Need some advice on emotionally supporting my wife

To start with I would ask HER that question:

OnDistantShores said:

how exactly can I make her feel less alone, and more emotionally supported?

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Maybe she will have an answer and maybe she won't. But it will communicate to her that you are trying and searching for a way to help her. That alone may help a lot.

If you ask her directly what she needs, she may not actually know distinctly or be able to describe it clearly, which will only frustrate her more. I'm speaking from experience here.

You mention love bucket. Do you two know what you're love languages are? For instance if hers is acts of service, but yours is words of affirmation, you can tell her ad nauseam how wonderful you think she is and she will not feel that her love bucket is full. There are quizzes you can take to help identify your love languages, if you don't know them already. Just google "five love languages".

I think one of the key things is to ask her what she would like for you to do. Ask her what what ways you can support her better and become more affectionate. It sounds easy to some, but for someone who isn't an affectionate person, it isn't easy.

I am an emotional person and although my husband is affectionate, he didn't know how to handle me when I was emotional. He often felt like it was something he did and he would draw away from me and in turn, I would pull away from him because neither one of us wanted to be rejected by the other. What we are learning is to draw closer, not assume things. My husband always ask "is everything OK", "is there something he did", "is there something we need to discuss" because he is sincerely is thinking about my feelings. I also am learning to draw closer to him when I am upset, hurt or something because we both know that neither one of are trying to reject the other. I think about his feelings and he is thinking about mines. I know if I have something that needs to be discussed that pertains to him that I have to think about how to approach him, not in a frustrating type of way especially if he asked me over and over "what's wrong". We are communicating a lot better.

So I would say to truly ask her what you can do better. I would say invite her to share the couch with you, watch a show she likes. Please if you aren't, date and date as much as possible especially since you guys don't yet have kids. I'm not talking about having to spend lots of money, I'm talking about taking walks, hanging in the park and just chatting. One thing that I love that my husband and I do is have long talks at night just about everything. "How was your day", etc. Try to see things from her eyes and not yours. She is angry and you have to be careful with this because you don't want her to feel like she is disappointing you because you guys haven't been able to conceive as of yet. She could be angry cause she is blaming herself. Reassuring her that you love her, that you support her and that you are there to ride this out. One thing that I need because I can be emotional is reassurance of my husbands love and that feeling of being safe in his arms and that he is with me.

I am going to pray for you guys, be well!!!

Practically, how do you make someone feel less alone, and more emotionally supported? What are the nuts & bolts of how that looks?

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I love this! That is so ISTJ! It almost read "how can you be practical about emotions?" That is exactly something I would say. I'm ISTJ, although my "S" is barely an "S".. I think the S is 51 and the N is 49. Anyway, I can relate to not really knowing how to support someone on an emotional level. My husband says he feels emotionally supported by me, and I think a lot of how I do that is simply ask questions and/or prompt for more information. I also listen when he needs to vent, and "feed back" what I think he might be feeling (sometimes this is a guess, and if I'm wrong he will clarify what he really is feeling). Here's what it might look like:
Husband (or friend, or colleague, etc) talks about an issue or situation
I ask questions for more information like "what happened then?" or "what does that mean?" or "how did that work?"
Husband fills in the details while I listen for feelings that might come through. If his speech gets fast and his eyes widen, I think he might be excited, or if he takes a long time to answer a question I might think he's tired, for example.
Husband then might clarify how he is feeling "yes, I'm looking forward to _____" or "no, I'm not tired, just feeling introspective."
Then I might ask him about what he's looking forward to or whatever.

Imo, the three biggest practical keys I can give you are these: Listen, paraphrase back what your wife says, and now and then empathize...the empathy (guessing about how she might be feeling) might require broadening your "feeling" vocabulary and learning a little emotional intelligence. But even if you can't identify with the situation that causes the emotion, even the most robotic ISTJs have experienced the full spectrum of emotions, even if we don't express or talk about them much. So you can always identify with the feeling. Part of empathy is imagining what it might be like to experience the world from her perspective, too. If you can't imagine it, ask her to describe her world to you while you try to imagine and understand, like a visualization technique.

It's funny how much the two of you sound like me and my husband, but my husband is lucky enough that I have a lot of logic mixed with my emotion (comes from being a math/science student I think lol), so I can give him more insight into what is behind my more extreme emotions. I do not expect him to be a mind-reader, and I tell him exactly what is wrong, and what he can do to make it better if he so chooses. Like you, he also says that he doesn't really have a lot of feelings, so it's hard for him to understand it when I'm overly emotional. Us silly, emotional people do tend to go through phases. I'll be totally fine (maybe seemingly) for months, but it might just mean I'm bottling stuff up, and it'll come out eventually, but my husband and I worked together, and he's onto my little plot now, and he doesn't let me play the bottling up game anymore.

Since your wife and I sound a bit alike, maybe some of the things that help me will help you with her. As others suggested, you can directly ask her what would help. It sounds like she wants you to be a bit of a mind-reader, but did you try asking her when she wasn't emotionally charged? When I get upset, my husband seems lost on how to handle it, so we ride it out, and when I calm down (maybe hours or days later) I talk to him calmly about what the problem was and what I would have liked him to do. I do this so he'll know how to handle it next time. He's started taking my advice sometimes.

You said you took the love languages test, and your wife's language is gifts, but you don't have one? Maybe you could see if you can identify any of the languages as stronger for yourself. My husband's language is acts of service, but mine is an almost even mix of words of affirmation and physical touch. For me, having his language identified helps me identify when he has made effort to show me he loves me (example: If he does the dishes I was planning to do, since he understands love by acts of service, I realize that's him trying to fill my "love bucket." If I didn't recognize acts of service as his love language, that wouldn't go into my love bucket because normally mine is filled by sweet talk and snuggles.) It certainly sounds like you love her, so there must be some way she fills your own love bucket.

I'm not sure how you can really work with the receiving gifts language (sounds expensive to me!), but does she have a second place language? It was interesting to me when I took the quiz because I knew it was so true, and my husband had picked up on it even before we took the quiz, but for me, words of affirmation are so important. My husband tells me every day, several times a day that he loves me, I'm the best, I'm beautiful, I'm the other half of his brain, he can't wait to see me, etc., and it never gets old to me. He often texts me these things throughout the workday. It may seem nonsense to you, redundant, boring even, but it means the world to me, and he loves being the one who put the smile on my face. It is impossible to tell me those things too often.

Your robot, logical mind might tell you she knows you love her and knows she's beautiful, but maybe give verbalizing (and texting!) it a try and see how she responds.

What is it like when you two talk? Is it one-sided? How often do you tell her how you feel about her?