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I didn't stop loving her. I stopped being able to show it. And I had no idea those were two different things. It starts small. You stop reaching for her hand in the car. Not because you don't want to. You just... don't. The impulse is there and then it's not. Like a signal that fires and then cuts out before it reaches your arm. You tell yourself you're tired. That's the word you use — tired. It's a good word because it doesn't require explanation. Everyone understands tired. Nobody asks follow-up questions about tired. She asks if you're okay and you say yeah, just tired. She nods. She's heard it before. You can see in her face that she's stopped fully believing it, but she also doesn't push, and you feel something complicated about that — relief and guilt arriving at the same time, neither one winning. You go to bed. You lie there with six inches of mattress between you that might as well be a field. You could close it. It would take nothing. You don't. You stare at the ceiling and you have this thought — clear as anything — I should reach over. And then you wait. Like you're watching someone else's hand, waiting for it to move. It doesn't move. You don't know what's wrong with you. That's the part nobody talks about. Not the distance itself, but the confusion underneath it. Because this isn't a choice you're making. You're not withholding anything on purpose. You're not angry. You're not checked out. You love her. You know you love her. The love is just... stuck somewhere. Like a door you can see but can't open. You used to be different. You know that because you can remember it. Early on, you were the one who initiated everything. Texts in the middle of the day just because. Plans for weekends. Small things — a hand on her back when you walked past her in the kitchen. It was automatic then. It came from somewhere easy. You don't know when that changed. That's the part that gets you when you let it — there was no moment. No fight that broke something. No single night where the warmth drained out. It just became less. And then less again. And at some point you looked up and realized you'd gone weeks without touching her in any way that meant something. She mentioned it once. Not fighting — she wasn't even angry. She just said, quietly, that she felt like you didn't want her anymore. And you opened your mouth to say that's not true, that's not it, I do want you — and then something sealed up in your chest and what came out was I'm sorry, I've just been in my head. Which was true. But it wasn't enough. And you both knew it. The problem is you can't explain what's happening because you don't understand it yourself. You've tried. You sit in your car sometimes before you go inside, and you try to locate the thing. What is it. What is the actual thing. Is it stress — yes, obviously, but men are stressed all the time and they don't go cold. Is it something she did — no, actually no, you can say that honestly, it's not her. Is it that you don't care anymore — and this is the one that scares you, because you circle it like a question you're afraid to answer, and every time you get close you find the answer is no, I do care, I care about her, and that makes everything more confusing, not less. Because if you care, why can't you reach for her. If you love her, why do you feel nothing when she stands close. If you're not checked out, why do you feel like you're behind glass, watching the two of you from somewhere outside yourself. You know how it looks from where she stands. You've tried to see it through her eyes. She married a man who used to reach for her and now she lives with a man who sleeps beside her and disappears inside himself every night. She doesn't know what she did. She's probably wondering if it's her. She's probably been wondering that for a while. And that thought — that she's hurting and you can't explain it and you can't seem to fix it — sits in your chest like something heavy you carry everywhere. You don't talk about this to anyone. Obviously. What would you even say. Hey, so I've stopped being able to be close to my wife and I don't know why and I'm not depressed exactly, I'm just — shut down. Yeah. That's going to go over well. Nobody has a framework for that. Men don't talk about emotional numbness, they talk about being busy, being stressed, needing to blow off steam. The actual interior stuff — the locked-door feeling, the watching-yourself-from-outside feeling — you have no language for it and neither does anyone you know. So it stays inside. And because it stays inside, it calcifies a little. And because it calcifies, reaching across those six inches of mattress gets harder, not easier. And the weeks keep passing. Here's the thing nobody told you, and the thing you're only just beginning to understand. This isn't a character flaw. It's not coldness. It's not that you're broken or that something has permanently gone missing. It's a pattern — a real one, with a real shape — where the nervous system learns to protect itself by going quiet. Where enough accumulated pressure, or stress, or years of pushing feelings down because there was no place to put them, creates this state where the emotional systems just... run low. Not off. Low. Like a phone at four percent. Still on, still working, but conserving everything because it doesn't know when the next charge is coming. The distance isn't the real thing. The distance is a symptom of the real thing. And the real thing is that somewhere along the way you stopped having a place to put what you were actually feeling, so your body did the only thing it knew how to do: it stopped generating as much. You can't will your way out of that. You can't just decide to feel more. But you can start to understand what's running underneath it. You can start to build the awareness — slowly, without it being a big dramatic project — of what's actually happening in you. And when you start to understand it, something shifts. Not all at once. But the door that felt locked starts to feel more like a door that hasn't been opened in a while. Different problem. Smaller problem. I found Liven when I was sitting in the car again, before going inside, doing the usual circle of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It's an emotional regulation app, which — I know, that's not language most of us are reaching for. But there's a three-minute quiz that just asks what you're actually experiencing, not in clinical terms, in real ones. And something about answering those questions made the locked-door feeling a little less mysterious. Like someone had turned a light on in that room. I'm not the same person I was a year ago. Not fixed — I don't think that's the right word. Clearer. More present. Some nights I reach for her and it's automatic again, the way it used to be. Not every night. But some nights. That's enough to know the door was never sealed. Link is below.