We are becoming excellent housemates but....

Dear Delyara, We get through the day well enough. Shopping, schedules, children, bills, practical conversations, tired little jokes, who’s picking up what, who’s doing bedtime, did you reply to that message, do we need milk. From the outside, it probably looks stable. Cooperative. Mature. Functional. Inside it feels colder than that. We are solving life beside each other with increasing efficiency and decreasing reach. The hand on the shoulder happens less. The look across the room means less. The small first emotional instinct toward each other feels weaker than it used to. Some evenings, I can feel how much of our connection now happens through management rather than intimacy, and I don’t know whether that is adulthood or grief in slow clothes. I almost wish we’d have one huge honest argument. Instead, we keep having this soft emotional recession where nothing dramatic breaks, and that makes it harder to know when to be alarmed. But I am alarmed. Quietly. Constantly.