On Drift and Paying Attention

When we moved to England, I thought the biggest adjustments would be driving on the wrong side of the road and figuring out the grocery store.

I did not expect to rediscover my husband.

Justin and I have not lived a calm, uninterrupted life. We have had seasons that required real grit and real problem-solving, the kind that forces you into survival mode and makes you grateful just to get through the day. But the thing I did not see coming was that you can weather a lot together and still, very slowly, start living in parallel.

We have two kids, and when one moved out, something shifted. Not emotionally, exactly. Practically. The household changed. The pace changed. And then we moved to Bath.

With more margin than we’d had in years, we started doing things that felt almost ridiculous in their simplicity. We went on long hikes through the countryside, ten miles at a time, hunting down hidden pubs tucked behind stone walls and hedgerows. We planned overnight biking trips to see cathedrals that had been standing for centuries. We walked along the canal and watched the cygnets grow into swans. One season, we counted seventy-two ducks because apparently that is what happens when you slow down enough to count ducks.

Somewhere between the hiking boots and the canal paths, I realized something.

We had drifted.Not dramatically. Not painfully. Just subtly.

We had been doing life side by side, solving problems, stewarding responsibilities, loving our kids, and somewhere in all of that, we had slowly stopped noticing each other. Parallel lives can look very healthy from the outside. Two people functioning efficiently. Dividing and conquering. Managing a household like a small organization. You can tell yourself this is maturity. Partnership. Teamwork.

And often it is. But distance does not always announce itself with conflict. Sometimes it arrives disguised as competence. It shows up when you finally have space, and you realize you have not wandered together in a long time.

Not wandering away.Just wandering together.

There is a line in Hebrews that says, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (Hebrews 2:1, ESV). The author is speaking about the gospel, about the danger of inattention to something sacred. But the word drift lodged itself in my chest.

Drift is quiet. Drift is rarely intentional. You do not wake up one morning and decide to abandon what you love. You simply stop paying close attention.

In Revelation, Jesus says to the church in Ephesus, “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4, ESV). The church was orthodox. Persevering. Doing the right things. And yet something relational had cooled.

That verse used to feel sharp to me. Corrective. But walking along the canal in Bath, watching swans and counting ducks, it felt more like recognition.

We had not stopped loving each other. We had simply stopped tending to that love with the same attention we once did.

Parallel lives are efficient. They get things done. They raise children and manage mortgages and survive hurricanes and mold remediation and moves across oceans. But love, like faith, does not thrive on efficiency alone. It requires attention. Presence. Wandering without an agenda.

Bath did not fix our marriage. It revealed it.

It showed us that beneath the busyness and the competence and the shared mission, there was something so much more, just waiting to be discovered.

Maybe drift is not always the beginning of the end. Maybe sometimes it is the quiet invitation to pay closer attention.