I sleep beside someone every night and still feel emotionally homeless

Dear Delyara, My husband is not absent in the obvious sense. He comes home, pays bills, talks about the children, notices practical things, remembers enough of life that other people might look at us and see a solid marriage. But inside the walls of that apparent normality, I feel a growing emptiness I don’t know how to name without sounding ungrateful. We function. We coordinate. We manage. We continue. What we do less and less is arrive. I miss being looked at in a way that reads beyond the day’s practical surface. I miss reaching for him first and feeling reached for too. I miss emotional witness. I miss not having to translate so much before I can be held. And the worst part is that none of this has one dramatic event attached to it. It is slow. Which makes it harder to prove and harder to interrupt. Loneliness in marriage is not loud. That is why it can survive so long.