Our two-year-old marriage was already struggling before the pandemic sent France into lockdown. Now here we were, stuck in our Paris apartment with my two teenage sons. “Le confinement,” as the French lyrically call it.

My husband, two decades younger than me, sought refuge from all the forced togetherness by barricading himself in the guest room, shoving the heavy sofa bed — normally used by my ex-husband when he comes to visit his sons — against the door.

I hated sleeping apart but rationalized our growing distance by telling myself that his snoring and my tossing made it difficult for us to get a good night’s rest. (Never mind that those things hadn’t been issues before.)

Besides, what couple doesn’t need space from time to time? Especially when the French government permitted only one hour of outside exercise per day, within one kilometer of home. To leave the house, we had to fill out a form and carry ID. Police were checking paperwork and issuing fines.

This was the flip side of having fallen madly in love with a man born the year I finished college. In the early days of our courtship, in Cairo, I was so caught up in the post-divorce, risk-laden thrill of stealing illicit kisses on poorly lit street corners — public displays of affection can land you in jail in Egypt — that I scarcely noticed the age difference.

Love may be blind, but lust is both blind and idiotic.

[Sign up for Love Letter, our weekly email about Modern Love, weddings and relationships.]

As a mother, I had often felt the need to choose between the demands of parenthood and my sexual desires. That duality became even more stark when I met my second husband, who helped me rediscover the sensuality lying dormant during the 20 years I was married to the father of my children.

When I started letting him spend the night in the Cairo villa I shared with my sons, I was choosing the erotic version of myself over the maternal version. The boys must have thought I had been body snatched.

They would have been right. Sexual empowerment reanimated me. When my new lover and I met, he was exactly the same age I had been when I first got married. Choosing him felt like both a do-over and an escape from the invisibility of midlife. Not only did he see me as desirable, but our being together suddenly made me a source of envy. Women his age who admired his good looks would try to figure out our relationship. It was exactly the kind of validation I craved after a marriage in which the erotic flame had been doused long before we ended it.

I liked that our May-September romance was unconventional. Bucking the norms I had hewed to out of a sense of duty felt as validating as it did challenging.

My husband had to confront the alienation of his Tunisian family, who refused to acknowledge my existence, even after our wedding. Yes, we had fallen deeply in love, but choosing to marry was also an act of rebellion for each of us, a rejection of what society and friends and family expected. It felt like setting out into uncharted territory. It was exhilarating.

But marriage was also a necessity for our relationship’s survival. When I moved to Paris with my sons, my lover’s Tunisian passport made it nearly impossible for him to spend time with me here. We fixed our problem by flying to California and tying the knot.

Alas, thrill-seeking and passion can only take a marriage so far and, now that we were living as a family, reality had set in. Gone was the Middle Eastern backdrop, the inexpensive four-bedroom house with the verdant garden. The City of Lights is as romantic as ever, but Paris, for me, represented a return to the responsibilities of adult life with its endless loads of laundry and the drudgery of putting dinner on the table every night.

Since my husband’s arrival, I had been bumping up against the uncomfortable understanding that the way I wanted to live as a woman in my 50s was starkly different from how he thought life in his late 20s should look. My middle-aged friends bored him. My insistence on living in a clean and orderly house was, to him, senseless. And the hours he lost to Facebook, to watching European football, seemed pointless to me.

We sought out couples’ therapy, twice, but were no more able to communicate past our language and cultural barriers than we had been before. We still didn’t have the tools to address the imbalance of power that resulted from his being dependent on me for financial and visa support. He resented being reliant on me and, truthfully, I resented it too. I wanted an equal partner, someone I could depend on, someone who would share the load.

As wonderful a diversion as our love had been, I simply could not turn back the clock and be a suitable spouse to someone as young as my husband. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t matured over the previous 22 years. I couldn’t unlearn what experience had taught me, nor did I want to. I love being 54. Falling in love with a younger man had rejuvenated me. I looked and felt better than ever. But surface is no substitute for depth.

As the days wore on, my husband’s self-isolation grew to feel less benign. Before long, we were not engaging in even monosyllabic exchanges. His main form of communication became the missives he left on strategically placed Post-it notes. I might wake up in the morning to find “I scrubbed this” on a pot that wasn’t getting clean or return from my run and discover “please refill after use” on the Brita pitcher.

I could hear the thump, thump of the weights he lifted for hours, but I hardly ever saw him. I never knew when he might burst out of the guest room to cook himself a meal or zip out to the grocery store.

Mostly, I wanted to protect my boys from seeing my pain. I felt guilty enough for letting them watch me fall to pieces when my marriage to their father collapsed, and here I was, forcing them into front-row seats to witness the failure of yet another relationship.

One day, when sifting through the cupboard and trying to find something he could eat that hadn’t been claimed by a Post-it with my husband’s initials, my 19-year-old turned to me in exasperation. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said.

I broke through the couch barricade to the guest room and told my husband we needed to talk. We were over, I said. We couldn’t go on like this. We were all suffering too much. And then, with nothing to lose, we allowed ourselves to say all the things we hadn’t been able to.

He told me how overwhelming the previous few years had been. Between estrangement from his family, fruitless job hunting, living in the land of his country’s former colonizer, the pressures of sharing a house with me and my teenagers, and never speaking his native Tunisian, he hadn’t been able to let his guard down for a minute. He loved me, but he had never wanted to be a stepfather.

For him, “le confinement” had allowed him to catch his breath. He hadn’t been stewing in anger in the spare room, as I had thought. Solitude had been a respite.

I heard his anguish. I felt his suffering. I managed to move past my anger and disappointment at my feelings of failure and having been failed. For a beautiful moment, we each saw the other. The love that we shared in that room briefly eclipsed the pain we had inflicted on one another. We vowed to do better.

I think, even then, we knew the futility of our promises. Confinement had both locked us down and birthed an unavoidable truth: We loved each other, but love wasn’t enough.

By choosing a man nearly half my age, I had not chosen the sexually empowered iteration of myself, but rather the mother. As I watched him unburden himself, I saw a beautiful man who was too young, too inexperienced to be my partner. If I wanted to fully embody the woman I had become, I had to release both him and the 25-year-old self I was trying to reinhabit.

When confinement finally lifted, and we were once again allowed to move freely through the city, my husband signed the lease on a sun-filled studio astride the Canal Saint Martin, where young hipsters hang out drinking craft beers.

Grabbing a black suitcase crammed full of clothes, he walked out of his self-imposed exile and into his new life. As I watched him leave, I cried. Of course I cried. But with confinement over, I could already feel the first flutters of my own rebirth.

Monique El-Faizy, who lives in Paris, is the co-author of “All the President’s Women.”

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.

Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”