After nearly 16 seemingly happy years with the man I thought I'd spend the rest of my life with, it became impossible for me to ignore that neither of us were truly "happy".

Slowly growing apart for years left us with zero emotional intimacy, sexual chemistry, or even a basic excitement to see each other day to day. However, our love runs incredibly deep and we get along great. I mean…how can you say anything is wrong in a marriage where you genuinely like your partner and absolutely kill it together, both in life and as parents?

We never fought or raised our voices toward each other (maybe that should have been an indication of problems to come), but we both held a genuine love and respect for one another. We logically talked and debated our way through disagreements (though they were few). Then slowly (over more years than I’d care to admit)…the distance we drifted became so expansive that it no longer allowed us to truly see the other anymore. Every other aspect of our life together was so good that we had become utterly complacent about “us”.

The bigger problem is that, as a society, we've been convinced:

• "That's just what happens in marriage."

• "This is normal for couples who stay together this long."

• "We're too busy for sex."

• "We don't fight, so everything's fine."

Then when you really start to look at the consequence of years of allowing things to slip by convincing yourself what has become an acceptable state of being…you start to recognize problems that begin to eat around the edges:

1. Neither of you are ever mad at each other, but you both annoy the other most of the time.
   
   

2. When your partner walks in the door (and you haven’t seen them all day), you don't have any particular emotion. You're not excited, but you're also not upset. You're just disconnected and numb.
   
   

3. You don't laugh together anymore. Affection is a thing of the past. You don't really miss each other when one of you is gone.
   
   

4. You feel like platonic roommates who are raising kids together.
   
   

5. You just don't really have any sort of amazing connection to this person who was once the center of your universe.
   
   

6. Communication feels like a chore, and you just exchange the bare minimum pertinent information to each other (mostly logistical).
   
   

7. You inactively avoid spending time together, blaming it on your schedules…but find yourself busy prioritizing and scheduling other things in that absence.
   
   

8. You avoid conflict just to make things easier and less stressful.
   
   

9. You stopped making big decisions together and both start to independently navigate your daily needs and routines.
   
   

10. You feel lonely. To fill that void: you find hobbies, activities, or unhealthy habits to distract yourself.

Any one of those single issues on their own is easy to dismiss. But once you list them all out and stack them up, it’s so glaringly obvious that something has been wrong for quite some time. As someone who takes quite a bit of pride and effort to constantly remain present, practice self-awareness, and pursue growth; I was so embarrassed and surprised at myself for not putting together the pieces sooner.

Albeit ever so gradual, I could see his happiness distantly slipping. For too many years, I had convinced myself that maybe he was unhappy in his work, or weighed down by his obligation to provide that took him away from our family, or any other number of reasons that made simple sense to me. He would push me away, and after enough time I began to oblige.

Selfishly, I was in my own world and never slowed down enough to stop and assess whether it was anything I was doing. I’d poke and prod (in the way that wives do), but in the end I grew tired of trying to solve his increasingly disgruntled disposition and withdrawal. I knew this was ultimately something he needed to figure out for himself, and that is where I failed. I should have pushed harder and dug deeper.

Whether it was my own fear stemming from his repeated rejection…or frustration from his lack of communication, I learned to accept and enable this status quo. When I wasn’t obtaining growth and fulfillment from our marriage, I knew that I needed to find alternate methods to spread my wings because I’ve always been someone who demands advancement to further thrive in some fashion. To combat our stagnation, I found ways to push myself to evolve that I felt could mutually benefit a greater good. To say I’ve always been ambitious would be a gross understatement; and so, I set off to conquer the world. How could I know that this very ambition was feeding what he manifested as neglect toward him, then caused him to push me away even further. And so…around and around that cycle we went.

