I Don't Love My Partner Anymore. I Have No Intention of Leaving.

I loved my partner once. When I first met him so many years ago, everything about him felt like a deep sigh of relief. I found him, I used to think. I’ve done it. We fell for each other fast and fell apart slow, a pattern that would define us for a decade or so. Passion, relief, adoration, joy, fury, heartbreak, ending, reunion. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Always coming back to each other for different reasons that mostly had to do with love. For us it was love over everything, all the time. Until now.

I can say now that I am not in love with my partner anymore. I can guess now that he does not love me either. We feel like one of those leaky faucets that you turn off and on and fiddle with so many times that eventually, you just have to accept that it’s broken for good. This is when the big decision gets made. You can either throw out the broken faucet and replace it with something shiny and new. Or you decide you can learn to live with the constant little drip, drip, drip because it’s really not as bad as you thought it would be.

This is me. I have decided to live with the drip.

In so many ways, I can’t quite believe that I have become the kind of person who would choose to live in a loveless relationship. Me? The woman who can quote romantic comedies from at least the last six decades verbatim? The Hallmark movie lover? The reader of bodice-rippers; the love song lover? Jane Austen’s biggest fan?

I had a different idea of what a “loveless” relationship would look like if it ever came for me. I imagined lots of brooding and sadness, terse “fines” over the morning Cheerios and bitterness that would leave our throats constantly aching and raw. All culminating in a War of the Roses scenario at some later date.

Instead I can’t tell you how relieved I am to finally, finally just feel regular. To feel the slide of my days defined by something other than the pursuit or retention or loss of love. To wake up in the home we share just feeling neutral. Even, dare I say, happier to have let it all go? I almost feel giddy with it, being allowed to not love the person who is sharing my life and my home.

The home is, of course, the reason for it all. We love our home. We love the life we built in this home. We love the morning coffee routine, the old fireplace that warms our slippers. The big bathtub, the front door that needs repainting. We love the discussions about that door, we love thinking about our planned renovations for next year. We love the dinner parties we throw together, we love the friends we both have. And we really, really love that those friends will never have to choose between us. Because we are, in so many ways that matter more than the love I thought I wanted, still us.

It took me a long time to admit to myself that I did not love him anymore. It felt so cold and awful and calculated, like if I admitted to myself that I didn’t want to leave this life or this house even if I didn’t love him, I would become a different person. A vixen from an ‘80s-era nighttime soap like Dynasty or Falcon Crest, a woman who took and took and took from hapless, frightened men.

So I pretended to myself that I loved him and it made me mean. It frustrated me. I kept trying to find something in him and us that was just lost. I rolled my eyes constantly, at everything he said. Why couldn’t he get it right? Why couldn’t he fix this unfixable thing between us?

Then one day, I just gave up. It was breakfast, we were quiet because of some fight that had nothing to do with anything. I looked at him looking back at me all miserable and tense. And I exhaled. Like that first love sigh but in reverse. I gave up trying to turn us back into those people and admitted to myself and him – yes, I said it out loud – that I was done trying to love each other. I was done with all of this twisting and contorting, the impossible puzzle of us that did not really need to be solved anymore. I said I still want the other parts of our life. The friends, the house, the boring bills, the grocery store. It is all so very little except it is also everything. He exhaled then too. He agreed.

This new life has brought surprising contentment. Now that I know I don’t love him, I get to like him again. I expect nothing from him. I want nothing from him other than a chat over coffee or some more kale from the grocery store while he’s there. I appreciate him now that I have stopped wishing he would earn me.

My life is made happier by the afternoon sun streaming across our floor boards. Or a soak in that deep bathtub at the end of the day. Or baking cookies for my kids, or a book club with my friends. All of us calm as anything.

I am happier now that I’ve let go of this love. I have room now for so much else. And it feels like freedom.