I left my husband because we were in a “dead living room” marriage.

I left my husband because we were in a dead living room marriage.

My husband and I live together. But we rarely talk. We watch TV. We disagree about which shows to watch together. We sit down to relax. But we never touch each other.

Our living room is comfortable, filled with antique furniture from when we first got married over two decades ago. It has the necessary pictures of children in frames.

The living room is also where we celebrate holidays and birthdays, where we put up the Christmas tree lights and where we light the fire when it’s cold.

I left my husband because we were in a marriage of Ketut Subiyanto / Pexels

However, our living room never seems to be warm – it’s as cold as our dead bedroom.

According to the statistics published in New York Timesabout 15% of married couples have a dead bedroom. A decade untouched. Without affection And certainly no privacy. Ten long, cold years without talking about our non-existent love life.

“I’ll do better,” he promised years ago. And it never happened. Why live like this? I thought to myself one day when I was 47 years old.

I still have needs. I would like to sleep with someone again before I die. Why deprive me? What kind of sick martyr was I? No one would put up with a decade of zero intimacy. They will leave or cheat.

Research from 2023 states that one of the main reasons people cheat is because of a lack of intimacy in their relationship.

The "Living room Dead" marriage cottonbro studio / Pexels

So, I cheated because I wanted a “living” living room.

I wanted a living room where I could joke with my partner, put my feet up on their legs, where I could relax and feel accepted for being me. The perfectly imperfect self. The intimate self The playful self

They are not welcome in my current living room. My “living” living room would be a place to make wonderful memories. And it would lead to us stripping in the hallways as we laughed our way to the bedroom.

A living room should have joy and even disagreements. It should be a place where we talk, not just sit apart and ignore each other, each of us on our respective laptops or phones going to bed to roll to opposite sides, never touching.

At home, it’s not a war zone. That’s good, right? We don’t have drag fights, but we also don’t have honest, sustained communication. It’s pointing fingers.

“You always do…”
“You never…”
“Not that again…”
“Why can’t you…”

It’s a perpetual blame game. I constantly feel “less than”. Except my partner makes me feel like I’m enough.

“Don’t you wish every night was like this?” he asks as he crawls over. “We could see Stanley Tucci in Italy,” he adds.

“With you take me?” I ask It’s an impossible dream, I think. Nobody has that. But some lucky people do.

Alex Alexander is a pseudonym. The author of this article is known to YourTango, but chooses to remain anonymous.