Me (31m) and my wife (32f) are splitting up today after a 10 year-old relationship and I'm just about completely devastated.

Hi,

I hope I'm not breaking any rules. Ultimately I just wanted a place to vent and talk about it since I don't have any close enough friends I can talk to.

We started dating 10 years-ago. I was going to photography and film school while she was about to finish Interior Design college. We were introduced by a mutual friend from high school and I fell in love literally the first time I looked at her. I'm not much of the cheesy type but I suppose that's one cheesy part of my life that will always be there. She was in love with someone who didn't love her back but after some time and a bit of drama, we ended up together, in love.

She was amazing. To this day one of the most gorgeous women that I've seen. We had so much in common, down to music, video-games and even interests developed together, like our love of animals. She is unbelievably kind and gentle, not to mention intelligent and just so, so beautiful. She ended up graduating in Digital Media Communications instead and started working in Digital Media.

We're in Brazil, so we always struggled with money. We moved in together about 5 or 6 years ago. First to a nice house we rented, and a couple years after we couldn't afford rent anymore, to an apartment on the first floor of my parents house that I sold my car for and built.

We live in a rather small and undeveloped city in Brazil, so trying to pursue a niche photography and video career, I failed. She did reasonably well working in a social media agency but because of where we are, she still makes very little money to this day. I thought I was going to do okay for a while, but it all went downhill fast and about 7 years-in our relationship I started to struggle pretty hard with depression and anxiety - problems I've had since I was 13 but never got the courage or means to seek treatment -, eventually giving up completely on my career and spending a whole year without barely leaving my home. She's never had to support me, though, as through one way or another - along with the help of my reasonably well-off parents - I've always managed to come through our bills and more often than not helped her financially.

At this point it seemed we had grown a bit apart from each other. Our sex life was reduced to maybe once every couple months, we talked less and less, and often about more practical stuff than personal things. Understandably, she didn't enjoy very much living on top of my parents house and seemed to always have a feeling where she was just waiting for things to finally improve so she could start living life and being happy. I can't say I disagreed entirely with this perspective but perhaps it was easier for me to deal with our current living conditions than it was to her, especially considering she doesn't have any family in this city.

But last year I decided to do something about it. Enrolled again in college, this time in Web Systems Development, surprisingly started to do well very soon, and got a paid internship where I've been told I'm in line to be hired up by the end of the year, making the same salary as my wife currently does.

But also in this past year, because of my hours with the internship + school and her job, we only see each other maybe 1 or 2 hours a day. And usually we're completely exhausted anyway. Our financial situation is still currently pretty tough, although we can live on a day-to-day basis and neither of us is in debt.

And I suppose that's what I took to break us apart. We haven't had sex in over 8 months now, I think. We don't have personal conversations anymore. When I pick her up from work (she doesn't drive), she doesn't say a word in the car, and not because she's mad or anything, but because she genuinely doesn't have anything to say to me. When I start to make conversation, she's very monosyllabic and doesn't engage, so a few months ago I also consciously started to avoid trying to make conversation with her. Finally, all we ever talked about was practical things: bills, groceries, vet bills, how our cats were doing etc. I also used to bottle up a lot of my feelings and never talk about them, always struggled with that, and I suppose I'm an irritable person that sometimes would answer rudely to her when we had an understanding. It was something I knew bothered her but I was always actively trying to police myself and improve on it.

Last night she asked if I was happy because she wasn't. I told her I wasn't either but still very much loved her. I asked if she still had any attraction or interest in me, she didn't answer but had an expression that couldn't tell it louder that she no longer liked me. She asked for us to take a break and I said I didn't believe it, and that if she was no longer interested in me, there's no time that would regrow that. She agreed. We didn't say the words but we both knew we were splitting up now and then.

Today (national holiday) I saw her but we didn't speak to each other. She left with a friend and I send her some texts saying I still loved her and always would, but that I understand her decision and that I'll help her find a new place and that she can take anything she wants from the house. She replied she was going to start looking for a place to stay and that she needed time to her, so she didn't reply to anything else further.

And that's how my world's been falling apart since yesterday. I told people so many times over the years she was pretty much the only reason I was still alive. She was my anchor and I used to believe I was hers.

I don't believe anyone is going to read all this but I hope I feel better getting it off my chest. It's funny how I feel kinda like after my first break-up when I was 16, only this time the feeling is intensified, albeit familiar. I don't feel like showing up to my internship tomorrow, I don't like anything really, just disappearing completely.

I can't help but keep asking myself how am I going to move on without her.

Anyway, thank you for reading all this.

tldr: 10-year old relationship broken, she admitted to have lost all interest in me, I don't know how to move on.

Submitted June 24, 2019 at 02:15PM by two-headed-boy http://bit.ly/2IGwTPL