I saw a message on my husband’s phone.
“Last night was incredible. Your wife didn’t find out anything, right?”
I didn’t say a word.
I simply smiled… and waited.
I was fifty-six when I first began wondering whether, after thirty-one years of marriage, my husband had stopped seeing me as a woman.
When Georgi and I were younger, he could barely walk past me in the kitchen without touching me.
He would catch my hand as he passed, wrap his arms around me from behind, or kiss me before bed and whisper:
“You’re still the same girl I fell in love with.”
For years, those words had been enough to make me smile.
But over the last two years, almost all of that disappeared.
At first, I didn’t think much of it.
I told myself it was age.
We weren’t twenty-five anymore.
There was work. Stress. Bills. Family problems. The ordinary exhaustion that comes with growing older together.
But eventually I realized Georgi wasn’t simply becoming less affectionate.
He was avoiding me.
“Come sit with me tonight,” I would say. “Let’s spend some time together.”
If I sat beside him in the living room, he would get up within minutes.
