she was living where she lived around the needs and demands of others.

I agree with eskie in that your wife never learned how to communicate, it probably wasn't something she was exposed to growing up where she saw healthy communication taking place with her parents.

You want a committed relationship where your partner is monogamous so you can plan a future together. Well, it really looks like your wife doesn't want to do that with you. She would rather be friends with benefits and have an agreement where she can be free to be with whomever she wants and do what she wants without having to get permission from anyone. And her saying how the housing you get would be good for you and the children, but not for her is just another way of saying she doesn't want to be a part of "your" plan. And yes, she is probably using you to subsidize her while she explores and experiments.

The ones I am concerned about in this picture are your children. What they see of the communication taking place between you and your wife is confusing them and they don't have the capacity to understand it. Also, as I mentioned, children tend to believe that they are not loved or important enough. They are already experiencing being stuck in the middle where they see that their mother is lying to their father. They are already experiencing "childhood emotional neglect". This doesn't mean that you don't love them, or even where your wife doesn't love them, what it means is what is taking place between you and your wife is confusing them emotionally and they are often alone with that emotional confusion.

I feel for you because I had to deal with some major challenges in my marriage too. My husband was a binge alcoholic, and he also cheated on me and I did not find out about that for about 6 years. My husband was 'SELFISH" and I was lonely and pretty much the "stable" parent to my daughter and I tried very, very, hard to shield her from the dysfunction I was experiencing.

I have tried to listen to your situation and consider "both" of you in this picture. Yet, I am concerned about how your wife is using alcohol and going to bars etc. I can't help but see the potential hazard of engaging in that lifestyle. What I do know first hand is how the alcohol slowly affects a person's judgement and ability to be logical and responsible. I know how the person engaging it gets so they don't care and instead lives in denial. I also know this has become a huge problem in your age group too. A red flag to me is how your wife always drinks when she is with you too. She isn't even recognizing that her two children are seeing this too.

Your wife is refusing to get help because she wants to be in denial, even to herself. I learned that about that problem by living through it with my husband and it's progressive and sneaks in and creates distance and problems, it doesn't EVER fix problems, instead it creates them. What I personally learned about that problem is how it gradually becomes the crutch and sucks someone in to practicing a very selfish life, then when it gets to a point where the person FINALLY admits they have a problem, that becomes a new path where the partner distances into the rooms to learn how to live without that crutch and that too leaves the partner "alone and lonely".

I don't want to paint your wife as a "bad person" because considering what you described of your relationship, I can see she was dutiful for several years, but was also "lonely" in her relationship. I know what that feels like first hand. But I did not choose alcohol to drown my loneliness and hurt. I started my own business and focused on being a good mother. But I was lonely when it came to having a "true" partner.

If your wife doesn't want what you want, then the two of you need to make a decision and work on getting along and making sure your children have their parents and don't have to struggle alone with how this is emotionally challenging them. As far as your wife is concerned, she needs to really look at that path she is taking, how that can become confusing to her two children and how "if" she is drinking and partying around them, how that isn't fair to them and the consequences that come from them being exposed to that are not good for them and the one thing that's so important about that is we NEVER get a chance for a redo when it comes to our children.