The Romantic Husband

  Marriage rarely fails all at once; more often, it wears down through disengagement, and learning how to notice that erosion is an act of faithfulness. Most marriages do not end with a rupture. They end with a thinning. There is no single betrayal to point to, no moment that forces a reckoning. The vows remain intact. The household functions. From the outside, everything appears stable. Two people continue to share a life together, and nothing is obviously wrong. That’s what makes this kind of ending so difficult to name. Marriage burn-out rarely announces itself as unhappiness. More often, it arrives as efficiency. You get good at managing the marriage. You divide responsibilities. You handle logistics. You keep the structure upright. Over time, the relationship begins to run on competence instead of attention. This is not neglect in the obvious sense. It’s quieter than that. You still care. You still intend to stay. But you stop reaching in ways that carry risk. Conversations be...

Romance is not only about holding on, but about learning how to honor what was real when time cannot return it.   People say time heals like it’s a law of physics. Like gravity. Like something you don’t need to believe in for it to work. I believed it because the alternative was harder—that some relationships don’t fade, even after they end. That they don’t dissolve into memory so much as settle into you, unchanged, waiting. It’s been long enough now that I’m supposed to be past this. Long enough that the relationship should have become a story I tell without feeling my body respond to it. Long enough that I should be able to say their name and mean only the facts of what happened, not the weight of it. At first, I counted the years. One. Three. Five. Each one felt like proof that something was happening, even if I couldn’t point to what. At some point, I stopped counting. I told myself that was healing. It wasn’t. What time didn’t heal wasn’t the relationship itself—we lost that h...