I see men online talk about a “dead bedroom” as though the phrase comes with special permission to cheat. My experience was almost the reverse. We were together for three years, our sex life was active and enjoyable, and he cheated anyway. More than once.
There hadn’t been an obvious change in my appearance or weight. I was getting older, as people inconveniently tend to do, but nothing that explained some sudden shift. And at first, there wasn’t a shift in our physical relationship. Even after the cheating came out and we tried to repair things, that part of our life continued.
Eventually, though, everything physical stopped. Not just sex. Cuddling, affection, the smaller ways of being close—all of it disappeared. We began sleeping in separate beds at his suggestion. He was always too tired for me.
He apparently wasn’t too tired for someone new. He pursued and slept with other people more than once, so I couldn’t make sense of it as a general loss of interest in sex. What had disappeared seemed to be his interest in being physically close to me.
Meanwhile, he kept telling me he loved me. Only me. The cheating, he insisted, was meaningless. He held on to that account right through the end, but he wouldn’t address the part I couldn’t stop noticing: whatever he said he felt, our connection had almost vanished.
I wasn’t asking him to explain an abstract relationship problem. I was asking about the separate beds, the absence of touch, and why there seemed to be energy for other people but none for us. He couldn’t give me an explanation, and he didn’t accept the breakup easily.
We’ve been apart for months now. He still texts that he loves me and wants to meet for coffee. The answer is no.
What I’m still looking for is an explanation, perhaps even a scientific one, though I don’t know whether one could account for this particular relationship. I don’t need anyone to establish that his behavior was hurtful. I know that. I want to understand how he could withdraw so completely and still insist, so persistently, that I was the person he loved.
The coffee invitation doesn’t answer that question. It just gives me another message to decline.
