My wife cares about someone else

End your marriage.

A friend and employee of mine had virtually the same experience you are describing.

Every day he would come into my office and tell me the latest tale about his marital problems. I always felt terrible for him, but also always ended our conversation with D----, she's crazy, and you can't cure her.

Because he was a friend, and because I felt for him, I spent hours with him every week trying to counsel him. Eventually, however, his situation began to effect his job performance and I had to relate to him more as a boss than a friend. I told him we couldn't spend so much time discussing his problems and, in fact, his problems were negatively impacting his performance.

I'm not sure my "tough love" made a difference, but he did end the marriage, or (more accurately) he gave up trying to save it, and immediately it was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

It's been about six years since they divorced and he is remarried and happier than he had been in a very long time. She is still crazy, but making some other poor sap miserable.

You don't have to hate your wife to leave her, but you need to wonder to what extent you might hate yourself if you are willing to subject yourself to so much pain.

I appreciate that you wrote this post from a sincere place in your heart, but everyone reading it has got to be saying something to the effect of' "Are you nuts?"

If she is truly willing to go into therapy and take the necessary drugs, you might have a chance, but if she hesitates or falters, give it up.

You can sacrifice your happiness in a doomed attempt to make her happy, or you can move on with your life.

Good luck.

good advice, the sooner you truncate the bad marriage, the sooner you can repair your life.

I did it years ago and I quickly recovered and now have a life of incredible satisfaction .

Then she's been on the wrong medication. Not to be flip about it, but there are choices between one or a few bad medicines versus none. I am not saying you need to cure her or stay with her but if the no meds/bad meds is what is driving things, get her a new doctor and get her on better meds. It may (and probably will) take a few tries. Of course she has to want to do this -- so long as she is considered competent, she will have a say in her care and you cannot force her.

I am not saying you need to be a martyr in all of this, just a suggestion as there may be ways for her life to be improved.

Take care of yourself emotionally, to be sure. You do not say whether there are any children, but if there are, I think you owe them at least the effort to get her better treatment. If she refuses, so be it. But at least you would be able to tell your children that you made an effort to get their mother the care she needs. A reassurance like that will go a long way, even if ultimately you are unsuccessful.

thanks for the advice everyone. No we do not have children. She was wanting to have them but I opted not too explaining to her that at this point it would seem too much like an effort to try to save the marriage and wouldn't be right to knowingly subject a child to this. I am actually going into therapy myself starting on the 8th to help with the severe depression I've slipped into over the past few months. I've talked to her a few times about therapy but her response has always been that she doesn't want too. then the other night she did say that she believes she needs it because of the way her mind flip flops she knows that she will never be happy without some therapy. So that's another thing I'm hoping with me going into therapy that she will follow suit. mainly though it is for myself. whether she's with me or not I want her to be happy. i want this all to work out and a separation may be the right thing just so we can both reanalyze the situation here and see how we feel after we have been apart for a bit. My wife has stated that she wants things to work out between us so is going to keep this other guy as solely a friend but at the same time I keep thinking that as soon as the separation is official that he is where she is going to run. it's confusing because she says she cares about this guy but wants things to work between us and also says that she will probably come over here on her days off to see me. I did tell her that if she wants to come back and aif I want her to come back after the separation that there would have to be some major changes in things. we have a history though of the couple of times we did split up we kept coming back to each other. This other guy she says is the complete opposite of her which where the phrase "opposite's attract" comes into play. Of course I also think that it's not that she cares about him but that he's something different than what she is used to. I just keep thinking that it's easy to get a new pair of jeans and through out the old ones but the new becomes old as well. Well I keep thinking that and trying to convince myself that I will make it through this although it seems pretty bleak right now. Just everything is so confusing right now trying to figure out what happened to us. I've been trying to put myself in her shoes but I just can't even begin to understand.