I think my marriage has become so practical that I’m grieving inside it without a funeral

Dear Delyara, Nothing dramatic has happened. That is what makes this so hard to talk about. We still function. We still speak. We still pay bills, discuss the children, decide about food, remember family obligations, take things to school, pick things up, make plans, survive weeks. From the outside, I think many people would describe us as steady. But there is a kind of grief that grows in practical marriages when emotional reach starts thinning and nobody knows how to stop the process without making life even harder. I miss being looked at in a way that reads the inside of me. I miss being known from within the day, not updated after it. I miss softness without having to earn it through visible distress. And I am frightened by how easy it is for two tired people to become a functioning household long before they realise they are also becoming lonely. That loneliness has no one scene to point at. It just accumulates. Quietly. Like dust on furniture no one moves anymore.