Reader's Letter

It didn’t happen overnight. There wasn’t a big fight, no door slamming, no clearly spoken-out cheating that suddenly made it obvious something was wrong. Instead, something slowly wore away. At first, he just touched me less often. Then his gaze stopped lingering on me, too. Now we’re at the point where we have sex once a month—if you can even call it that.

Yesterday it happened again, but it felt like he wasn’t really there. It took a long time for anything to start in him, and when it was over, all that was left in me was this suffocating feeling that something is very wrong. As if I didn’t really matter to him at all.

And in the middle of this is my entire life: children from my previous marriage, our one-year-old baby together, the household, days that blur into each other. I’m home with the little one, I take care of the older kids, I organize our lives. And while I’m doing all that, I’m waiting. For a touch. For a hug. For a sentence that says: I see you, you matter, you’re still a woman to me. But he avoids me, and if I move closer, he pulls away. If I give him space, he doesn’t come back. I’ve tried sexy clothes, exciting perfumes, bringing playfulness into bed, and at the same time giving him space in everyday life, trying to talk things through. I’ve pretty much tried everything by now.

I asked him if we could spice up our sex life somehow, if there were desires he wasn’t talking about. He said there aren’t any. That the fire just isn’t there anymore—that when he looks at me, he doesn’t immediately want me. He said it out loud, and I was left standing there holding that sentence, like it was some kind of final verdict. I suggested couples therapy. He doesn’t want it. When I tell him how much I miss love and affection, he goes silent. Or he says: if you don’t like it, there’s the door. As if it were that simple. As if there weren’t an entire life behind it.

There was a moment when the thought crossed my mind to make him jealous, maybe that would wake something up in him, some sense of desire or possession. But how? I’m home with the kids. I don’t socialize, I don’t go anywhere, because I don’t want to take time away from the family. I’ve never cheated, and I don’t want to. And yet the feeling keeps creeping in that it’s always the ones who try to be good who end up alone. The ones who hold everything together while slowly running out on the inside.

A lot of people ask why I’m still with him, then. Because I love him. Because I have nowhere to go. Because all the money goes into his account. Because I don’t have any living relatives. Because this isn’t just a relationship—my entire livelihood depends on him. And at the same time, I’m still hoping that maybe this isn’t the end yet, that somehow we’ll find our way back to each other. I just don’t know how.