We Still Share a House, but I Don’t Know If We Still Share a Life in the Way We Used To

Dear Delyara, From outside, I think we still look like a functioning marriage. We talk about dinner, children, bills, timing, school, who’s doing what, who forgot what, what the weekend looks like, what needs paying, what needs fixing. We coordinate well enough that nobody would immediately call this broken. But function is not intimacy. I know that now in a way I didn’t want to have to learn. There are evenings where he is sitting only a few feet away and I still feel emotionally alone. Not because he is cruel. Not because we are fighting loudly. Because something softer has thinned. We reach for each other less. We witness each other less. We solve more and understand less. The marriage is still standing, and somehow part of it feels absent anyway. That kind of loneliness is hard to explain because it comes without spectacle. There is no clean event to point at. It happens through accumulation, through omission, through practical life slowly occupying the rooms where tenderness used to breathe more easily. I don’t know when it changed this much. I only know I miss being emotionally arrived at in my own marriage. And missing someone who is still there is one of the strangest griefs I have ever had to carry.