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He stopped wanting me eight months ago. His psychiatrist says it's the pills. I know that. I still lie awake wondering what it means. THEN He used to reach for me in the mornings. Half asleep, automatic, like breathing. Before coffee, before his phone, before anything. I used to pretend to still be asleep for a few minutes just to feel it last longer. NOW He sleeps through the night. Fully, deeply, in a way he hasn't in years. I lie next to him and watch the ceiling and tell myself this is what I wanted. It is what I wanted. That's the part I can't get past. — THEN The two years before the medication were hard in ways I've stopped trying to describe accurately. He was there and not there. Anxious in a way that filled the room. Some nights I'd wake at 3am to the sound of him in the kitchen — not doing anything, just sitting with the light on, somewhere the bed couldn't reach him. I spent two years being careful. Reading his body before I spoke. Deciding, most mornings, whether today was a day I could ask things of him. I was so tired. NOW He sleeps. He makes coffee. He asks about my day and means it. He made a plan for our anniversary three weeks in advance — something he would have been incapable of before, the forward planning, the assumption that the future was a place worth booking. He is, I keep telling myself, the man I married. I just can't find my way to him in the dark anymore. — THEN I knew, going in, that the medication might affect things. His psychiatrist mentioned it as a possibility. I said: that's fine, his health is what matters. I meant it. NOW Eight months. I've been counting without meaning to. Not in a resentful way — I want to be precise about that. More the way you count anything that has weight. The way you know, without checking, how many days since something changed. I've stopped wearing the things I used to wear to bed. Not as a statement. Just: there was no point, and then it became habit, and now the drawer has been closed for so long I've stopped thinking about what's in it. — THEN A friend told me once, when her husband was going through something: you're allowed to have needs even when someone else is struggling. I thought I understood what she meant. NOW I understand it differently. Having a need doesn't mean the need gets met. Having a need doesn't make the need appropriate to press. Having a need you can't name to the person it involves — because the naming would make them feel like a failure, because they're already doing the hard work of getting better, because you love them and their getting better is genuinely what you wanted — that's a particular kind of alone. — What changed things wasn't a conversation. We'd had conversations. They went gently nowhere, both of us careful with each other, both of us trying not to make the other person carry something extra. What changed things was an article I found about the nervous system — about what medication does to emotional and physical range, about how the same system that runs anxiety also runs desire, about how quieting one can quiet the other without anyone choosing it or meaning it. It mentioned an app. Liven. Something about helping the nervous system find its way back to a wider range. Not a replacement for medication — alongside it. The quiz on their site asked questions I hadn't thought to ask: about presence, about physical responsiveness, about whether the body felt like it was running in a narrower register than before. I read it and felt, for the first time in eight months, like this had a name that wasn't about us. I left it open on the kitchen counter. He found it. He read it. He took the quiz. He came to find me afterward and said: I think I've been missing something I didn't know was missing. — NOW, FOUR MONTHS LATER Things are not restored. I want to be honest about that. But they are moving. In the direction of each other. Last week I reached for him and he was there. Actually there. I didn't pretend to be asleep. — Liven has a quiz. A few minutes. It doesn't ask about intimacy — it asks about nervous system range, about whether the body is operating in a wider or narrower version of itself. Don't make it about the sex. Make it about him. I wish I'd found it in month two. Would've saved us both six months of lying next to each other in the same silence and calling it fine. Link is below. 💙