I feel sidelined by my husband’s new-found enthusiasm for tennis

Since he’s been seeing his new friends at the club he’s joined, we don’t spend as much quality time together as we used to

My husband and I have a great relationship, but in recent months I’ve been feeling increasingly sidelined. We used to enjoy a date night at least once a month, and would always spend one evening a week relaxing at home. This quality time has dwindled to one date night in more than three months and practically no nights in together. He’s been spending time with new friends at the tennis club he’s joined (he’s always had friends, but I’ve always been a priority). I can see he’s happy, but I can feel the resentment brewing. Should I tell him about my feelings, or let him enjoy his time with new friends in peace? 
– Sidelined
It must be distinctly unnerving to feel that you are winning in the marriage game and suddenly find yourself, troublingly and from out of nowhere, wondering whether you’re 40-love down in the third set; looking on, a bit bewildered from the tramlines, not even required to cheer, but merely to keep the home fires burning. Well, the home fires are starting to crackle right now, aren’t they? Careful they don’t flare up and burn the house down. 
While you are not claiming full-force resentment, yet, you are certainly feeling something adjacent to it. How do we know? Well, you’ve moved beyond the fact that you don’t see him as much as you used to, towards the feeling that something has been taken away from you. You are keeping score, and not of his tennis matches. You are doing relationship maths; the kind of weaponising calculations that we make when we are feeling as though we are somehow being cheated out of something. 
Emilie remembers challenging her husband over the number of showers he took when their elder child was a newborn. She remembers her actual words as: “But you had one yesterday!” Luckily, they laughed about it (did they?), but Emilie vividly remembers the explosive resentment that bubbled out of her. So, before you find that you are screaming, John McEnroe-style, “You cannot be serious, you played a match/went out/left me yesterday,” it might be a good idea to nip this hostile rose in the bud. 
The good news, dear Sidelined, is that this may be solved by a forensic diary session. Boring but also essential. It is incredibly easy, in long-term relationships, when both are working hard and scrambling for free time and energy, to find suddenly that you haven’t had a meaningful interaction for months. Why not get busy with your joint diaries and lock in a few date nights here and there to plug the emotional gap? 
Happy, lifelong marriages don’t just happen. They take work and organisation and focus and concentration and communication – all that boring, unsexy stuff that leads to quite exciting sexy stuff. So perhaps instead of feeling shy about wanting to be with your husband, and worried about being perceived as needy, congratulate yourself on being vigilant for your relationship. At least you have your eye on the ball, while he’s heading out in his tennis whites, confident that everything in his life is under control. 
And dear Sidelined, while you may feel a little on the outside of it all, his friendships and his healthy hobby are to be admired. All relationships benefit from both partners having independent activities, from having a little space from each other. The fact that in mid-life he has found exercise that he loves, that will keep him healthy and fit, is also a good thing, and that he has a capacity for friendship is also a giant tick. It might be worth having a little look and seeing whether you might need to do something, find something, that energises you in the same way, that isn’t dependent on him. We don’t want to create more space between you but hey, that’s where a little diary synchronisation comes in.
Whatever the reason, it’s not OK not to see each other all the time. It is also absolutely OK for you to sit down and say, “I love you playing tennis, I love this for you. You’ve always had friends and it’s one of the things I admire most about you but right now, it feels different, and it doesn’t feel very good.” Remind him that your relationship with him is your most precious thing, and that you don’t want to take away from his activities but rather you want consciously to couple: you want to add back in all the stuff that’s good about your relationship. 
Many people reading this will hear alarm bells going off and conclude that his appetite for the tennis club is concealing the fact that he is playing a more sinister game, and if he responds negatively to your challenge or refuses to be flexible, then of course, you have a bigger problem. But in the meantime, before the tone becomes accusatory and paranoid, and you end up hating yourself and him, tell him how you feel. Seal the gap that his tennis absence has opened up. Because when you create draughts in relationships, things have a tendency to blow in. Or blow out. Are you game?
Read last week’s Midults column