My wife and I have been married for 8 years. She's a licensed healthcare professional but hasn't worked full time, or even meaningfully part time, during our marriage. We've moved a few times, and she's never really pursued work in her field. She's also said she doesn't enjoy the career she spent years training for, so there's that layer too. She carries about $180K in student loans that we've been managing through IBR and filing taxes separately.
To give a sense of the financial picture: over the entire 8 years of our marriage, she's earned roughly $115K total, and about $28K of that was unemployment insurance. So her actual employment income over nearly a decade comes out to around $87K, which averages to under $11K a year. Meanwhile I've been the primary earner throughout and have been doing well the last few years.
To be clear, she's not sitting around doing nothing. She handles the majority of cooking, cleaning, and laundry. I do dishes and home maintenance. We outsource lawn care. We travel well, roughly one international trip a year plus weekend getaways.
But recently things have gotten harder to ignore. She's become easily offended by things I genuinely don't intend as hurtful. She's pulled away from the few friends she had. Our sex life has faded. There are stretches where she goes silent on me for something I said that, objectively, was not offensive, and I'm left guessing what happened. She doesn't get along with my family either.
She's not a bad person and I don't want this to read as an attack on her. But I've started noticing that I feel most at ease when I'm by myself. That's not something I ever expected to feel in a marriage, and I don't really know what to do with it.
How do you open a conversation with someone who shuts down or takes offense easily without it turning into an argument? Has couples therapy actually helped anyone in a dynamic like this, or does the withdrawing partner need to address something individually first?
tl;dr: Wife [34F] has gradually withdrawn from friends, family, and me over our 8 year marriage, tends to go silent or get offended over minor things, and I've reached a point where I feel most content when I'm alone. Don't know how to move forward.