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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
I did not notice him at first. We had been in the same loose circle for months, a friend of a friend, the sort of person you say hello to without really seeing. It was not until a university trip to Hawaii that summer that something shifted. Six weeks, a group of students, and a lot of time with nowhere particular to be.
He was not what I had always told myself I wanted. He was younger than me, and slightly shorter, and I had always assumed I would end up with someone older and taller, as if I had written those requirements down somewhere official. But he was easy to talk to in the way that some people are, not performing, not trying, just present. Like someone I had known a long time already. We had similar interests, a similar way of looking at things, and what I can only describe as matching temperaments. Someone told me once I had an old soul. He had one too.
One night I had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep in his room. I woke up in his bed. He had slept on the floor. He didn’t make anything of it. Neither did I, not out loud. But I noticed.
That was the moment, if I’m honest. Not a kiss. Not a declaration. Just a quiet, decent thing that told me exactly who he was.
We were engaged within two months of coming home. Married eight months after that. Twenty felt grown at the time. It does not, in hindsight.
We did not have a dramatic love story, and we knew it even then. No lightning bolt, no consuming chemistry, no grand gestures. What we had was conversation. Ease. A shared sense that life together would be calm rather than chaotic. I used to wonder, in my more uncertain moments, whether that meant something was missing. I had read the novels. I knew what a spark was supposed to feel like.
But over twenty years, what we built has held. Quietly, and completely.
There have been seasons of distance. A period somewhere around ten years in when I questioned privately whether I had mistaken comfort for compatibility. Those thoughts did not linger, but they existed, and I think it is worth saying so. A long marriage is not a continuous feeling. It is a series of choices, some of them easy and some of them considerably less so.
What I can say now is this: I am still myself.
Marriage did not swallow me or shrink me. I have always known I could stand on my own two feet if I needed to, and that independence has never threatened him. His steadiness has never confined me. We talk constantly. The best parts of our holidays are often the long drives, stretches of road where conversation unfolds without effort. Even when our daughter was young, we were careful not to lose ourselves entirely in parenting. We did not want to wake up to an empty house and find we had become strangers.
Do I sometimes wish for more tenderness? Yes. I wish he would come up behind me in the kitchen and wrap his arms around me without prompting. I wish for small, unannounced gestures. Not passion, just quiet closeness. The sort that says I see you, without needing to say anything at all.
But longing for a little more does not mean lacking love. It means I am still human. Still wanting. Still alive to the idea that even a good marriage can keep growing.
We are two people who talk well together. Who travel well together. Who have built something that does not look like the novels but has proven, over twenty years, to be more durable than anything dramatic could have been.
It is ours. It has grown quieter and deeper and more certain with time.
And after twenty years, that feels like something worth keeping.
— Kate
There are things I think that I will never say out loud.
Not because they are shameful, or dangerous, or particularly radical. Simply because I am not built that way. I process things privately, turn them over quietly, and then move on without much fuss. That has always been true of me.
But thoughts have a way of accumulating. And somewhere along the way I realised I needed somewhere to put them.
So I write.
I am not entirely sure what this will become. I have a feeling it will cover more ground than I can currently anticipate. Faith, because it is central to my life even when it is complicated. Marriage, because twenty years of anything teaches you things worth saying. Motherhood, because I have always experienced it differently from the way most people seem to and I have spent too long staying quiet about that. The small and specific details of a life that looks ordinary from the outside and feels, from the inside, like something worth examining.
I grew up in England and have lived in America long enough that I belong to both and fully to neither. I notice things. I observe quietly. I form opinions I rarely share in conversation because it has never felt worth the effort of explaining them to people who weren’t asking.
Here, perhaps, is different.
I am not writing to be understood by everyone. I am writing because there are things I have thought for years that I suspect other people have also thought, quietly, without saying. And if one person reads something here and thinks, I have never admitted that, but yes, then that seems worth doing.
This is not a grand project. It is simply a place where the thoughts that would otherwise crowd can go instead.
And perhaps, if I am honest, the quiet hope that it might one day become something more.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 