The first nine years of our life together, my charismatic ambition fueled our collective progress. We both propelled each other in ways that led to unfathomable achievement, and together we thrived as a power couple. Somewhere along the way, a dark and irrational fear grabbed a tiny foothold in his mind that I would someday outgrow him and I’d eventually leave him behind. In an effort to protect his heart, he began pushing me away and closing himself off to prepare for some unreasonable impending inevitability that had no basis in truth.

The more he invested in his self-preservation, the further he thrust us apart and shifted my ambition to continue to flourish on my own path. In a sense, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy…except for the simple fact that I hadn’t left. There I was standing right in front of him, begging him to love me while pleading to understand where the man I fell so deeply in love with had gone.

When everything finally came to a critical head, we were faced with excruciating realizations and faults on both our parts. When I decisively received the wake-up call required to diagnose what was right there for me to see all along, I couldn’t believe I never realized our marriage was in this state of crisis and on life support.

Our shared discovery of why he withdrew and completely shut me out of specific elements of his life for so many years was equal parts shocking and devastating, which left me feeling utterly betrayed in a manner far worse than is typically associated with that word. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but for someone like me…where connection and intimacy carries so much weight; it would have been so much easier if he was simply cheating on me instead of choosing to unconsciously reject and lock me out over and over again. In my mind, this was a far more destructive form of betrayal and cruel punishment that I didn’t deserve.

If the person you once made the center of your world wounds you so deeply…does that pain matter if they didn’t know what they were doing at the time (and are now so willing to completely turn that around)? Years upon years of his physical and emotional rejection due to unfounded irrational fear and anxiety is something not easily undone. That is what I’m now trying to reconcile.

With this newfound benefit of hindsight, I quickly came to realize (and shocked even myself) that I was about one week away from walking out on our marriage…but I’ve opted instead to take it from the brink of crisis and currently, actively fight to keep it alive.
 

This is still painfully raw and real, and very much an unfolding situation. Writing, sharing my story, and talking to people out loud is how I have successfully moved past every trauma in my life (and sadly there has been much). This book is simply a method for me to synthesize the overwhelming volume of varying emotion that needs to be distilled so I can break through to the other side. At my very core, I’m a data scientist and scholar-practitioner; so as such, unique and strange is the manner in which I need to analyze and process even emotional data to make sense of it all.

Now, as I type these very words…it has only been two weeks since the catalyst of today was sparked. Two excoriating, long weeks where I have collected more data and written more words than could fill volumes of books to document what I’m feeling. The meticulous organization and cataloging of all these thoughts into careful order…that mechanism and structure has veraciously helped my nerd brain comprehend so many of the complex facets of the situation.

I don’t yet know the ending to our story, but I do know that sharing it will help us get there. By putting my thoughts, raw emotions, and understanding of what is happening in real time out into the world, I’m hoping that if our story or experience resonates with yours...it can help you in some small way.

Perhaps if I had read someone else’s words of similar experience, I could have seen the warning signs sooner and acted before so much damage had been done. If I had the sense to slow life down just a little bit and listen to that subtle, nagging feeling inside that something had drifted too far, we could have saved a lot of pain. Even better still, if you’re only starting your love story...be sure to learn from our mistakes so you never end up here.

In this book, I’m going to take you through so much of our journey. What went right? What went wrong? Where did we let things slide? It’s going to be raw, and real, and painfully vulnerable, and shamefully embarrassing. But what is life if not all of those things? I’ve unfortunately endured a lifetime of trauma; and, for me, I’ve learned this method has been the most effective tool in my survival kit.

This serves a dual purpose in that it helps me directly confront and release everything that needs to come to light, despite how ugly, so that I can process it to move on. Like every other tortured battle weathered throughout my years, I’ve similarly shared and refined those wounds to shed those too. In doing so, I’ve been able to help so many others open up and confront things about their past they’d rather leave untouched. Sometimes, people just need an example that somewhere in the darkness, there can be light. I hope by sharing my story, it can bring some semblance of understanding, hope, or inspiration to act now if this is where you are.