Dude you just summed up the last 2 years of my marriage, before I divorced, about a year and a half ago. And I am not sure if that is even a helpful thing for me to say to you right now. But it is dead on.
My wife was, I think, trying to push me away. She was unsatisfied, yes. But she was also tactical. She belittled me and undermined every request I made for support, in the comfort of our own home, while being totally affable in public (which is, by the way, a complete mind fuck: "I got pissed because, you can be nice in public, but not at home? ... but then maybe I'm the asshole here because now my wife and I are in public and she's nice and I'm the one getting pissed...?"), and I found out just days after our separation that she had been living a second life, using frequent work trips, and other "self care time," to visit lovers. I raised the kids alone, for the last four years of our marriage, approximately 30%-50% of each year, while I thought she was getting a PhD. And she was, but that wasn't all she was doing.
I didn't believe it, no way, until I was sat down and shown physical proof. People in my life who were close to me, once I finally broke down and started talking about it to more people in my life than my therapist, people asked if maybe she was having an affair or something, and I just denied it. No way. We were tight. If she made a mistake, she would tell me. We talked about this, we lived it to some degree already (she was in a polyamorous relationship when we met), I told everyone there was no way. She was just fucking overspent on work, and she had told me herself that she just didn't have time for our relationship, and I believed her, and I believed my job was clear: support her through the rest of her PhD, unconditionally, and just be a trooper through the rough stuff that tests our relationships.
I'm sorry, I've written so much about my own experiences, and they probably don't correlate to your experiences at all. I actually wound up married to a true narcissistic sociopath, and that's not something many people can say... I don't know if any of this helps you, or even speaks to you and your experience.
I can tell you this: I begged my wife to go to counseling with me. She allowed it once, and then refused to go back any more. That's when she told me she didn't have time to work on our relationship. But I would still ask her every few months. I wish I could have seen this for the warning sign it so obviously is. What can you do, when one person in a marriage, chooses to let the marriage die? In my experience, there ended up being a LOT more to the story than I knew, like, decades of uncovered legal documents, that illustrated she had a hidden past of hiding children from bio and stepfathers - even changing her child's name - all shit I never knew until after 11 years of marriage.
It's worth saying, it is ALWAYS okay for you to request that your wife invest time, with you, and with a professional, to work on the marriage. If you ever feel shamed or guilty for making that request, that is a serious red flag. That is dangerous.
I know that feeling that nothing changes. Nothing changes. Nothing gets better. Shit just gets worse. I know that feeling. In my experience, my wife tried to drive me to kill myself. Absolutely. She would have gained so much, the house, the kids, everyone's total sympathy and support. She wanted me to kill myself so she could be the martyr that survived. At the very least, she wanted to stay in the house another couple years and finish her PhD.
That was a year and a half ago. I still, sometimes, cry all day. I mean, I can get myself on point when I am being a dad, and when I'm at work, but I still have days where it is just a fucking sad day, and I spend every hour to myself in bed.
But I can promise you. It will change. Life, for better or worse, will always get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better again. I can promise you that, if you can stick it out, if you can keep yourself going, it will change, whether you try to engage or change for the better or not. Sometimes it does just happen to you. Usually we have to work for it, but sometimes life just gets better for no reason at all.
My life is absolutely way better than 4 years, 2 years, 1 year ago. It'll get worse again, too.
But I know that feeling that, nope. it doesn't. whether it is suppose to or not, here you are, it's your life, you are the only one who has lived it, and shit. doesn't. change. And I know someone saying, it does change, doesn't make it better. Even if you do agree, sometimes life gets better for an unexpected reason, it doesn't make it better, even knowing that, when you are in the fucking abyss. It's like texting someone a pic of a water bottle who is stranded in the desert.