Member-only story
Featured
He Wants Me Back — But Only If I Come Back as Who I Was
On the quiet ending of a long marriage, and the invisible labour of women who stay too long.
He still wants me. I know.
But that’s because he’s afraid of change. Not because he loves me. If he had, we wouldn’t have been here.
Sometimes, it’s in the smallest things, like the way he puts my coffee in the same cup every morning, the way he offers to take the trash out, the way he lingers in the kitchen like maybe I’ll brush against him, like muscle memory might be enough to revive desire. It’s in the way he refers to our marriage as something ongoing, as if this arrangement, two adults parenting beside each other, sleeping across the hall, never touching, never really talking, is just another season we’ll emerge from if we wait it out.
He wants me back. But not the me that exists now — not the woman who’s been sitting with the truth for years, not the woman who left quietly and still hasn’t been asked why. He wants the version of me that said yes, even when I meant no. The one who didn’t need affection as long as there was function. The one who convinced herself that routine was love, and silence was safety, and sex without intimacy was just part of the deal.
