Hi Heart
I feel for you so much as you face so many deeply challenging factors in your marriage. As a gal who's been married to the same guy for 23 years, to say a long term relationship can become deeply challenging in a number of ways would have to be an understatement, based on my own experience.
It's tough when our partner's not a major communicator because it's then that we're trying to gain clarity on our own. I always find it's far more helpful to find people who are going to wonder with me, as opposed to me wondering all on my own...
I can recall wondering with my daughter 'Why are your father and I so different?'. She mentioned 'love languages', which was the first I'd ever heard of such a thing. She said 'Dad's love languages are 'Physical touch' (hugging and kissing) and 'Words of affirmation' (being praised and openly appreciated). Your love language is completely different, it involves 'Acts of service''. She was spot on, I love deeply and feel loved through acts of service. I'm typically not a hugging kind of person who needs praise, so it's hard for me to relate at times. When two people express love in very different ways, sometimes it can be hard for them to share love. Also, both may go on to feel unloved by each other, when the languages are very different. I found this has been the case with my own marriage at times. I can't help but wonder how you and your husband express love or how you both enjoy feeling loved. Online, there's plenty of stuff about 'love languages' worth researching. It perhaps help shed some light.
I found another biggy in a relationship to be the 'growth' or 'evolution' factor. When one person wants to develop the relationship in certain ways and the other's happy with what they want to do (the same kind of stuff they're used to), it can definitely become challenging. Without that sense of development you can start to lose yourself in different ways. The adventurer in you can start to fade away, the excitement seeker in you can diminish, the visionary in you can be exercised less and less to the point where you can cease being your once highly imaginative self and so on. In summary, we can cease developing soulful and key aspects of ourself, which can bring about a sense of resentment toward the person we desperately want to develop or evolve with.
If you felt the soulmate factor earlier in your relationship, I suppose the question could be 'What used to bring your souls to life?'. A new and shared vision can sometimes help rekindle feelings that used to be there, back when things were more exciting. Could your husband be craving excitement in some form, yet is not up for the challenge of bringing it into the relationship you share together? Can be so much easier to look outside a relationship for excitement, rather than do the hard work the relationship calls for (in order for it to develop to the next positive stage). If you really want to do the work and he's more about focusing on what brings him joy and excitement, this is definitely worth questioning. Could he be someone who's become largely self serving or someone who's depressed?
