If you are separated and living apart (but still committed to your marriage), it is very understandable when you are feeling extremely impatient. When I was separated, there were times when every day without my husband felt like torture. In fact, I used to obsess and brood over this feeling. So of course, when things start to look up between you and your husband, it’s natural to start fantasizing about your coming home. Sometimes you think about this so much that you ask him flatly if he will come home. Unfortunately, sometimes you don’t get the reaction you expected. There are times when he doesn’t say yes and doesn’t say no. It simply tells you that it is not sure. This leaves you wondering where that might leave you in the future. Should you put your hopes aside or could it just be temporary?
Someone might say, “For almost six months, my husband acted like he could barely bear to talk to me. Never mind the fact that he had moved to avoid me and not fight me. He didn’t even bother to check on me. It hurt. I always wondered what he was doing or how he was doing, but it got to the point where I couldn’t just call him and ask him about this, because he wouldn’t answer my calls. Excited when he started calling me and then he wasn’t filtering his calls anymore. Better yet, That led him to wonder if we could get together a couple of times a week. This is all more than I ever dared hope. So when we started spending time together, things started awkwardly. But eventually, we started to clicked and things got better pretty quickly. After that, we really started connecting again. This has been such a precious time for me because it’s almost like when we first dated. e a quick reconciliation. I wanted to relive our lives and forget all the pain with the separation. But a long time passed and my husband didn’t say anything about it. Fortunately, we continued to see each other and talk, but he did not mention homecoming or reconciliation. It killed me having a good time together and then coming home alone. So one day I couldn’t take it anymore and I blurted out ‘when are you coming home?’ My husband looked at me like he was surprised by my outburst, and then he sighed and said he wasn’t sure if he was ready for it yet. I was quite surprised because he seemed happy and content while we were spending time together. Why would he be perfectly willing to be loving and interact with me, but then not sure if he wants to live again? Does this mean that there is no hope of reconciliation? “
No, I definitely wouldn’t say that at all. My husband and I moved very gradually as things began to fall into place between us again. As much as I wanted him to move home, I was very afraid that our reconciliation efforts would fail. I knew that if we tried to reconcile and then things fell apart, it would be very difficult (if not impossible) for me to convince my husband to try another reconciliation. Basically, he knew he only had one chance to make this work. And she knew how lonely and miserable it was to live alone. But even so, he wanted to wait until he could be relatively sure that things would really work out.
Your husband might be having a similar thought process right now. You could be careful not to rush things so the spell doesn’t break, as things seem to be going very well at the moment.
Trust me, I know how difficult it can be to remain patient when what you want more than anything in the world is not to spend one more night alone. But when I had these thoughts, I would tell myself that I would rather continue with things as they were (on good terms between us) than risk my progress by rushing. I just wasn’t willing to go back to the time period where my husband avoided me, didn’t return my calls, and gave me very limited access to him. I decided I’d rather wait than go back to that.
Instead, I just tried to skew things so that my husband would spend more and more time at our house. I would offer to make dinner for him. I’d ask him to fix things. Finally the night passed. So this became him spending the weekends. He got to where he was staying for several days in a row. Then he moved back in, but there was nothing really official about it. This took a lot of pressure off the situation. If we had a bad night together, he would just go home, let things cool down, and then we’d pick up again. We were able to assess our “hot spots” and places where we still had work to do before attempting a full reconciliation. This gradual approach meant there was much less risk and it pointed out where we could still make improvements before my husband returned full time.