Dear Lou92:

Welcome to the forums, I’m glad you are here and I hope that you post again.

“I have been in a relationship for 10 and a half years and got married in a couple of months ago… In the months leading up to the wedding, our relationship started showing cracks.  He suddenly became very close friends (very quickly) with a female coworker, where they were texting excessively, morning and night, despite spending all day in the office together… he has never had a female friend in the time I have known him and is now suddenly very close with on“-

– After marriage became a definite plan and six months before the planned wedding, he did something he never did in the 10 previous years: excessively communicate with another woman.

You shared that the last 5 or 6 years of your relationship with this man were “powerful and solid…  I made him feel like the centre of my world, and he made me feel like the centre of his“. But before the wedding and after the wedding, he is: “appearing distracted at home with me and not being as present in the evenings or weekends“, no longer having you in the centre of his world.

“This experience has affected me because this situation was coupled with him appearing distracted at home with me… has led me to the realisation that I have an anxious attachment style due to my Dad..“-

– I think that any woman in your place, having had an attentive man changing into a distracted man who excessively texts another woman, would be anxious regardless of attachment style.

“He still appears distracted at home, he is still talking to this female co-worker much more than I am comfortable with… I get the bare minimum from him these days, and I feel he gives his best self to his colleagues and friends at work and then I get the leftovers. He barely makes conversation with me… I no longer feel like the centre of his world, more like a spare part that is just ‘there’ when he comes home at night“- he is inattentive and distracted with you but attentive to, and focused on this female coworker, and other colleagues and friends at work.

“He said he was just being there for her as she was going through a difficult time and that they were just friends“- maybe his coworker is going through a difficult time and needs a friend, but the same is true to him: he is going through a difficult time and he needs a friend. Unfortunately (I feel sad to be typing this), you are not the friend that he is seeking. The question is why…?

One night, “he took our dog out for a walk at 7pm and didn’t come home until 4am, after being drunk driven home by a friend“- what made him not want to go home to you that night..?

I don’t think that either his depression nor your attachment style explains, by itself, this change in him. I think that the main explanation for the change is the wedding itself. Seems to me that he felt caged-in with you as a result of anticipating the wedding and then following the wedding. Maybe feeling that the marriage was really going to happen, and then it taking place triggered his childhood experience where he was stuck in his original home with an unpleasant or distressing parent or two, older siblings perhaps. Maybe as a child and teenager, he wanted out of the home for a long time. Fast forward, he wants out of the home he shares with you as his wife.

If the possibility above is correct to a large extent, then he is not seeking you as a friend because he sees you as someone unpleasant from in his past. Let’s say that he sees you as his overbearing mother (just an example, I know nothing about his mother/ original family) because he projected his mother into you once the wedding felt real enough. Next, he is trying to survive living with.. his overbearing mother by distracting himself and focusing on life outside the home.

You’ve known him for a long time. Is the above a possibility, Lou92?

anita