F45/M42 — Six weeks separated after 13+ years together. We still love each other, still sleep together, and still emotionally rely on each other. How do you actually untangle?
Please be gentle with me. This is very new, I’m deep in the grief/attachment stage, and I’m genuinely looking for perspective from people who have been through something similar.
My partner (42M) and I (45F) recently ended our relationship after more than 13 years together. We share children/family life and built a whole adult life together. There was no affair or dramatic event that suddenly ended everything. We still love each other very much.
Ultimately, he decided that he believes we are fundamentally incompatible.
One of the biggest issues is alcohol. He is several years sober and feels that alcohol has caused too much hurt and anxiety in our relationship. His position eventually became that he cannot feel emotionally safe in a relationship with me if I drink at all.
I rarely drink anymore, but I have struggled with agreeing to complete lifelong abstinence. For me, there is a difference between choosing not to drink most of the time and agreeing that I can never choose to have a glass of wine or a cocktail again. For him, that distinction doesn’t really matter anymore.
Neither of us seems able to find a compromise that doesn’t leave one of us feeling unsafe or controlled.
So we separated.
For the last six weeks we’ve been “nesting.” The kids stay in the family home and we rotate in and out so their lives have remained remarkably stable while we figure everything else out.
And honestly, we’ve accomplished an enormous amount in six weeks. We’ve worked through finances, housing, parenting schedules, belongings, logistics and what our lives might look like going forward. I’m looking at houses. We’re trying incredibly hard to protect the kids and treat each other with love instead of turning this into a war.
But emotionally? We are a mess.
We keep coming back to each other.
We still call or text when one of us is hurting. He is still the person whose arms calm my nervous system when I’m overwhelmed. I’m still someone he turns to when he’s sad. We talk deeply. We cry together. We hug and cuddle. We still have an intense physical connection and continue having sex—sometimes multiple times in a day or multiple times in a week. We have fallen asleep wrapped around each other and then gotten up the next morning and gone back to being “separated.”
Then we try to pull away again.
Three weeks after our separation, he downloaded Tinder. He says he was on it for about four hours, matched with one woman, deleted it, and they’ve now been on several dates. They’ve become physically affectionate/intimate.
I’ve also tried finding connection outside the relationship and have slept with other people.
Neither of us is technically doing anything wrong. We’re separated. We both understand that.
But somehow, despite dating/sleeping with other people and intellectually understanding that our relationship is over, we keep finding our way back into each other’s arms.
This week alone we’ve spent time together, parented together, looked at a house for me together, texted a lot, had sex several times, talked for hours and eventually fell asleep holding each other.
The next day he texted me saying he was incredibly sad and couldn’t figure out why until he looked back at how much contact and intimacy we’d had during the previous week. Basically: “No wonder.”
And I feel exactly the same way.
My brain understands the separation.
My heart and nervous system absolutely do not.
After 13+ years, this man still feels like home to me. And I think some part of me still feels like home to him, even though he is the one who believes we cannot make the relationship work.
So I’m asking people who have actually lived this:
How long did it take you to emotionally detach from a long-term partner you still loved?
Did you continue sleeping together after separating? If so, for how long? Did it eventually help you say goodbye, or did it just prolong the agony?
How do you stop using the person you’re grieving as the person who comforts you through the grief?
How do you create emotional distance when you share children and genuinely want to remain close, loving co-parents?
For people who nested after separating, how long did you do it before establishing completely separate homes?
And has anyone ended a relationship because of a fundamental incompatibility like sobriety/alcohol despite still being deeply in love? Did distance eventually make the incompatibility clearer, or did you eventually find a compromise you couldn’t see while you were in the middle of everything?
Finally… how fucked up are we? 😂
Because sometimes I look at this objectively and think, “You two broke up and apparently forgot to actually break up.”
But from inside it, it doesn’t feel casual or reckless. It feels like two people who spent more than a decade being each other’s home trying to figure out how to stop being that without destroying each other or our family in the process.
I know “go no contact” will probably be some people’s answer, but with children that isn’t entirely possible, and I’m not sure either of us is emotionally capable of going from 13+ years of being best friends and partners to cold, businesslike co-parenting overnight.
I would especially appreciate gentle advice from people who have gone through a loving separation where attachment and attraction remained strong. I’m only six weeks into this, and I’m very much still in the thick of the grief.