Nine Years
As told to Between the Covers
I should say at the top that he is a good husband and I love him, because what comes next is going to make people want to make him the bad guy, and he isn't. That's almost the point. There's no bad guy. There's just a long slow quiet that nobody decided on, that arrived the way dust arrives, and one day you write your name in it.
The Count
I counted it once, which I do not recommend. Nine years since I had been wanted in the way I mean. Not touched. We touched. A hand on the shoulder passing in the kitchen, the goodnight thing that's more punctuation than sentence. I mean wanted. Reached for. The kind of want where someone looks at you across a room full of people and you feel it land on your skin like weather. Nine years since I'd been that, to anyone, including the man asleep beside me.
You stop expecting it the way you stop expecting snow in a city that doesn't really get snow anymore. Not with grief. With adjustment. You quietly revise the forecast of your own life. I told myself this was maturity. This was what marriage became, the friendship deepening as the fever cooled, and the magazines and the group chats all agreed, everyone passing around the same comfort: it's normal, it's the season of life, you've got young kids, you're tired. And I was tired. And it was the season. All of that was true and none of it was the whole truth. If any of this sounds familiar, our piece on healthy relationships is worth a read.
The whole truth was that I missed it so much that some nights I had to leave the room.
What I Actually Missed
I didn't miss sex, exactly. I want to be precise, because precision is the thing we never get to be about this. I missed being the kind of thing a person reaches for without thinking. I missed being wanted out loud, being the answer to someone's question instead of an item on the list that got handled. There is a specific loneliness in lying next to someone who loves you and would be genuinely shocked to learn you feel unseen, because the love is real, it's just stopped having hands.
And here is what I had not understood until it happened to me. When you go that long without being wanted, you stop wanting too. That's the part that scared me. My own desire went quiet. Not gone. Quiet, the way a dog stops going to the door when no one ever comes home at that hour. Desire is a hunger and a hunger that nobody answers eventually learns some manners. It stops embarrassing you. It stops asking. I had trained mine so well I almost lost the receipt.
The Wiring Wasn't Dead
What woke it up was nothing, which is to say it was everything. A man I didn't know held a door, and looked at me a half-second longer than the door required, and there was nothing in it, nothing happened, I will never see him again. But my whole body lit up like a house at Christmas, and I stood on the sidewalk afterward shaking a little, because the lights still worked. After nine years I had decided the wiring was dead, and it was not dead, it was waiting, and the relief of that was so enormous I nearly cried into my coffee like a lunatic.
I did not have an affair. I know that's the story everyone reaches for, and I understand why, it's a cleaner narrative, it has a plot. The truth is duller and harder. I went home and I had to sit with the fact that the want was mine, that it had always been mine, that I had been treating my own appetite like a problem with the marriage when it was actually just a part of me I'd let starve to keep the peace.
The Confession
So I did the most terrifying thing I have ever done, which was tell him. Not as an accusation. As a confession. I said I miss being wanted by you and I have missed it for years and I stopped telling you because I didn't want to make you feel bad and somewhere in the not-wanting-to-make-you-feel-bad I disappeared. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, and I'll never forget it, "I thought you weren't interested anymore." Nine years. We had both been standing in the same dark room, each one sure the other one had left.
I'm not going to give you a triumphant ending where everything ignited and we're teenagers again. We're not teenagers. It's awkward, reaching for someone after that long. You're shy with the person you've slept next to for two decades, which is its own strange grief and its own strange gift. But we're in the room now. Both of us. With the lights on. That's more than I had a month ago, and a month ago I'd have told you it was impossible.
What I Want Other Women to Know
What I want women to know, the ones doing the same quiet math I was doing, is this. The wanting is not gone. You are not past it. You did not age out of being someone who gets reached for. You just stopped feeding a hunger nobody was answering, because that's what we do, we're efficient, we don't keep setting a place at the table for a guest who never comes. But the guest is you. The appetite is yours. It was never about whether he wanted you. Somewhere in there it became about whether you'd let yourself want at all.
I'm forty-eight. I want to be wanted. I want to want. I'm saying it out loud now, even though I was raised to believe a woman my age saying that is faintly ridiculous, even though every cell I have was trained to apologize for it.
I'm not apologizing. I waited nine years to feel the lights come on. I'm not turning them off again to make anyone comfortable, least of all myself.
