The Marriage You Stopped Showing Up For

For years, I would come home from the shop and sit down across from my partner. I would be physically sat at the table, but my mind would still be finishing an argument with a supplier, or running numbers on a surf trip that had not happened yet. He would ask me something simple, and I would answer a beat too late, the way you do when you are not fully present.

He never made a big thing of it, which is probably why it took me so long to realise it. Instead, he adjusted the way most partners of high-achieving people learn to. He stopped waiting for the full version of me some evenings and started working with the absent-minded one. He worked through some of the harder conversations without me, because having them with someone who is not really there is lonelier than not having them at all.

Neither of us ever named exactly when that started. There was no conversation about it. It was just a slow accommodation that over time became the norm.

I have sat with a lot of leaders since building this practice, and the pattern I recognised in myself shows up in almost every one of them. The quality of presence they describe struggling with in a boardroom is the same quality that shows up at the dinner table.

What strikes me most is how little of this gets said out loud. The professional version of presence gets books and frameworks built around it. The version that shows up in your personal life goes unacknowledged, mostly because admitting it feels like failing in the area of your life that should be under control.

I did not understand how not present I was until the silence after losing my partner made the pattern impossible to avoid. When there was no shop to go back to, no fire to put out, I had to sit with how much of myself I had been bringing home late, and partially, for years.

Most people already know this about themselves, even if in some level of denial. What is harder to accept is that the awareness has not been enough to change it. If you are ready to change that behaviour, let’s have a conversation.