There’s a version of this essay where I tell you I’ve fallen out of love with my husband. That would be cleaner. Easier to explain at a dinner party, easier to justify to myself at two in the morning when I’m lying next to him thinking thoughts I don’t fully finish.
The truth is messier than that. The truth is, I don’t entirely know what I feel anymore, because feeling things requires a kind of bandwidth I stopped having somewhere around the third year of raising two kids while working full time, while managing the logistics of a household that doesn’t manage itself, while being a wife in the ways that being a wife requires.
I’m not checked out. I’m just—running on the wrong kind of empty. The kind where you’re still doing everything, but you’ve lost track of why.
And I stay. Not because I’ve made a decision to stay. Because staying is just what’s already happening, and disrupting what’s already happening takes energy I don’t currently have.
Here’s what that actually looks like for me.
I don’t know if I’m unhappy or just depleted
This is the question I keep coming back to and can’t answer cleanly.
Because unhappy implies something is wrong that could be fixed. Depleted implies I need rest and a different distribution of labor, and maybe a week alone somewhere with no one asking me for anything. And those are very different problems with very different solutions, and I can’t tell which one I have.
Some days, I look at my life, and it looks fine. Good, even. We have a house and kids we love and a marriage that functions and a life that, by most external measures, is exactly what you’re supposed to want. And I feel the gap between that and what I actually feel inside, and I can’t tell if the gap is the marriage or me or just the particular stage of life I’m in, where everything is a lot, and nothing is ever finished, and there’s no version of Tuesday that doesn’t require something from me.
I’ve stopped trying to diagnose it. I’m just in it.
I’ve stopped imagining a different life because imagining takes effort
There was a version of me, not that long ago, who had an interior life. Who thought about things. Who had opinions about how she wanted her life to look and energy to want things she didn’t currently have.
That version of me would have had thoughts about this marriage. Would have sat with the question of whether it was working, what she needed, what she was willing to accept, and what she wasn’t. She would have done the internal work of figuring out where she stood.
I don’t have the bandwidth for that anymore. The imagining—the sitting with the question of what I actually want—requires a kind of mental space I fill before I’ve even gotten out of bed. By the time the kids are at school, and the work is done, and dinner has happened, and the kitchen is clean, and everyone is in bed, the part of me that might have had thoughts about my own life has gone completely offline.
I’m not even sure what I’d want if I let myself want things. I’ve stopped asking.
I’m not sure if I’m waiting for things to change or just waiting
I used to believe the waiting had a purpose. That I was getting through a hard season, that the kids would get older and the pressure would ease, and we’d find our way back to something that felt more like a marriage and less like a joint venture with shared sleeping arrangements.
I’m less sure about that now. Not because things have gotten worse. Because I’ve stopped being sure things are going to get better, and I’ve also stopped being sure that matters to me the way it used to. The waiting has become its own kind of staying. I’m not building toward anything. I’m just—here. In it. Moving through the days.
That’s either acceptance or resignation, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
I love him, and I’m tired of him, and both things are true
This is the part that’s hardest to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside it.
Because it’s not that the love is gone. He’s a good person. He’s a good father. There are moments—real ones, where something is funny, or the kids do something that catches us both off guard, or we’re sitting somewhere quiet together—where I feel something that resembles what I felt when I chose him. It’s still there. Just buried.
And also, I am so tired of him. Tired of his particular way of not noticing things. Tired of the specific version of checked-out he does when he’s stressed. Tired of being the person who tracks everything while he moves through the house like a guest in a hotel that runs itself. Tired in a way that isn’t anger—I’m too depleted for anger—just a kind of low-grade wearing down that I don’t know how to talk about without it becoming a fight I also don’t have the energy for.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and they don’t cancel each other out, and that’s the particular confusion I live in.
The decision to leave is just another thing on a list I can’t get to
I’ve thought about it. Of course, I’ve thought about it. There are evenings when I run the calculation—what it would actually look like, what would have to happen, what would change, and what wouldn’t.
And then I think about the logistics. The conversations. The lawyers. The dividing of things we’ve spent years accumulating. The explaining it to the kids. The selling of the house or the not selling of the house, and all the decisions that come after that one. The rebuilding of a life on the other side of all of that, from scratch, while still working and still parenting and still being a functional human in the world.
And I think: I cannot do that right now. Not because I’ve decided not to. Because I don’t have the capacity to take on another enormous project. And leaving, it turns out, is an enormous project. The most exhausting thing I can imagine. And I am already exhausted.
So it stays on the list. Below the dentist appointment I’ve been rescheduling for four months.
He thinks this is contentment, and I don’t have the energy to explain the difference
He seems happy. Or at least he seems fine, which in our house has become the same thing. He comes home, and the house is running, and dinner exists, and I’m functional and present, and everything appears to be okay.
He doesn’t know that I spend a portion of most evenings somewhere slightly outside myself, going through the motions of a life I haven’t fully decided to be in. He doesn’t know because I haven’t told him. Because telling him would require a conversation I don’t know how to have—one that would open something I’m not sure I have the energy to deal with once it’s open.
So I let him think what he thinks. And I keep performing fine. And the gap between what he believes and what’s actually happening widens a little more, quietly, in a way neither of us is naming.
I’m still here, which means something, I’m just not sure what
Some mornings I wake up and think: today I’m going to do something about this. Have the conversation. Make the appointment. Decide something.
And then the day starts. And the kids need things, and the work needs things, and the house needs things, and by the time I get to the part where I was going to do something about my marriage, there’s nothing left.
So I don’t. And tomorrow I’ll think the same thing. And the days keep moving, and I keep moving with them, and the marriage continues in its current form, and I am neither fixing it nor ending it. Just maintaining it the way you maintain anything you don’t have time to properly address.
Maybe that changes. Maybe one day the fog lifts enough that I can see clearly what I want and find the energy to go after it. Maybe the kids get older, and the pressure eases, and we find our way back to something that feels like a choice rather than a default.
Or maybe this is just what it is for a while. And I’m in it. And I’m still here. And I’m trying to figure out if that means I’m staying or just haven’t left yet.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
