You used to be, and now you are not.
Welcome to the marital desert — the arid, quiet plain that replaces the intimate, glad, desirous friendship that once existed between two people.
In the desert of a dead marriage you dwell side by side, exchange conversation about this and that, and mainly cooperate to supply your children with a normal home. The universe does have a particularly cynical sense of humour.
Why did you fall so hard? How did you surrender to the statistics without noticing?
Here is a provocation: it did not happen to you. You brought it on yourselves. The fact that everybody around you is like this does not justify it, and above all does not explain it.
There are better explanations. There are pits you fall into, repeatedly, with your eyes open. Here are four.
1. The pit of sex.
First and foremost among the horsemen of the marital desert. If you are not sleeping together, you are in trouble. I am not interested in frequency, and certainly not in the reasons. The main tip is: think about what the other person wants.
2. The pit of individuality.
At some point you understood that the relationship cannot encompass all of you, and you discovered other things that interest you and command your attention.
What is the problem with that? That is exactly it — there is no problem. It is entirely natural. You cannot surround somebody through three hundred and sixty degrees.
The problem is not your individualism. The problem is unrealistic expectations. She can still be the love of your life and the partner in your fate even if you think day and night about some project she has no interest in whatever.
3. The pit of comfort.
You could also call it the pit of pain-avoidance. What happens down in this one is that you come to think that if your life is comfortable and free of significant procedural worry, then that is good enough.
And it is not. You find yourself telling your friends, again and again over coffee, that something is missing.
4. The pit of the audit that never happens.
Everybody in a marital desert knows they are in one. What almost nobody does is say so out loud to the other person — because the conversation is frightening, and because the arrangement is, in a low way, working.
So the years pass in a state that both parties have privately diagnosed and neither has ever mentioned. That is the pit that keeps you in the other three.