Nothing dramatic happened. No affair, no big fight, no single moment I can point to and say “that’s when it changed.” We still get along fine on the surface. We still do the school run and the grocery shop and the Sunday routine together, still sit on the same couch most nights, still say goodnight. But somewhere in the last few years, quietly and without either of us really noticing it happen, the actual “us” part of us disappeared.
We used to talk for hours. I mean actually talk — about nothing in particular, about stupid stuff, about our days, about ideas we’d probably never do anything with. Now our conversations are almost entirely logistics. Who’s picking up who. What’s for dinner. Whether the rego’s due. Did you pay the electricity bill. I genuinely cannot remember the last time either of us asked “how are you doing, really” and actually sat with the answer instead of half-listening while scrolling on our phones.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
We still function as a team when it comes to the kids, and I’m grateful for that — I know plenty of people don’t have that. But somewhere along the way we stopped being a couple and became more like two very efficient co-managers of a household. Even the small affectionate things have thinned out. A hand on the shoulder walking past in the kitchen. Actually looking at each other during a conversation instead of at the TV. I miss being asked how my day was in a way that meant he actually wanted to know.
I still care about him. Deeply, honestly. I don’t want this to sound like I’m looking for a way out. I just don’t know anymore if I’m “in love” with him, or whether that’s even a reasonable thing to expect after twelve years together and two kids and a mortgage and all the ordinary grind of adult life. Some days I tell myself this is just what long relationships settle into eventually, and that I’m being ungrateful for what is, by most measures, a stable and decent life. We don’t fight. We’re not unhappy, exactly. Isn’t that supposed to be the goal?
Other days it feels less like settling and more like a slow leak — something quietly draining out of the relationship a little at a time, so gradually that neither of us noticed until it was mostly gone. And that scares me more than a big blow-up would, because at least a blow-up gives you something to point at and deal with. This just feels like erosion.
The hardest part is I don’t even know what I’d say to him if I brought it up. “I feel like we’re roommates” sounds dramatic when nothing is actually wrong. I don’t want to blow up a stable home over a feeling I can’t fully explain. But I also don’t want to wake up in another ten years having just quietly accepted that this is as good as it gets, without either of us ever having tried to reach back across the gap.
> Do you recognise yourself in that story? Many of us do. What is your solution?