August 18th, 2026

When Familiarity Becomes Invisibility
​

Over the past several weeks, I have found myself sitting across from couples who, on the surface, have very different stories about their relationships. Different marriages. Different histories. Different reasons for finding their way into my office. And yet, underneath those differences, I kept hearing something remarkably similar:

They loved each other.

They cared deeply about one another. They had built lives together, raised children, weathered difficult times and become deeply familiar with the person sitting beside them.

And somewhere along the way, something had changed.
Not necessarily love.
Not necessarily commitment.
But Desire.
The person who was once looked at with curiosity had become familiar. Too familiar. The body that once invited touch had become part of the landscape of everyday life. Husband. Wife. Mother. Father. Provider. Caregiver. Companion. Best friend.

And I began wondering whether one of the quietest challenges of a long marriage is not falling out of love, but becoming so familiar with one another that we stop seeing the person who is still there.

The poem that follows is fictional, but the emotional landscape is not.

As I listened to these couples speak about the places where intimacy had changed, I found myself thinking that, in some way, any one of them could have written these words.

Perhaps some of us already have.

Because long-term love asks us to live with a paradox: We want to be completely known by the person we love. And yet desire needs us to remain a little unknown.

There are times when couples need to find their way back to one another. And there are other times when the more courageous work is different...to acknowledge that something has changed, to grieve what once was, and to discover whether there is a new way of being together that can still hold tenderness, companionship, and meaning.

This is not a poem about losing love.
It is about what happens when love remains...but the way we experience it has changed. 

​We become so familiar
with the Body of another
that we forget
it is still a mystery.


The hand that once awakened Desire
becomes the hand that reaches
for the child,
the coffee pot,
the grocery bag,
the light switch.


We know the body
before we touch it.
We know the history
before it is spoken.
We know the well-worn wounds,
the habits,
especially the places where love
has learned to be careful.


And perhaps this is the quiet danger
of being married a long time...
that familiarity can become
a kind of invisibility.


We stop looking.
Not because we no longer want,
but because we have become certain
of what is there.


Yet Desire
has never been particularly obedient
to certainty.


It asks us to look again.
Not at the body we have known
for ten,
twenty,
thirty years,
but at the person
who has continued to change
inside it. 

Curiosity.


The woman beneath the mother.
The man beneath the provider.
The lover beneath the husband.
The woman beneath the wife.


For Desire
requires something marriage
does not always know how to give...
a little distance,
a little mystery,
the recognition
that the person beside me
does not belong to me
just because they love me.


And perhaps that is where
we find each other again:
not in the comfort
of being completely known,
but in the  uncertainty
of discovering
that there are still places
inside you
I have never touched.


After all these years,
I look at you
and remember--
you are not mine to possess.
You are yours.


And perhaps
that is where
we must leave it.


Not with the expectation
of wanting you
all over again,
but with the quiet acceptance
that something between us
has changed.


That love can remain
even when Desire does not.
That tenderness can survive
the absence of longing.
That two people can choose
to stay,
to care,
to accompany one another,
without asking the heart
to become
what it once was.


Perhaps this too
is a kind of intimacy:
to stop reaching backward
for the lovers we were
and learn,
together,
a new way
of being.

Acceptance.



​lw

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