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There is a stretch of two lane road not far from where we live that winds through mountains and small towns, the kind of road that exists alongside the interstate rather than instead of it. Most people take the highway. We take the back road.
We always have. Partly because neither of us has ever been in much of a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and partly because there is something about those roads that the highway cannot offer. The pace of them. The way they move through places rather than past them. The sense, driving through a small town with its shops and its church and its one set of traffic lights, that time moves differently here than it does on six lanes of concrete going seventy miles an hour.
It reminds me of before. Before the interstate made it unnecessary to know the names of the towns between here and there. Before convenience became the only thing that mattered.
These are the drives where we talk. About everything and nothing in particular. About things we have been thinking and have not yet said. About things we disagree on and things we have always seen the same way. The conversation unfolds without effort on those roads, the way it does when two people have been talking to each other for long enough that silence is just another form of the same thing.
Because sometimes we do go quiet. The radio on low or just the sound of the road and the air coming through the windows. And that silence is not awkward or empty. It is comfortable in the way that only happens between people who no longer need to perform for each other.
It is on those drives that he puts his hand on my leg.
Not every time. Not as a habit or a routine. Just sometimes, wordlessly, his hand moves from the gear shift or the wheel and rests on my leg and stays there. And I will place my hand on top of his. And we will sit like that for a while, not saying anything, just driving.
It feels like a sigh of comfort. That is the only way I know how to describe it.
I have written in another essay about wanting more spontaneous tenderness. About wishing he would come up behind me in the kitchen without being asked, or motion for me to come closer on the sofa rather than waiting for me to move toward him. Those things are true and I have not stopped wanting them. I mentioned it to him once or twice over the years. He made a joke of it, gently, the way he tends to deflect things he does not quite know how to meet directly. I understood. I did not bring it up again.
We have been together long enough that I know the shape of how he loves. It does not always look the way I imagined it would when I was younger and had ideas about what love was supposed to feel like. It is quieter than that. More practical. Less given to grand gestures or spontaneous declarations.
But on a two lane road through the mountains, windows down, going nowhere in particular, his hand finds my leg and stays there.
And I have come to understand that this is not the absence of tenderness. This is what tenderness looks like for him. Wordless and unhurried, offered without announcement, on a road that takes the long way round.
Twenty years in, I think I would rather have that than flowers.
— Kate
After twenty years of marriage, people tend to assume they know what love looks like. Comfort. Familiarity. Quiet evenings and shared routines that no longer need much explanation.
In many ways, they’re right. My husband and I have built a life that feels steady. We talk easily. We enjoy long drives together, the kind where conversation fills the time without effort. We can sit in the same room without needing constant attention from each other. There is a deep friendship in that kind of marriage, and in many ways, it is good. Very good.
But that isn’t the whole picture.
Last week made that quite clear. Every day that week, I wanted to have sex with my husband. Not in a vague, romantic sense. I mean I wanted sex. I thought about it. I went to bed expecting there was a fair chance it would happen.
Some nights I curled up next to him, waiting to see if he would turn toward me. Other nights I put my hand on his leg so it was obvious where I stood. There was nothing particularly subtle about it.
And every night, there was a reason it didn’t happen. He didn’t feel well. He was sore from working out. He was exhausted. It was late. All of those things were true. None of them were unreasonable.
And yet I still wanted sex.
Not because anything was wrong between us. Not because I felt unloved. I wasn’t lying there wondering if he cared about me. I knew he did. But being loved and being wanted sexually are not the same thing, and I was very aware of that difference by the end of the week.
I do initiate sometimes. But if I’m honest, I prefer when he does. There is something about being chosen in that moment that feels different. Especially now, when I am more aware of my body than I used to be. I am not the size I once was, and while I don’t spend much time dwelling on that, it sits there quietly in the background. When he initiates, it tells me he still finds me attractive. Not in a general, long-married way. Not in the of course I love you sense. It tells me he looks at me and wants me. That matters more than I tend to admit.
Years ago, we attended marriage retreats, and the message in the wives’ sessions was always the same. Your husband has needs. Physical needs. Be attentive to them. Year after year, the same theme. I sat in those rooms and felt something between annoyance and quiet anger. Not because the message was entirely wrong, but because it assumed a dynamic that has never quite fitted my marriage. I would look around at the other wives and wonder, quite privately, whether any of them felt what I felt. Whether any of them were lying awake wanting more than their husbands did. Nobody said so. I was left to wonder if I was simply rather odd.
I don’t suppose I am. I think it is just not something women say aloud.
I came to faith later than some, and I did not always live by the beliefs I now hold. I had other partners before my husband, and I wish I hadn’t. Not out of guilt exactly, but because I have found, over twenty years of marriage, that intimacy within a covenant is a different thing entirely. It is more connected. More present. More everything, if I’m honest. I tried to tell my daughter that once, not as a rule to enforce but as something I genuinely found to be true. She made her own choices, as she should. But I meant what I said.
I believe sex belongs within marriage. Not as a restriction but as a context, the one in which it becomes what it is actually meant to be. And because I believe that, because I have experienced it, I pray about this. I pray for my husband to reach for me more. I pray for myself to initiate more easily. It is a small and very specific prayer, but I mean it.
In a long marriage, desire doesn’t line up neatly. It shifts with energy, stress, health, and timing. Some nights it matches. Some nights it doesn’t. Nothing is broken. Nothing is wrong. But the difference is still there, and pretending otherwise would not be honest.
You can have a good marriage, a steady one, a happy one, and still lie next to your husband wanting more. That longing doesn’t disappear simply because everything else is working. But I have come to understand that the longing itself is not a problem. It is evidence of something. That after twenty years, I still want him. That what we have built is worth wanting more of.
That feels like something to be grateful for, even on the nights when nothing happens.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 