A Mix of Issues...Some Her Fault, Some Mine

My wife and I have been married for almost 5 months, and we'd been together nearly 4.5 years before we tied the knot. We didn't start living together until about 10 days before the wedding. Initially, she didn't want us to be living together until we were married, and I'm still unsure to this day as to what the rationale for that was. (I would have preferred that we live together for some time before getting married so that we knew we'd be able to function well daily.) Suffice It to say that I feel some of the cracks are starting to show. Throughout most of our relationship, we only saw each other on the weekends, though we'd speak online every day and on the phone each night. We lived with our respective families up until we moved in together, and her family history has, unfortunately, been far more checkered and unstable than mine (her parents are divorced and her father didn't attend the wedding due to a rather hostile falling-out they had about 11 months before the big day). The stress of her family life alone served as a catalyst for more than a few events that would have put our relationship and the wedding plans in jeopardy had cooler heads not prevailed. I currently work in architecture, and three years of our relationship (part of which included the engagement) included my attending architecture school, which is an extremely tense and stressful experience in its own right. I gained an intense work ethic from graduate school in which I never allow myself to do the bare minimum, and as a result I try and do whatever work I can outside my current 8-6 job. I try to balance that with photography jobs and spec work that would allow me to still spend time at home so my wife and I wouldn't wind up having one of those marriages where we never see each other at all. And therein lies the problem. My wife is very much on the needy side. She usually doesn't like it when we're awake and together in the evenings and I'm on the computer doing work, unless I'm doing something to help her out in her job. She's a drama teacher, and I've helped her with laying out and building sets for plays, designing programs, making diagrams for room seating for her students, making spreadsheets to help her input grades more quickly, etc. I have no problem when she's working on grading or lesson plans or anything else that she might be doing on the computer. However, when I try to pursue spec work in graphic design or try to edit photos from the few side jobs I actually get, I feel like I get an attitude from her. If we're both working, she'll ask me to rub her back or shoulders, which then takes me away from what I'm doing because I don't want to be a jerk. I hate making money into an issue, but I fear it's going to become one, because even though we're both gainfully employed, it's sometimes difficult to make ends meet due to rent, bills, student loans, etc. She was raised by a somewhat traditional mother who believes that it's the man's responsibility to pay for things when we go out (and that's more or less a couple of times every weekend) and instead of running for the hills way back when, I capitulated because I loved her that much and I was working full-time at the time and I could handle it. However, even when we were both in grad school and she was making more money as a substitute teacher than I was working one day a week for 6 semesters (save for summer boosts), I was still the one picking up the tab. That's still the case today, even though she makes more money than I do, and she somehow has the audacity to call herself the "sugar-momma" (and I can't tell if she's really joking or not). I wanted us to get married a year after I graduated from architecture school (I graduated last June), but we were married in November because she didn't want to wait so long, which meant that as soon as I started working I had to dump as much as possible into our savings (which she was doing too, though not to as heavy an extent) while not devoting myself to paying off my credit card to wipe the slate clean. Which means I have to fit all this in now, which is why I'm trying so hard to pursue extra work but running into the current roadblock of having to deal with her interference when we're together at home. At the same time, I've got my own personal creative projects (making artwork from packing scrap...strange as it may be but it can be therapeutic) that she gets in the way of. I've always wanted to build furniture, but she feels that we should just buy buy buy. She has her own personal creative ideas but she doesn't act on them, and as a result I feel like she's trying to exercise veto power on me. I'm afraid this feeling I have is going to grow into a full-on resentment that'll manifest itself in a bad way. At the same time, we've had more than a few fights over various things, which have sometimes resulted in her saying that she wants to separate, and that she never should have gotten married, never wanted to get married, feels stuck, etc., but in the end she falls back. The next time she says it, I'm afraid I'm going to say something drastic that'll jeopardize the marriage. She feels that her sex drive is much stronger than mine, and I'll agree that it is -- but only because my disillusionment with everything else happening is bringing me down -- and as a result she'll state that we have no chemistry, and she once even hinted at having sex with someone else (it was more a threat). Last night, she came home from a rehearsal for a play series she's doing with a friend, and despite the fact that our apartment is a 4-minute walk from the train, she gave me crap for not picking her up, saying that I didn't care about her (meanwhile, I had grilled the chicken for her lunch salads and was in the middle of folding a load of our laundry when she walked in the door) and then just walks into the bedroom without so much as a kiss hello. And she wonders why I have a low sex drive... I know that I've written what basically amounts to a short essay, but for me it's a complicated situation. It goes beyond me "being a man" and dealing with it, because I'm dealing with someone who's not as level-headed and logical as I am, who can have a short fuse, and who has some entrenched habits, expectations, and behaviors for which I am partially to blame. I just feel like this isn't where our marriage should be only 5 months in. Any advice?

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