A few years ago, my husband and I were at a wedding. The wedding photographer came up to us about halfway through the party and said, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you two were the newlyweds.” It was such an amazing compliment, and something I relished. There we were, together for a decade, married for a few years at that point, and we were still acting like newlyweds.

I found myself reliving that memory recently as I was laying in bed after a nasty argument with my husband, wondering if we have finally reached our breaking point. Shortly after that wedding a few years ago, we decided to have kids. We had a hard time conceiving, and for a while, I thought that the TTC process might break us. I wanted to deal with the TTC issues proactively, and my husband didn’t. The subject was embarrassing to him, the effort to figure out what was wrong was big, and he preferred to avoid it and just hope for the best. I don’t begrudge him his reasoning, and understood his avoidance, but I felt left out. After nearly two years of trying, I was actively going to therapy and coming to a point of acceptance that having kids was just not meant to be. Of course, we got pregnant just as I was preparing for my new kid-free reality.

Hindsight is a powerful thing, and as I look back at it now, I probably should have known that the differences I always thought attracted us to each other were going to escalate into problems. My desire to tackle conflict head on and his desire to avoid it at all costs. My need for someone to relax my controlling, over-planning tendencies and his inability to push back at me when I started behaving badly. When our child was born, the reality of new motherhood hit me incredibly hard. I felt awfully isolated and completely lost on what to do with this new little person. My husband stood back and got out of my way, despite my need for someone to step in and take over every so often, and my inherent trouble with asking for help only made things that much worse.

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When the first year of parenting drew to a close and the fog began to lift, the cracks in our marriage began to show. We both work outside the home full time, and after a full work day and then an evening with our kid, we had spent virtually no time together as a couple. I needed to go to bed early in order to get enough sleep to function, and he was a night owl. Despite being an incredible romantic, he completely bypassed my birthday and our anniversary, claiming that he didn’t think I’d want to go out because I was so tired at the end of the day. It came from a good place, but the lack of effort hurt. We disagreed about parenting approaches – I relied a lot on books and online communities to figure out what to expect, and he openly scorned my attempts at learning, claiming that my gut instinct should be enough. He slept soundly every night, and I woke up repeatedly to make sure our kid was OK. We didn’t have many interests in common to begin with (something I always viewed as an asset that gave us great opportunities to explore different things), but we began to drift even further apart as my capacity for what I wanted to read/hear/learn reduced proportionally to the brain space I had left after work, child and a little bit for myself.

I read somewhere that you shouldn’t make any major decisions in the first two years of a child’s life, so I tried to write off our disconnect and continue trying to figure out what was broken and how to fix it. After many years of trying (going back to our troublesome TTC days) to get him to go to couples therapy with me, he finally agreed. We saw someone once a week for 8 months, and we got a lot out of it. We seemed to talk a bit better. Our biggest takeaway, however, was that we had incredibly big differences – outright polarizing ones, in fact – in how we dealt with emotional challenges. I think and process and analyze everything, and try to find all the rights, wrongs and viewpoints in between. I try to relate. My husband isn’t able to relate or understand my feelings, or even his own, for the most part. His ability to put himself in my shoes or anyone else’s just doesn’t exist, and therefore my upsets and frustrations simply become noise to him and he withdraws. He doesn’t spend time thinking about his own behaviors. Because he’s not prone to get angry or even argue, it’s easy to make me the bad guy, simply because I’m louder. He doesn’t talk about what he’s thinking or feeling, claiming there’s just nothing to talk about. In his mind, he’s simply reacting to my actions – well, when I’m well, and badly when I’m imperfect.

I realize that I write this that it sounds like I’m blaming him, and that’s not the intent at all. We are both at fault for what’s gone wrong between us. I have a terrible temper, I get angry easily, I obsess and control and talk too much. My frustrations, especially in the TTC struggle and early on in parenthood, had caused me to lash out rather than address problems constructively, and that lashing out caused him to avoid conflict even more than he’s already prone to do. And after years of building up this awful dynamic of me getting angry, him withdrawing, me getting even angrier and so on, the wedge between us has been growing larger.

The hard thing about all this is that there are no easy causes to pull the divorce trigger around. My husband is an amazing human being. He’s boundlessly generous, an incredible father, and even a great husband. We don’t really argue (though I often think that if we did, things would actually be better because at least I’d know what he’s feeling and thinking). He’s an incredible partner who supports me in every way – except one. Over these past few years, I’ve realized that he can’t provide me the emotional support I need when I become imperfect. Perhaps I’m asking for too much, but oftentimes it feels like he only wants to be with me when I’m my best self. Every other time he’d rather just get out of my way and let me figure it out. Which I do, a lot, but it’s become incredibly lonely to go at it myself all the time, especially now that there’s a little person whose emotions also need to be managed.

I’ve asked myself repeatedly whether we would still be together if it weren’t for our child. The fact that I can’t answer yes definitively is telling, but so is the fact that it’s not a definitive no either. I keep hoping. I keep thinking that maybe I can find a way to fix this. Our therapist “fired” us (kind of) – her conclusion after 8 months was that my husband just simply isn’t wired to give me what I’m looking for in emotional support. It doesn’t make him a bad person, it just is. The question is where I can live with it and fall in love with my husband again, after years of bad feelings between us. That’s where I’m currently stuck.

I don’t want us to stay together for our kid’s sake. I know enough children of divorces to have heard the advice repeatedly – do NOT stay together for the sake of your kid. I know happy parents, even if they’re no longer together, is going to be better for our kid. But my heart breaks every time I think of two homes, two beds, two separate lives that our kid would have to lead. I worry that if I don’t make a decision soon (and it’s my decision to make, he’s never going to pull this trigger), my husband and I will only grow to resent each other more and more and not even manage to stay friends if we part. I think that maybe we should just part ways while we’re still somewhat friendly. But it’s also what makes me keep hoping that maybe we can fix this.