I asked for this and I have started resenting her for enjoying it

I have been sitting on this for about four months and it does not get better by being sat on.

I am the one who wanted this. Six years of raising it, gently, patiently, never pushing. She said yes eventually and she meant it, and we have been doing it for about eighteen months, and by every measure it is going well.

And I have become an absolute pig about it.

Not out loud. Nothing anybody could point to. But she comes home happy and I find myself going quiet. She mentions him in passing during the week and something in me tightens. Last month she said she was looking forward to it, in exactly the same tone she would use about a weekend away, and I was in a mood for two days.

I know exactly how this looks. I asked for a thing for six years and now that she is enjoying it I am sulking, which is contemptible, and I have enough self awareness to see it and apparently not enough to stop.

What I keep circling back to is the difference between how I imagined it and how it is. In my head she was doing this for me. It was something she gave me. In reality she is doing it because she likes it, and the two of us are having quite different experiences on the same evening, and I did not anticipate that at all.

There is a worse version of the thought that I will write down because there is no point posting this otherwise. Some of what I wanted was to be the reason it was happening. And I am not the reason any more. It happens with or without me being the engine of it, and I appear to mind that far more than I minded any of the things I thought I would mind.

She has noticed the moods. She has asked twice. I have said work both times.

So what do I do with this. Is it a stage? Do people come out of it? Or is the honest read that I wanted a version of this that requires her to be less keen than she is, which is not a thing I can ask for.

What you have described is not resentment of her, though it is currently landing on her. It is that you wrote a script in which she was reluctant and you were the one who wanted it, and she has gone off script by simply enjoying herself. In the version you imagined, her enthusiasm was a gift she was giving you. In the version you have, it is hers, and it does not need you in it. That reassignment is genuinely disorientating and almost nobody expects it, because the fantasy always casts you as the author.

Wife here and I want to say what this feels like from the receiving end, because you have not asked. Being sulked at for doing the thing you were asked to do is corrosive in a very specific way. It teaches you to be less obviously happy. I did that for about a year, dialled it down, came home flatter than I felt, gave him a slightly duller version of the evening. He got what his mood was asking for and neither of us was any happier. If your wife has started editing herself for you, you have already lost more than you think.