For a long time, I assumed the problem was that something inside me had changed.
That somehow I had lost a part of myself I couldn’t quite find again.
Because on paper, there was no obvious reason I shouldn’t have wanted my husband. I loved him. We had built a life together. He was someone I had chosen, someone I had shared years of memories, routines, disappointments, and dreams with.
The strangest part was that I never felt like I stopped loving him. There wasn’t a morning where I woke up and suddenly felt nothing. It was much more confusing than that. I still wanted him to be happy. I still cared about how his day went. I still worried about him and, in many ways, still saw him as my person.
But somewhere along the way, something in me had gone quiet. The part of me that naturally reached toward him—the part that wanted to move closer, to seek him out, to feel connected—had slowly faded into the background. And I didn’t know how both things could exist at the same time: how I could love someone deeply and still feel myself moving away from them.
For years, I focused on the most obvious part of the problem: the fact that I no longer wanted physical closeness. Looking back now, I can see that wasn’t where things actually began. It was simply where everything underneath us became impossible to ignore.
By the time I started pulling away physically, I had already been feeling emotionally distant for a long time. I just didn’t understand that then. I didn’t have the language for it.
I didn’t know how to sit across from someone I loved and explain that something felt missing. That I missed him, even though he was sitting right beside me. That I wanted to feel close to him but couldn’t figure out how to get there.
Part of what I didn’t understand at the time was how emotional closeness gets eroded in ways that don’t always look dramatic from the outside.
It isn’t always one explosive fight or one defining moment. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of small disappointments, unspoken frustrations, conversations that never happen, and needs that never quite find their way into words. Sometimes it’s carrying things alone for so long that you stop noticing how heavy they’ve become.
Over the years, I’ve watched countless couples tell versions of this same story. Different details. Different circumstances. But often the same underlying ache. One partner feeling unseen. The other feeling confused. Both convinced they’re trying. Both feeling alone.
At the time, I didn’t understand that intimacy wasn’t something that existed separately from the rest of a relationship. I thought physical connection and emotional connection were two different things.
Now I know they rarely are.
Eventually I responded the only way I knew how
I withdrew.
I remember Mike wanting to be intimate with me, and I remember finding reasons not to be. I was tired. I wasn’t in the mood. I had a headache. I had an excuse ready before I even had to search for one.
Sometimes, when he came to bed, I would close my eyes and pretend I was already asleep.
Looking back, that is difficult for me to write.
Because now I can see how that must have felt on the other side of it.
But at the time, I wasn’t thinking about how it looked. I wasn’t trying to send a message. I wasn’t consciously trying to reject him.
I was confused.
The person I had once wanted so naturally was now someone I found myself moving away from, and I didn’t understand why.
Eventually, I started looking for the problem inside myself.
I didn’t have another explanation. I was young, healthy, and by every outside measure, I was supposed to be in a season of life where desire came naturally. So why was I pulling away from my husband? Why did something that had once felt effortless now feel like something I had to force?
Underneath all of that was the thought I was even more afraid to say:
I’m not attracted to my husband anymore.
Even writing that sentence now, I can feel how loaded it was.
Because attraction felt like something that was supposed to be automatic. Something that proved love was still there. Something that shouldn’t just disappear.
Once I started questioning my attraction to my husband, I found myself in a place I didn’t want to go.
Because if that part of our marriage was disappearing, what did that mean about everything else?
I didn’t know how to separate the loss of desire from the loss of love. I think, at the time, I assumed they were connected. That if I no longer felt that pull toward him, that longing, that instinctive wanting, then maybe something much bigger had changed.
Maybe I wasn’t just disconnected.
Maybe I wasn’t in love anymore.
And that was a terrifying thought, because the rest of my life didn’t match that conclusion. I still loved him. I still cared about him. I still wanted good things for him. I still saw him as the person I had chosen to build a life with.
But I couldn’t ignore that something had shifted.
So instead of looking at what was happening between us, I started trying to make myself okay with it.
Maybe this was just what happened after years together. Maybe this was the part of marriage nobody really talked about. Maybe passion was something you eventually outgrew and replaced with companionship.
Maybe expecting anything different was just unrealistic.
And slowly, almost without realizing it, I started convincing myself that maybe sex just wasn’t that important.
That maybe I didn’t need that part of a marriage anymore.
That maybe this was just adulthood — another thing you adjusted to, another thing you accepted.
What’s strange to me now is that I don’t remember feeling devastated by that thought. I think, in some ways, it actually felt easier.
Because if I could convince myself I didn’t need intimacy, then I didn’t have to sit with the much harder question:
Why was it gone?
I wasn’t actually making peace with the loss of closeness.
I was learning how to live around the absence of something I didn’t know how to repair.
I remember sitting in my doctor’s office trying to explain it, even though I wasn’t sure I fully understood it myself. There was a certain amount of embarrassment in admitting it out loud — that I didn’t feel drawn to my husband in the way I thought I should, that I didn’t want sex.
She listened and offered a simple explanation: maybe we needed to reconnect. Maybe we needed to date each other again. Maybe we needed more intentional time together.
Which, at the time, felt both reasonable and completely impossible. Because apparently the solution to emotional disconnection was… scheduling romance? Somewhere between calendars, dinner reservations, and trying not to resent each other?
I remember leaving that appointment feeling strangely relieved. Not because I had an answer, but because I had finally said the thing out loud and didn’t get confirmation that something was wrong with me.
And part of me grabbed onto that immediately.
Okay. This is fixable.
That was comforting. There was something almost soothing about believing there was a solution I could simply execute my way out of.
But if I’m being honest, there was another part of me that felt a little heavier at the thought of it. Because somewhere in the back of my mind was this tiny voice saying:
Wait… so now I have to plan romantic nights too?
