Reason One
The Slow Drift
Nobody remembers the day it started, because there was no day it started.
Daniel could tell you the date of his wedding, the date his daughter was born, even the date he and Shu Mei bought the little terrace house in Subang with the leaking porch roof. What he could not tell you, sitting across from a counsellor eleven years later with his marriage in pieces, was the date he and his wife stopped talking. Not arguing. Talking. The easy, pointless, life-giving kind: what she saw at the market, what he was afraid of at work, the silly things, the true things.
“There wasn’t a moment,” he said. “It was more like… the tide went out. And by the time either of us noticed, the boats were very far apart.”
Of all the reasons in this book, this one comes first because it is the most common, the most gradual and the most invisible while it is happening. When researchers survey people who have been unfaithful about why, the answers that surface most often are not wild passion or wickedness. They are quieter words: distance, loneliness, feeling unseen, feeling like housemates. Therapists who work with couples report the same thing so consistently that many describe emotional disconnection as the soil in which most affairs grow.
