Cat, I want to second what d said below, and add something that may be very important.

Does your wife have any adult male friends? At church, or work, or small group, or anywhere with whom she hangs out or does activities sometimes? Are any of them attractive?

She of course would never do anything innapropriate or untowards with them while still married to you, and that's exactly the point.

Few, if any, friendships that humans develop are truly "pure". Even in modern psych, we see that people tend to have friendships with people they find attractive, even if romance is the farthest thing from their minds. In a nutshell: there are no pure friendships. And that's ok, and healthy.

She only notices, and is distressed by your friends because it is hitting the deep rift in your relationship. It would be as if she had told you that she could only perform in bed with you by fantacizing about other men, and you saw her chatting and teasing some guy friends at church. Suddenly, those otherwise innocent friendships appear as threats to you.

So to do the boys you have healthy friendships with seem threatening to her, for irrational reasons.

i don't know if she is in a place to hear this, but you are. And it's the kind of thing that both of you will have to work on. Maybe, for a while, you need to be a bit more standoffish (poke and tickle the kids, but don't chase them, for instance, fiening tiredness) and make it clear to her that you are choosing her over the boys, without hurting the boys feelings. On the flip side, if she can learn to see your boy friends in the same way she expects you to see her man friends, than you can both have healthy relationships outside of the marriage with out the fear. You can, and in truth MUST each "have your cake and eat it too".

In Christ,
~CSL