Your wife has a seriously disturbed view of life. It sounds like she wants to have something to be mad about. This prolonged rejection of physical intimacy with you is not okay. Love making in a marriage is not optional. Even in Victorian times, to withhold physical affection and spurn one's spouse in bed was considered a breach of the marital contract. Rhett Butler told Scarlet O'Hara he had legal "grounds for divorce" on that basis. I'm not saying your wife should simply "do her duty," as was the expression in a byegone era, but she has a serious moral obligation to try and resolve whatever issue has her this troubled that she is not fully participating in the marriage. What she's doing (or not doing) was traditionally considered a form of mental cruelty. For her to simply say she does not feel "emotionally" loved" is too vague and too broad. Unless you're some kind of boorish dolt with a Neanderthal approach to women that we haven't caugt on to, she needs to spell out what's bugging her. If you are just a general clod when it comes to showing affection (which you don't sound like,) then why did she marry you in the first place?

Obe psychologist that I used to listen to on the radio had a saying: "When things change, it's because something changed." I have found that to be true. Everything has a cause. A woman who was formerly responsive and eager for sexual relations stops wanting sex and even rejects advances is reacting to something. What is it? Think back to when her rejection of you started. Something precipitated this. You two knew each other for 3 and 1/2 years before you got married, which is a decent length if courtship. The marriage wasn't a "shotgun" affair. The pregnancy began after some months of being married. All of this is what I consider ideal. Now she seems sorry she ever married you. Do you have any idea what got her into this mindset?

Somehow you're not connecting the dots, or your wife has some serious emotional problems that you just haven't known about. In any case, I think your wife has a real mental disorder. This is beyond being a negative type of person. This is beyond her being a pessimist. She deals with disappointment and/or resentment by, basically, sulking. That is a bonafide mood disorder, or personality disorder. She needs to be made aware that this cannot go on. You cannot be passive in the face of this, or you enable the behavior. And this is so unfair to the child soon to land in the middle of this. The remedy is not to dissolve the marriage and you pursue finding "the one." A good faith effort on both your parts to resolve this is the moral obligation you both took on when you got married and, again, when you got pregnant. Is your wife, on some front, not happy about the pregnancy? If you honestly can't figure out why your wife's attitude shifted so drastically, you need to get the two of you to counseling, dragging her, if that's what it takes.

It's note-worthy that you didn't entitle this thread "My wife rejects me." You seem, instead, more preoccupied with how there is this other woman who just might be "the one" and you're dying to know if she has "feelings" for you because it seems like there's something "special" between the two of you. Of course, getting rejected at home makes you more susceptible to feelings of attraction outside the home, but you do seem awfully eager to move on to another relationship. I believe you that your wife doesn't know about this particular attraction you feel, but could it be causing you to act so bored with your wife that she knows something is missing in your feelings for her.

I read your posts again, and I see the bit about the ankle surgery making a change in your wife's life. I'm looking for a "precipitating stressor," and maybe that's it. IDK . . . that doesn't quite seem enough of an explanation. But maybe you can use that as an excuse to get your wife into counseling. Maybe tell her you are concerned that she seems depressed since the surgery and the way it curtailed her activity and you are afraid you aren't supporting her effectively and you want help to make things better for the both of you. She sounds stubborn, but I hope you can budge her on this. If the nice approach fails, then get angry. I don't believe you can let this go on without your marriage eventually going down the drain. Right now that may not seem so awful to you because you've got this fantasy of how glorious life could be, if you were free to pursue "the one." It wouldn't be anyways near as great as the fantasy holds out, I promise you.