where is my husband?
the question that always returns
It’s close to midnight. My laptop is still open atop my desk, warm and fan faintly humming.
Portugal tabs crowding my browser with visa notes, apartment numbers, budget spreadsheets...
My phone is face-down beside me, its pink case catching the yellow light from the lamp in the corner, right next to the last of my tea has gone cold on the nightstand.
Where is my husband?
Plain and alive in the quiet, a bottomless ache hollowing in my chest.
My whole life, I’ve learned how to hold myself. I know how compare timelines, build a databases of spreadsheets, and sit with my jaw tight for three hours until the numbers stop scaring me.
I lay in bed and scroll — clicking between visa requirements and neighborhood maps and cost-of-living threads… and I can feel two lives being lived concurrently.
One life is on the screen: Deadlines, documents, date ranges.
The other life, I shouldn't admit…
I want my husband here.
I told myself I was building a full strong life by myself, learning how not to need what could not be guaranteed.
I mastered being the woman who do everything in my own: handle all the difficult conversations, hold everything together, remembers launch strategies, deadlines, backup plans — stacking structure atop fear.
I know her well. She sits at the desk right in front of a gold-curtained window currently called home with her color coded digital and physical notebooks writing clear next steps in neat lines. She makes coffee each morning and drinks it while it's hot — despite waking with her mind already running through project phases.
She still wants her husband.
Why is the desire still there? Haven’t I built enough?
Isn’t my life meaningful enough to ignore the space there for him?
Aren’t I disciplined and self sufficient enough for this desire for marriage to be unnecessary?
It catches me now in ordinary places — clear & exact.
In the grocery store, when I reach for two of something and stop. In the car, when I hear myself talking out loud and there is no one to answer. In the small pause after I have figured something out alone again. In bed with nothing but the lamp on in the room soft, all my plans laid out in front of me.
My life is full of beautiful effort, creation energy, and thoughtful becoming of everything I have built with care.
I am not wandering through blank days waiting to be completed.
I know how to build a life.
So well that I forget to ask whether I was ever meant to build all of it alone.
I have held my phone in the middle of the night, thumb hovering over a man's dating profile, looking at his neat little prompts and cropped photos and feeling my whole body go flat. The glow on my face. The silence in the room. The strange, dead feeling of trying to locate something sacred inside a marketplace. A smile in one square. A joke in another. A line about travel. A line about tacos. A line about looking for someone who doesn't take life too seriously.
I stare. I lock the phone. I set it down. My hands collapse by my sides with no left but how tired I am.
I love Love.
But I’m tired of systems that make love feel thin.
Offline dating is no better. Just has different lighting. The same strained energy in a different room. The same feeling that I am supposed to make myself more available to things I already know I do not want. The same subtle pressure to loosen my standards and call it openness, to be chill enough, flexible enough, modern enough, detached enough to move through the machinery without complaint. My body rejects it before my mind has finished the thought. My shoulders go tight. Something in me pulls back.
The hardest part is both desiring something so deeply and how quickly the world tries to make that desire feel embarrassing.
I tucked my desire for marriage under other goals and held it the way you might hold a bruise — carefully, off to the side, not looking at it directly.
But the desire remains.
It stayed.
Through jobs, endings, foundings, plans, launches, openings, expansions.
It stayed because it was never a flaw.
I snuggle warm in bed exactly as I am now — soft focus spread through lidded eyes, smushed under calming comfort with a pillow protectively pressed flat against my chest, watching blue-gray dusk followed by dawn light pool through my pink curtains, knowing…
I do not want to build a life that proves I can do everything alone.
And the thought underneath the thought?
I am tired of trying to transcend what I actually want.
The fight against the longing stopped.
It never meant anything bad about me. It never needed to be polished into something acceptable. It was never evidence that I am behind, weak, insufficiently healed, or less evolved than women who seemed more detached.
Now when the question comes, I soften and let it come, without bracing against my heart’s desire.
Where is my husband?
Sovereignty, for me, is not without longing.
Nor is is it becoming so self-contained that nothing touches me, or where I finally earn some polished distance from wanting, or where I learn how to need less.
My life is full of artful gifts, clarity in plans, creative work, intentional expression, and joyful expansion.
Still, when the screen goes dark and there is nothing left to optimize for the night, I can feel the outline of what I am no longer willing to pretend I do not want.
Where is my husband?