it has stopped doing anything for me and I feel oddly bereaved

Two years and about eleven evenings, and somewhere in the last six months the whole thing has gone flat for me.

Not badly. Nothing went wrong. No jealousy, no incident, no falling out with anybody. It simply does not do anything any more. She goes out, I think oh good, she has a nice time, she comes home, we chat, and I feel roughly what I feel about her going to a concert.

The strange part, and the reason I am writing this at midnight instead of sleeping, is that I am upset about it. Genuinely upset, in a way I would struggle to explain to anybody.

I had this fantasy for about fifteen years before we did anything. It was a fixed point. It was there on bad days and boring afternoons and long drives. Now the real thing has happened enough times that the imagined version has nothing left to run on, and the real thing turns out to be a pleasant evening that I am mildly indifferent to.

So I have not lost a marriage or a friendship or anything anybody would recognise as a loss. I have lost a fantasy, which is a ridiculous thing to grieve, and I am grieving it.

There is also a practical side. She likes it now. She was hesitant for years and somewhere in the middle of it she found she enjoyed the whole thing, the getting ready, the evening, the coming home. So it would be a poor time for me to announce that I have gone off it, and I have not announced anything.

Has this happened to anyone? Does it come back? And is there a way of telling your wife that the thing you spent a decade asking for has stopped mattering, without it landing as an insult to her?