When Your Spouse Puts You in the Friend Zone

Somehow I only realized I was at the edge of a cliff once I already had one leg hanging over it. That is the feeling I have upon suddenly realizing that the marriage I thought was stable was actually in quite a precarious position. Three days before we move apart for 3 years and begin trying to manage a long-distance relationship.

Shit.

It came to this through benign neglect, and denial on my own part, and a quiet anger which has been stewing for months on her part. A therapist we saw together (her therapist, two days before we separate) asked my wife to name the things she liked about me. This is actually a repeat of an exercise I had done for her - months ago during my wife's depression I was given an assignment by the therapist to write a list of things I liked about my wife and give it to her before her next therapy session. Now I am on the couch with her, and she is listing things about me. She starts off with by telling me I'm a "good guy."

OK.

She continues by rattling off things like I "take care of her," and I "support her career," and I can do things like fix the car. That all sounds nice and probably would describe a "good guy." It would also describe a completely platonic friend.

We're here because our love-life has dried up past the point of stale and now seems to be disintegrating around us. It's been a long road up to this point. We've been married for just over 2 and 1/2 years, but we've been a couple closer to 6 years, and we were a secret couple for a year or two before becoming a bit more official and open about our relationship with our friends (nearly all of whom were mutual at the time). They already knew.

We moved in together 1 year into our engagement and 1 year before getting married. Things were great. Our lives were on completely different schedules (I did shift work, she worked normal business hours), but we still found time to have a physical relationship. Occasionally she would tell me that she wished I would take more romantic initiative, but we still seemed ok. I did try to do that, but I have to admit, I'm not very romantic and my attempts to be were bungled and awkward.

About 6 months after we got married, we moved across the country, away from our family and friends. I got a great career opportunity (I thought). She had just completed a fellowship and was currently between jobs, so there was nothing holding her back from following me and my ambitious dreams. My ambitious dreams turned out to be more of a nightmare, in reality. The great opportunity I was chasing after turned into the greatest challenge of my professional life due to difficulties with my boss and a lack of sorely-needed mentorship. I became extremely depressed. During this time, my wife was working and supporting me - basically being the rock of our relationship while I wallowed in self-pity. Eventually I got my act together, started seeing a therapist about my work-related anxiety, and started taking medication. I came out of my depression.

Around that time, my wife got laid off of her job, and she struggled to find work she found meaningful. She became very depressed. It seemed most nights ended with her crying quietly on the couch, not telling me what was wrong other than anxieties about what her purpose in life is and whether or not she is qualified for anything she is applying for.

Our depressions strung together probably a bit over a year. Now, our love life during this time was not so good, but I was not worried. In my mind it had suffered because we had both gone through depression nearly sequentially, and I know that I was not feeling amorous during mine.

Now I sit on the couch looking down the cliff with my wife, wondering if our marriage is even salvageable. It turns our my wife has been slowly growing angrier at me, but silently, night after night that I did not try an romantic gestures. This fed into her depression, by making her feel that she was not desired, and that I didn't care. Over the last few months, I certainly did notice that she was becoming physically distant from me, but she had just received some good news and landed a competitive job in an area she desperately wants to work. Things would be looking up shortly, I thought.

Nope.

Things did not improve. The elephant in the room of our love life gone AWOL was hard not to notice. Yet I remained in denial that this was a cause of significant concern. Which leads us to the cliff now, where I sit listening to my wife patting my leg and telling me that she loves me, but it's like we're friends. She has no sexual desire towards me. I'm in the friend zone.

I would like to jump off the cliff now.

Tomorrow my wife moves away to pursue her job, and I move next month to a begin another position. My job is a 3 year position. There's nothing for her where I'm going.

Our marriage is in dire straights because of a lack of physical intimacy, and we will now be separated by hundreds of miles for years. My wife sits next to me re-iterating that she has needs that aren't being met. Naturally, I begin to wonder how those needs will get filled when I won't be there at all.

God help me.

Afterwards, we went out to dinner at a bar we both like. We actually managed to talk about our problems without becoming heated or overly emotional, and we even had a good time. It was actually a semi-normal night. I fear that it was the last semi-normal night we'll ever have together. It's hard to see things going well for us.

To this point, there is no conclusion. Our lives will proceed separately for now. I brace myself for gut-wrenching news that may or may not come in three years. I fret about where I can even begin trying to fix this.

Once in the friend zone, it may be too little, too late.

Photo credit: Pierre Bouillot https://unsplash.com/@pbouillot