If there's one thing to understand about a marriage in trouble, it's this. The two people are almost never in the same place at the same time. One is usually leaning in and one is leaning out, and most of the pain, and most of the failed attempts to fix things, come from treating them as if they were one undifferentiated couple with one shared problem. They're two people in two very different emotional positions, and each needs something different.
What it's like to be leaning out
The partner who's leaning out is often further along than anyone realizes. They've usually been unhappy for a long time, quietly, and have done a lot of their grieving already, while the other one was still hoping. By the time they pull away visibly, they're often not at the start of a problem but near the end of one. That's why "trying harder at them," more attention, more effort, more pleading, so often fails. It arrives as pressure on someone who has already half-left, and pressure makes them want to leave faster. It isn't coldness. It's exhaustion that's been running longer than you knew.
What it's like to be leaning in
The partner who's leaning in is usually in something closer to panic. They've realized late that the marriage is in danger, and they're frightened, and fear makes people grab. So they pursue. They want to talk about it constantly, fix it tonight, hear reassurance, see effort. All of which is love, and all of which, aimed at someone who's leaning out, tends to backfire.
The spiral between them
Put those two together and you get a predictable, painful spiral. One pursues, which makes the other withdraw, which frightens the first into pursuing harder, which makes the second withdraw further. Each person's response makes the other's worse. From inside, the pursuer feels abandoned and the withdrawer feels suffocated, and both are right about their own experience, and the spiral keeps turning. Seeing the spiral as the problem, rather than the other person, is the first thing that loosens it.
What actually helps each of you
For the leaning-in partner, the counterintuitive medicine is room. Warmth when they reach, no chasing when they don't, your own work done without narrating it, a steady life that isn't arranged entirely around their decision. Room isn't surrender. It's making yourself someone easier to move toward instead of someone to brace against.
For the leaning-out partner, what's owed isn't a promise to stay. It's an honest look before a final decision, not because staying is the right answer, but because a choice this large, one that reshapes your life and your children's, deserves clear eyes rather than the momentum of a long, tired drift.
And for both of you, a neutral third person helps more here than almost anywhere, because the gap between your two positions is hard to cross alone. The short kind of help built for this is called discernment counseling, and its whole purpose is to help two people in different places get clear, together, on what they're doing.
One necessary exception. If the distance in your marriage is really fear, if one of you is controlled or frightened or unsafe, then this isn't a leaning-in and leaning-out situation, and the even-handed framing here doesn't fit. That's a safety question, and it deserves help of a different kind.
The most hopeful thing about understanding the gap is that it's normal, and it's workable. Two people standing in different places isn't the end of a marriage. It's the ordinary, painful starting point of almost every one that gets mended.
This is supportive self-help, not medical, psychological, or legal advice, and no substitute for a qualified professional. If you or your child may be in danger, contact your local emergency services.