I left my husband because we were in a dead living room marriage.

My husband and I live together. But we rarely talk. We watch TV. We disagree on which shows to see together. We sit down to relax. But we never touch.

Our living room is comfortable, filled with outdated furniture from when we were first married over two decades ago. It has the requisite kids’ photos in frames.

The living room is also where we celebrate holidays and birthdays, where we put up the Christmas tree lights, and where we light a fire when it's cold.

Ketut Subiyanto / Pexels

Yet our living room never seems to be warm — it’s as frigid as our dead bedroom.

According to statistics published in the New York Times, about 15% of married couples have a dead bedroom. A decade of no touching. No affection. And certainly no intimacy. Ten long cold years of not discussing our non-existent love life.

"I’ll do better," he promised years ago. And it never happened. Why live like this? I thought to myself one day when I was 47.

I still have needs. I’d like to sleep with someone again before I die. Why deprive myself? What kind of sick martyr was I? No one would put up with a decade of zero intimacy. They’d leave or cheat. 

Research from 2023 states that one of the biggest reasons people cheat is because of a lack of intimacy in their relationship. 

cottonbro studio / Pexels

So, I cheated because I wanted an "alive" living room.

I wanted a living room where I could banter with my partner, put my feet up on his legs, where I can relax, and feel accepted for being me. The perfectly imperfect me. The intimate me. The playful me.

Those aren’t welcome in my current living room. My "alive" living room would be a place to make wonderful memories. And would lead to stripping in hallways while laughing our way to the bedroom.

A living room should have joy and even disagreements. It should be a spot where we talk, not just sit apart and ignore each other, each of us on our respective laptops or phones heading to bed to roll to opposite sides, never touching. 

At home, it’s not a war zone. That’s good, right? We don’t have knock-down-drag-out fights, but we also don’t have sustained honest communication. It’s pointing fingers.

• "You always do…"
• "You never…"
• "Not this again…"
• "Why can’t you…"

It's a perpetual blame game. I constantly feel "less than." Except my affair partner makes me feel like I am enough.

"Wouldn’t you like every night to be like this?" he asks while snuggling. "We could watch Stanley Tucci in Italy," he adds.

"With you holding me?" I ask. That’s an impossible dream, I think. No one has that. But some lucky people do.

Alex Alexander is a pseudonym. The author of this article is known to YourTango but is choosing to remain anonymous.

This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.