My husband has expressed his desire to end our marriage. About 18 years ago he had an emotional affair with someone and it devastated me. We didn’t get marriage counseling for it until about 8 years afterwards. I spent a lot of time in pain with him begging me to let it go before we went to counseling. We had 10 sessions of marriage counseling and I was optimistic I could go on and let it go. I found myself experiencing doubts, still feeling the pain of it, and questioning myself as a woman and whether or not he really desired me. My self esteem was blown and I didn’t know how devastated I was and how much I needed more help than what we’d gotten together. I was ignorant of what I really needed, but I knew that I loved him and wanted out marriage to work. I tried to move forward, not understanding that I really couldn’t because my heart and mind weren’t prepared. I spent the next few years lashing out at him, not trusting him, and our sex life suffered. There were other instances that led me to question his faithfulness (i.e. him privately contacting women on FB messenger and giving them his work cell to call). Then I had an emotional breakdown due to severe pressure and mistreatment at work and fell into depression; where I’ve been for the past 6 years. On top of that I began having female issues and was always on my period which impacted our ability to be intimate and had some other issues that made sex painful. My depression caused me to withdraw more from him, we’ve disagreed on how to raise our daughter in bad arguments. About a month ago I realized I needed to make some life altering changes to be better. I was tired of being depressed and letting it affect my relationships, so I started talking to him about making changes to build up to the big talk about my problems and me decision to get help. I was afraid to tell him part of my problem was the old pain and the things he’d done to make me mistrust him because I knew he would get angry that this is still an issue after so long, so I delayed this talk. Ive since made some some positive changes to remove some of the stressors and discussed them with him. We were talking about how good life would be to see these things happen, but I still needed to share the reason for these changes and have the big talk. By the time I went to talk with him he said he is done trying to prove that he’s dedicated to me and done with me lashing out at him and done with not having intimate relations very often and thinking he doesn’t matter. He says I have brought him to a place where he doesn’t know himself anymore and he doesn’t trust me to change. I have expressed my sincere apology, explained that my mental health prevented me from seeing him, that my physical health contributed to the lack of physical intimacy, and that it’s not fair to hold me accountable for the things I wasn’t able to do due to my depression and physical health issues. I also pointed out that my pain from his transgressions is a problem because I found in my research of ways to help myself, I found that I never got the help I needed to properly heal. He agreed to counseling and seemed to be softening to me but then went fishing with his best friend and came back hardened and stuck to his position of “saving himself”. So now it appears counseling is simply to show me he’s done the work, not to actually work it out. Please pray that God will intervene in his heart and that we can reconcile. He is my heart and soul and I would be lost without him, my dreams have always been us growing old together and I need him. Further, I know this would devastate our very sensitive child.