Think about who you were with your partner before the role became what it is now.
Not idealised — actually. The quality of presence. The things you talked about that were not about work or logistics. The version of yourself that was available when the day was not consumed by what the position requires.
That version is still there. But it is increasingly unavailable — not because you have changed in character but because the role, which came home and never fully left, occupies the space where that version used to live. Your partner has not been living with you. They have been living with the managed version — composed, problem-solving, half-present, always with some portion of attention allocated to something that is not in the room.
The Narada Bhakti Sutras' distinction between Sakama Bhakti — love with agenda — and Nishkama Prema — love without agenda — has a precise domestic application. The person who is always in role brings the role's agenda into every relationship. The management of impression. The maintenance of authority. The careful calibration of what is shown and what is not. The love is real. But it is love conducted through the filter of the Persona — and the Persona keeps the other person at the distance required for the Persona to remain intact.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, described genuine love as two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other. Not merger — the specific quality of being fully present with another person while remaining fully oneself. The couple in which both people are fully themselves in each other's presence. This quality — which was perhaps available early in the relationship — requires a specific quality of availability that the role systematically reduces. Not through malice but through the simple arithmetic of attention: what goes to the role does not go to the relationship.
The question is not whether to leave the role at the door — that is not fully possible and not entirely desirable. The question is whether there is any time, any space, any context in the relationship where the role is genuinely set down and the actual person — uncertain, unperforming, not managing anything — is present with the other person.
If the answer is no — not because the desire is absent but because the habit of role has become so total that the unperforming version is no longer easily accessible — the relationship has become a managed arrangement between two people who knew each other once and have since become primarily functional to each other.
That is recoverable. But only if the role is recognised as the role — and the person is recognised as someone distinct from it, who owes the relationship the specific presence that only the person, not the role, can provide.