Just so tired of the clutter and filth...

This is my first ever post on this forum, though I have been a long-time lurker. I recognize that compared to many other couples' problems my story might seem trivial, but please be kind and understand that I would not be posting this if it wasn't truly bothering me. First, my situation: my wife and I have been married for over ten years. Both of us are employed in good professional jobs and we make plenty of money and live, with our three children, what most people would consider to be a really good life. My wife is pretty, presents well, and is well-respected in her profession. Other than the nearly nonexistent sex, a common enough refrain among those married for more than a few years, I have no real complaints. We never argue about anything except what I am about to describe. Simply put, my wife is a slob. She just piles stuff everywhere. There is not one flat surface in our house that isn't piled with her crap. Old magazines, old bills, coupons she has clipped, papers from work, bubble-wrap she might use someday, work from the kids' classes, empty envelopes, makeup and bottles of shampoo that she purchased several weeks before... it just goes on and on and on. The living room tables are all covered. The tops of the bedroom tables and dressers are covered, as are the bathroom cupboard and the work tables in the basement. We often have to shove stuff aside to eat dinner at the dining room table. What won't sit on top of a pile somewhere gets thrown on the floor. Her coat is never hung up after she removes it, it usually either goes on the floor IN FRONT OF THE CLOSET or is added to a pile of other coats. Her shoes are in a big ever-growing pile next to the door, until I can't take it any more and put them all away in her closet. (The next day she starts on a NEW pile of shoes.) When she undresses at the end of the day, she loops her bra over the end of the bed with about ten other bras and throws her clothes in a pile on a chair. There's another pile of shoes and slippers on the floor next to her side of the bed. Stuff keeps falling off of her nightstand onto the floor. This extends to her car as well. Every couple of weeks I vacuum out of her car the most unbelievable amount of food and trash. She blames it on the kids, of course, though the three kids spend just as much time in MY car as in hers, and my car is spotless, because I clean it up soon if one of us makes a mess. Her car stinks. (Honestly, I am chuckling to myself as I read over what I have just typed. It all seems so surreal and pathetic.) I noticed these slob tendencies in her when we were dating, but it was never THIS bad. She must have tidied up a bit every time I came over to visit. But ten-plus years down the road, it's really AWFUL. And to make it worse, our kids now think this is how people should live. I've done everything I can think of to curb this behavior. I am no neat-nick, but I like a clean and reasonably uncluttered house, so living like this makes me feel stressed. For what it's worth, I do more than my share of housekeeping. I have never seen her vacuum, for instance. I do the dishes and clean the kitchen after dinner, keep the bathrooms clean as best I can with all the piled up stuff, and so on. I have thought of just letting her stuff pile up higher and higher with the hope that eventually she would wake up to what she is doing, but I think we'd be in it up to our necks in a few months, so for the kids' sakes I do what I can to stay ahead of it. I've tried talking to her about it, have offered to pay for cleaning services, have checked out library books on the subject and left them for her to find, and have asked one of her friends to talk to her about it. Nothing has worked. In fact, every time I even broach the topic, my wife immediately turns it around and heaps blame on me, forcefully insisting that much of the mess is mine. I usually look around in bewilderment at this... There isn't a thing in sight that is mine and is part of the mess. Then I get the Ice Queen treatment from her for a day or two. When we visit friends, I nearly have a breakdown when I see their houses and how neat, clean, and uncluttered they are. Once I really lost it and had to go sit in the car for a while and calm down. I was nearly in tears. I don't want to keep living like this. The thought of that makes me SO depressed. It absolutely breaks my heart to type this, but I have thought of leaving her because of the mess. If it were not for my children, I'd have left by now, I do believe. I have seen the effects of divorce on the children of friends and acquaintances, and I don't think I could ever do that to my three innocent kids. I am VERY involved in their lives and if I moved out it would destroy them, and probably me, too. But what can I do? I am so out of ideas... I can't leave, I can't live like this, and my wife refuses to even admit that anything is wrong.

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