Member-only story
Marriage Shouldn’t Make You Feel Lonely
But I felt lonely and emotionally abandoned.
“I’m lonely,” I tell my sister.
“Col, I feel terrible for you,” she says. “Even at the worst of my marital problems, I never felt that way.”
It was an encapsulating, heart-withering sense of solitary.
Technically and physically a man was residing in our home.
Yet emotionally I was unescorted, stag, single, solo…you get the point.
I realized I wasn’t living with a man.
But rather me, myself, and I.
I could be in the room with my husband, sitting next to him on the couch, or snuggled under the covers. It didn’t matter our physical proximity. The expanse between our connection was cavernous.
I always say, “There’s nothing more painful than the distance between hearts.”
Inhabiting the same space as someone physically but not emotionally isn’t living, it’s surviving.
A distance takes residence in a marriage for a variety of reasons.
It’s not the same for everyone.
It might be you’ve grown apart, or another person has grown between you, it might be vastly different schedules or priorities, sadly, there are…
