I Love My Husband. But Sometimes I Imagine a Life Without Him

I'm 33, and I've been married for eight years.

We have two kids.

My husband is a good man. And I think that's exactly what makes this so difficult to admit.

He doesn't drink too much. He's never hurt me. As far as I know, he's never cheated on me. He works hard, he's a good father, and he loves me.

There's no obvious reason for me to be unhappy.

There's nothing I could tell my friends that would make them say, "Of course. You need to leave."

Quite the opposite.

From the outside, we have a good marriage.

But about a year ago, I started imagining my life without him.

It happened accidentally at first.

I was driving alone one day and suddenly started thinking about what my apartment would look like if I lived by myself.

Not after some horrible divorce.

Not after a huge fight.

Just... alone.

What kind of bed would I buy?

What would be in my fridge?

What would I do on a Friday night if nobody expected me anywhere?

Then I started having these thoughts more often.

Sometimes my husband will be telling me something and I'll look at him and think:

"If I met you today, would I fall in love with you?"

And I honestly don't know the answer.

I hate admitting that.

Because he still loves me.

I can see it.

He still comes up behind me sometimes and puts his arms around me. He still kisses my neck for no reason. We still have sex, and sometimes it's genuinely great.

So it's not even that we've completely lost our intimacy.

But sometimes afterward, he'll fall asleep next to me perfectly content, and I'll lie there staring at the ceiling.

And I'll think:

"Is this my life now?"

Then morning comes and I feel guilty.

Especially when I see him with our kids.

I look at the three of them together and think that if I destroyed our family because of some feeling I can't even properly explain, I might regret it for the rest of my life.

But there's something that scares me even more.

I can't remember the last time I did something simply because I wanted to.

Not as a mother.

Not as a wife.

Not because it made sense for our family.

Just me.

Recently, I found some old photos of myself.

I was in my early twenties.

And I realized I was jealous of the woman in those pictures.

Not because she was younger.

Not because she was thinner.

She just didn't know who she was going to become yet.

Her life could still go in a hundred different directions.

Mine sometimes feels like all the important choices have already been made.

And now comes the part I haven't told anyone.

A few months ago, a man came into my life.

Nothing has happened between us.

He doesn't even know I sometimes think about him.

We just talk occasionally.

But one day he looked at me in a way I hadn't been looked at in a very long time.

Not like someone's wife.

Not like someone's mother.

Just like a woman.

I went home that day and couldn't stop thinking about that moment.

I haven't done anything with him.

And I'm not planning to.

But I liked how it made me feel.

And that's the part I'm almost ashamed to admit.

I don't think it's really the other man that I want.

I think I want the version of myself I felt like when another life suddenly seemed possible.

And now I don't know what scares me more:

losing the life I've spent eight years building,

or waking up years from now and realizing I never allowed myself to find out who else I could have been.