Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: It’s human nature to want the other person in any romantic relationship to feel the same romantic feelings that you do. No one wants to be the only one who is feeling the love. But this is never true more than when you are trying to reconcile with a separated spouse. You can want the reconciliation enough for both of you, but that still doesn’t keep you from wanting reassurance that your spouse really WANTS to come back and is just as emotionally invested as you are. Some spouses will offer you verbal reassurance that they are happy about (or invested in) the reconciliation, but that doesn’t stop you from looking for clues for true confirmation of the same.  And what you are typically looking for are very concrete signs of an emotional investment – but you sometimes wonder if you will notice them when you see them.

For instance, a wife might say: “after nearly four months of working on my husband during our separation, he finally agreed to try coming back home on a trial basis. I worked very hard to get him to trust that things would actually work between us. I know that I should be thrilled that he’s willing to try coming home, but I find myself having some worries and doubts. The biggest thing that bothers me is that he doesn’t seem as excited about this as I am. Yes, he has agreed to it. But I’ve planned all sorts of special things for us. I’ve announced it to all of my friends. He hasn’t done anything special. In fact, he hasn’t canceled any of the plans that he made while we were separated. This makes me worry that he really doesn’t care if our marriage is going to make it or not. It makes me concerned that he’s not nearly as emotionally invested as I am. How do I determine the level of his emotional investment? And what happens if I find out that he doesn’t have it?”

First Things First.  Consider Perspective: I understand why you are so very interested in his emotional investment. I felt exactly the same way. But I have to tell you that my constantly trying to second guess my husband actually made things worse for me. My husband got defensive and didn’t like my trying to analyze him so closely. Looking back at things with hindsight, I would have been better off going with the flow and just being very grateful that he was willing to consider coming home. Because my insecurity that he was not “into” or as “emotionally invested” in the reconciliation as I was could have become a self fulfilling prophecy as I put more pressure than was needed onto my marriage. Instead of allowing our reconciliation to be a sweet time of rediscovery, I put it under the microscope, added more worry to an already-fragile situation, and just put stress where we didn’t need anymore.

Here is what I came to realize after way too long: Honestly, keeping track of who felt what (and when) didn’t matter that much.  How we started didn’t really matter, either. It just mattered where we ended up. What do I mean by this? Well, about the same time that my husband and I tried to reconcile, some mutual friends of ours were in the same boat and were trying to reconcile their own marriage. The husband was trying to woo the wife back and they were in that sickening honeymoon phase.  I was so very envious because there were times when my husband didn’t seem all that excited. Years later, they are divorced and we are still together.

Perhaps my husband had his doubts to start with. But what mattered is that he was willing to try. And a little at a time, our progress convinced both of us to keep going until we were both fully invested. It didn’t happen right away. And I know there were times when I was more invested than he was. This knowledge hurt me and frightened me, but that certainly didn’t mean that I was going to give up or not accept my husband back. I was going to take him back in any way that I could get him, but I wasn’t going to accept less than the marriage that we both deserved when we were through with the process. (But I accepted that the process might take a while and it did.)

Signs That You May Want To Look For Eventually: As far as what signs to look for, I think that you have the most important sign right in front of you – he is telling you that he is willing. He is saying that he’s willing to come home and give it a try. Would you prefer his unbridled enthusiasm and loving displays? Sure, we all would. But we don’t always get this initially. However, if he truly didn’t think that there was any chance for your marriage or if he was sure that you were wasting your time, he likely would not have agreed to try to come home.

Sure, eventually you want to see him making future plans, showing you affection, listening and being attentive, and making an effort to sustain positive changes. However, you don’t always get this right away or all at once. Rather, it is often a gradual process that happens once progress begins to be undeniable. And many people walk into the process with doubts and with less emotional investment than their partner. But that doesn’t need to dictate your outcome. He’s there. He’s willing to try. What choice do you have but to take him up on it and to take advantage of the opportunity and build upon it?

At the end of the day, I decided that I was going to seize the opportunity to save my marriage even if my husband wasn’t jumping up and down and doing back flips.  And we made it.  He’s much more enthusiastic today so it was all worth it.  The rest of the story is on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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