I got a taste of the divorced dad life
At the end of last year, I got into a new job in a city some 4 hours drive away from home. My wife of more than 20 years and I intended to relocate, but we decided that we should avoid disrupting our sons' school year. So the plan was for me to work there and come back over week-ends, until we would move some 8 months down. So I got a taste of the divorced dad life, and did not like it one bit.
When came the confinement, the workplace was among the first to send its people home - and home, to me, could be my actual family home. Really, the pandemic got me out of my uncomfortable living situation. My partner, who is a businesswoman-from-home, and I got to experienced living together all the time without exception nor work days. It turned out to be really good. I have been in the process of learning to live with performance anxiety as a husband and lover, and the new sustained proximity forced me into growing further. I got to learn to expose my fragility and vulnerability, to express my needs clearly, and to accept the generosity of my partner, listening to these needs and making room for them. I got to appreciate so deeply simple gestures; simple touches of hands and shoulders, surprise hugs, teasing rubs of shoulder to arm, to back - these became like tasting exquisite yet familiar wine. I learned to slow down, to not do anything and just hang out, sometimes conversing, sometimes just being with her in silence and daydreaming, sometimes just us sitting besides one as we are respectively immersed into our own reading or drawing or crafting or watching TV.
My wife's libido has ups and downs, a phenomenon that I have always felt responsible for — always an error, yet convinced time after time. The worries of contamination and of our daily life changing drastically brought her into a down, which I think we lived through more deliberately, more together than ever. So when the pendulum started swinging back, so to speak, so did we. The sex we have is a mirror to that which we did not have. It is deliberate, desired, present, passionate. It is incandescent.
I have been in love for a long time, and I am more so today.