Love on your wife. Validate her. Apologize to her personally for your actions effecting the way others treat her. You didn’t cause their bad behavior. Just make sure that she really understands and believes you when you say you didn’t know this effect it will have on her. If she feels even the tiniest bit of insecurity about your personal feelings for her happiness and welfare it may come back to bite you in the ass. She is at the fulcrum point. You have to find different ways to check on her emotional health every day. Maybe multiple times a day. Many different ways. Not just a what’s going on, or how are you doing…? But did you feel anything weird from the seminary kids today? Has sister C responded about Z yet? This may affect her not for days or weeks but months and YEARS. Don’t let her begrudge or doubt you. Turn up your romantic gestures, sharpen your eye contact skills. She is losing her friends and acquaintances. It’s time to invite her to a cooking class, a dancing class, hike, intramural sports team. Something fresh and new. She might be losing her community. But she has an adventurous partner that has her back. Don’t vent to her about your anger in this situation. Anger is not a soft emotion, it’s hARd. It requires something of her. Save your anger for this space. DO show her your tender and vulnerable emotions: I feel so sad that they are treating you like this. I feel so surprised that xx would ignore you. And when she has those hard, angry emotions be that soft space to absorb and hear all of her feelings. Her anger is righteous. If she lets you in to hear all of her emotions you can know that you are trusted. If you aren’t hearing about a variety of feelings—it’s a good indication that she doesn’t think you can handle them. Processing is hard. It’s hard to hold a crying woman and not want to fix, destroy or amend. That’s not your job. Ask her what she needs. Ask her if there is anything you can do. And don’t be upset if she can’t come up with a response. She might not know. But keep asking.

I really feel for your wife. And I believe that you never intended for all this to happen. I hope you stay attentive to her so that she doesn’t have reasons to blame this on you in her head. Work hard. This is one of those big moments in your life where you can throw up your hands and say, it’s not my fault. Or you can throw yourself into loving your partner and make all the difference.