Dear Christopher:

Reads to me that your wife has been experiencing mixed loyalty- loyalty to her mother and loyalty to you. What changed recently is that her loyalty has finally made its final shift- and she is now completely loyal to her mother.

Her in love feelings for you meant a betrayal of her possessive mother for some time. My thinking is that your wife’s distress has a lot to do with her relationship with her mother, starting in childhood. Fearing losing her mother to cancer and following her mother’s disapproval of you, she chose sides- her mother’s side.

You wrote in your original post regarding her mother: “she accuses me of putting her in the middle of two people she loves”- being in the middle caused her lots of distress, eventually “killing” her in-love feelings for you. No longer in the middle is her solution, a relief of that distress.

anita