I Don’t Want More Help, I Want More Tenderness

Dear Delyara, I could ask for help. That’s not the point. My husband would take out the trash, pick up groceries, handle bedtime, run an errand, fix the broken cabinet. He is not useless. He is not absent. That is not the wound. The wound is subtler than that. I want to be reached emotionally before I’ve become sharp enough to earn concern. I want to be spoken to gently in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. I want to be touched in passing without the contact carrying logistics or sex or some practical task behind it. I want tenderness. And I don’t know how to ask for tenderness without sounding like an unsatisfied woman in a movie. So I ask for help instead. And then feel lonely when help arrives but tenderness doesn’t.