Which, looking back, is almost funny — because the whole point was supposed to be creating connection, and yet my first instinct was to experience the solution as another thing on the list of things I had to manage.
That reaction tells me more now than it did then.
I wasn’t actually missing dinner reservations or flowers or a perfectly planned date night. I wasn’t missing romance in the way I thought I was supposed to miss it.
How was I supposed to swoon over my husband when, every time I looked at him, I wasn’t just seeing him?
I was seeing everything else.
The dishes in the sink that somehow never made it into the dishwasher.
The projects that started with enthusiasm and quietly disappeared.
The promises that were made and never revisited.
The conversations we kept circling around but never actually had.
None of those things, individually, were enough to explain the distance I felt. And maybe that’s what made it so confusing. It wasn’t one big betrayal or one dramatic moment.
It was the accumulation.
The tiny reminders of all the places where I felt disconnected.
And I didn’t understand then that my body wasn’t keeping score because I was angry.
It was responding to a relationship that no longer felt emotionally alive.
I think this is one of the places where we, as a culture, often miss the bigger picture. We talk about physical intimacy as if it exists separately from everything else happening inside a relationship.
As if desire is just something you can restart with enough effort, enough romance, enough “quality time.”
What I understand now is that the body often knows something the mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
My body wasn’t rejecting my husband.
It was responding to the distance I didn’t know how to name.
Looking back now, I can see that physical intimacy was never really separate from emotional intimacy, at least not for me. The two had always been connected, even though I didn’t have the awareness or the language to understand that at the time.
I think I carried this quiet assumption into marriage that love would somehow take care of the rest. That if two people loved each other enough, they would naturally know how to find their way back when they drifted apart.
I assumed the important conversations would happen when they needed to happen. That the things we needed from each other would somehow become obvious. That being loved meant being known — without having to explain ourselves.
But intimacy doesn’t work that way.
It isn’t something that simply exists because two people chose each other. It’s something you keep creating. It requires honesty. Curiosity. The willingness to say the things that feel vulnerable before they turn into distance.
It was just something I didn’t understand at the time.
I think part of why I struggled so much to explain what was happening inside of me was because I didn’t grow up with much of that language.
Not because there wasn’t love. There was. I never experienced my family as lacking love. But love and emotional expression are not always the same thing.
I didn’t grow up watching people sit down and name what was happening inside of them. I don’t remember seeing those kinds of conversations where someone said, “That hurt me,” or “This is what I need,” or “This is how I’m feeling.”
It wasn’t something I had a lot of practice with. It wasn’t a skill I had watched being modeled over and over again.
So when I found myself disconnected from my husband, I didn’t know how to explain it — even to myself. I couldn’t point to the thing that was missing because I didn’t have a name for it.
And because I didn’t understand it, I turned it inward.
I didn’t think something between us needed attention.
I thought something was wrong with me.
I wondered what kind of wife didn’t want her husband. What kind of person could love someone and still feel herself pulling away.
The shame made everything harder.
Because the more embarrassed I felt, the less I talked about it.
I didn’t sit with my girlfriends over coffee and say, “I don’t understand what is happening. I love my husband, but I feel myself pulling away from him.”
I couldn’t imagine saying those words out loud, because even though no one had ever explicitly told me this was a failure, it felt like one. It went against everything I had absorbed about what marriage was supposed to be.
You find your person. You build a life. You stay connected. You want each other.
That was the story. That was the blueprint.
And I was terrified of admitting that mine wasn’t looking the way I thought it should. As predicted, the less I talked about it, the more distance grew.
The older I get, the more aware I am of the limits of my own perspective. I can tell my story. I can tell you what was happening inside me — the confusion, the distance, the feeling of being disconnected from someone I still loved. I can tell you what it felt like to not understand my own reactions.
But I can’t fully tell you what was happening inside Mike.
I can only imagine what it must have felt like to reach for your wife and feel her pulling away. To wonder if you were still wanted. To experience a growing distance without really understanding where it was coming from.
Maybe physical intimacy was one of the ways he was trying to find his way back to me. Maybe it was one of the places where he still felt closest to me, even when everything else between us felt uncertain.
I don’t know.
And that matters, because that part belongs to his story.
What I do know is that I don’t believe either of us was intentionally trying to create distance. I think, in our own ways, we were both responding to it.
I was waiting for emotional closeness before I could fully open myself physically. Maybe he was reaching for physical closeness because he was searching for the emotional connection he felt slipping away.
We were both reaching for the same thing.
To feel chosen.
To feel seen.
To feel like we still mattered to each other.
But we were speaking completely different languages, and neither of us knew how to translate.
Looking back now, I don’t think the loss of physical intimacy was what ended our marriage, but I do think it was one of the clearest signs that something deeper had already started shifting underneath us.
What I understand now is that physical closeness and emotional closeness are not always the same thing. They can exist together, but they don’t always arrive at the same time.
For me, physical intimacy was deeply connected to feeling emotionally known. I needed to feel close before I could fully open myself. I needed the conversations, the vulnerability, the feeling that we were standing on the same side of the table.
But I don’t know if that was how Mike experienced connection. Maybe for him, physical intimacy was one of the ways he tried to create closeness. Maybe reaching for me was his way of saying the things neither of us knew how to say out loud.
And that is the part I think about now.
We weren’t necessarily asking for different things. We may have been asking for the same thing in completely different ways.
I was waiting to feel emotionally connected before I could reach for him.
Maybe he was reaching for me because he was trying to feel connected.
Neither of us understood that the other was searching for the very thing we thought was missing.
And that, more than anything, is what stays with me.
Not the distance itself.
But the possibility that we were both standing on opposite sides of the same bridge, each waiting for the other to cross first.
-A
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