What you can't see is what you might get anyway.  No, I'm not talking about chlamydia. Or any other STD. I'm talking about a disconnection - an attachment injury - when you never saw it coming and are left, in its aftermath with a bath of cold water all over your aspirations for togetherness.
I'm talking about something that most women understand readily and most men - myself included until I worked it through heart and mind (with a woman's help) -- find baffling. No not baffling. Nonsensical. Most men find this utterly preposterous. Yet once we get it we do get it. So there's hope here.

File this one under Intangibles that Matter. 

While men famously view problem-solving as a function of pragmatics, women typically feel the relational implications of disentangling a conundrum keenly - pragmatics take a back seat.
Let's approach this as if it were a problem in logic. Only the key to the puzzle is going to be a lesson in emotional, not rational, logic.

Mike and Leigh are suburban-urbanites who live close enough to NYC to have felt a pang when informed, though there was no truth to it, that the Brazilian hole-in-the-wall at 50th and Ninth had gone out of business. Yet they resided far enough from the restaurant to take leafy strolls home from the Metro-North on temperate evenings.

They began their first relationship counseling session by letting me know that, despite a strong mutual attraction, their sex life had slowed down to the point that it could be picked up by the E-Z pass detector and their conversations were limited to updates with no talk of dates. Who was going to do what or spend how much left questions of who was feeling what about the doings unasked and unanswered. Closeness had become the worst four-letter word: none.

A quick inventory of their situation revealed that they spent barely any time with each other. Needless to say, there was a lot of despair there. And wherever they looked they'd find something to argue about. Just so as not to get an update on the grocery list. At least the arguing had some feeling in it. It was their only point of emotional contact.

So Mike wasn't surprised when Leigh reported to me that she was furious with him about the weekend. What he was surprised about was the reason she gave.

Leigh was furious that Mike had not invited her to have breakfast with him and George.
What surprised Mike about this is that Leigh was not fond of George and generally avoided him. Would she have wanted to go if he asked her? She said, "Maybe. But it would have meant a lot to her if you had asked."

Mike took a deep breath. "Let me get this straight. You are furious at me because I didn't invite you to have breakfast with me and George even though you don't particularly like George and you know that we would be going out to jog or play basketball afterwards."

"If you had invited me it would have meant a lot to me. It would have meant that you weren't taking me for granted. That you hadn't given up on finding new, unexpected solutions to the usual raft of reasons that we give each other for not making contact."

Mike was staring into Leigh's eyes as she spoke.

"And we are so far apart now that you don't have any idea what I'm going through and I happened to have had a terrible week at work and really felt like I needed to be with you. I wouldn't have wanted to exclude George -- I may not like him but I don't hate him - and I know you look forward to working out so I didn't want to interrupt that but if you had asked it would have meant that you were thinking beyond the routine stuff. And I would have taken it as a sign that you were really tired of the distance between us. Tired enough to do something different to see if we could break out of the patterns we're in. Can you see how and why it would have made a difference?"

Mike didn't say much but his nod in the affirmative seemed to indicate she had reached him.

On the following Saturday Mike invites Leigh to join him and George at the Star Diner. She refuses with a smile. A smile that resonates with more than a new understanding, a new way of understanding. At certain times there is nothing more pragmatic than an invitation that is meant to do nothing more than convey welcome. Welcome and choice. How the other acts on the choice presented becomes beside the point. The point is the invitation to choose!

Remember, love and good feelings are plentiful yet elusive; I'll be around to help you locate and develop them in the Middle Ground.