My confession – a story I can’t tell anywhere else

I am a man in my early forties. Married. Two beautiful children. From the outside, life looks stable – maybe even happy. But inside, I carry a sadness that I don’t share with anyone. Not a human being. Not even my wife.

We have been together for ten years now, married for five. She has known me almost all my life. We have a good time together – really. We laugh a lot, we share everything, we have a bond that I would never carelessly throw away. But romance has never been there. And infatuation? I never felt that for her. Not in the beginning, not in the middle, and not now.

We started out as friends with benefits. Just casual, no expectations. She started to feel more. I didn’t. But we did more and more things together, as if we were already a couple without saying it. Eventually I made a conscious choice: I went along with it. Because life with her was fun. Cozy. Stable. I hoped the feeling would come later. But somewhere deep inside I knew then: it’s never going to happen.

We have two children. Beautiful children. Really striking. People often look at them, talk to us about how handsome they are. And yes, they look like me. Appearance. I’m proud of that. But inwardly … inwardly I don’t recognize them. That is painful to say. But I sometimes feel so far removed from them that I don’t enjoy weekends anymore. As if I play the part of the father I should be, but can’t quite find the feeling anymore.

And despite everything, I love my wife. She is the mother of my children. She is my wife. I don’t want to cheat. I am not a man of secrets or double agendas. But more and more I feel alone in a life I built for myself.

After our miscarriage, everything changed. It was our first child. Halfway through the pregnancy, we had to leave the hospital without a baby in our arms. I hid in my work. She in alcohol. Until she had an epileptic fit. Then everything had to come out. Then it also turned out that she was pregnant again – we discovered in the hospital.

That was the turning point. We wanted to be parents, and despite all the sadness, that pregnancy was a new beginning. Exciting, intense, full of complications. Everything was under pressure. But we got through it. And we got married. Not because we believed in marriage, but because we wanted everything to be right for our children. Practical. Loving in a way, but without romance.

And yet, despite everything… I carry someone else with me. All my life.

When I was eighteen, I met her. A blonde girl, so beautiful that people said she and her sister were the most beautiful in town. We met in the pub. The following week she invited me to her house. I biked an hour to see her. Her family immediately embraced me as if I already belonged.

We became inseparable. No relationship, no sex. Just friendship. But so intense that it felt like something bigger. We were like brother and sister. We looked at each other and recognized ourselves. Quiet. Tender. Understanding.

But then someone came into my life that broke everything. A friend. Someone who spread lies about me to everyone I knew. He was jealous, maybe. Angry, I don’t know. But he took everyone away from me – including her. She chose to believe his story. I never defended myself. Never told my story. Those who really knew me would know the truth. I thought.

Her brother remained loyal to me. He said, “I know who you are.” And that while he still hangs out with that friend – they served together in Afghanistan. She believed him. Her brother continued to believe me.

Contact with her disappeared. I blocked her number. Not out of anger. Out of self-protection. But I never deleted it. She was never really gone. And still, after more than ten years, I sometimes miss her so much that it makes me swallow.

As if that wasn’t enough, after that I also lost her best friend. She too was close to me. Sweet, tender, gentle. In retrospect, I know she felt more than I realized. I didn’t see it until I saw her eyes when I was hanging out with other girls. She broke contact. Without explanation. And years later I learned – far too late – that she had died of anorexia. No one had told me anything. No goodbye. No chance to say anything more. That pain is still deep in my chest.

My wife knows I was once friends with someone. But not how much. Not what she meant. Not that there is still a sadness inside me that I have nowhere to put it.

And so I tell it here. Secretly. Anonymously. Not to get pity. Not for judgment. But just … because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Because I had to write this story to hear myself whisper: I lost something I could never really hold.

And that hurts.

A little bit every day.