Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Sometimes, when your spouse is telling you that he wants a separation, you feel as if you are getting conflicting information. For example, he will often insist that he still loves you while wanting to be away from you for a little while. And it can be very difficult to reconcile these two facts.

A wife might say: “I am not going to call my husband a liar, but I can’t fathom how he might be telling me the truth. A couple of weeks ago, he told me that he was going to move out for a while. He said that he needed some time to think about things and that he can’t do that while we live together. We’ve had a bit of a rocky road lately, but I did not think that it was anything this major. I started crying when he told me this. He asked why I was crying and I said because he didn’t love me anymore. His response was: ‘who said I didn’t love you? I never said that.’ I answered that men who love their wives do not seek a separation. He told me that this wasn’t true. He said that he still loves me, but wants some time away from me. I don’t understand this. If he still loved me, why would he want a separation?”

Various Reasons That Loving Spouses Separate: If you asked this question to a roomful of people, you’d likely get a wide variety of answers. Some people will tell you that he is just saying that he still loves you to soften the blow. They’ll tell you that this separation business is all meant to ease you into a divorce.

I do not always believe this. Sure, there are probably some people who do use this strategy. But in my own experience and from the correspondence that I get, there are plenty of couples who still love one another but who separate for a while to try to let things cool down or to sort things out. I do believe that my husband still loved me while we were separated. I know that I still loved him.

I believe that you can love someone, but dislike the conflict that you have with them and think that a break might help. I’ve had people tell me that they love their spouse more than anything in the world but currently can not live with them because things are just too tense.

Some people are fully aware that they still love their spouse, but they think that the marriage isn’t working anymore so they want to test out living alone. Or they separate as a sort of experiment to see how much they will miss their spouse.

Other times, they want to see a change in behavior or circumstances, so they initiate the separation to get their spouse’s attention, even though they are fully aware that the love is still there.

People can love their spouses but be unhappy in their marriages. People can love their spouses and still want to initiate change. And people can feel the love, but still be confused about their overall feelings.

Focuses On The Right Things To Get The Right Result: If he is telling you that he still loves you, then you have to ask yourself what reason would he have to lie? I think rather than worrying about something that you can’t change, you’re perhaps better off looking at what is causing that “rocky road” in your marriage you spoke of before.

Addressing and taking away the conflict is one effective way of addressing the separation. Reestablishing your bond, your intimacy, and your communication are additional ways. But I don’t think there is any upside with arguing with him as to whether or not he truly loves you. Or with debating why he would want the separation.

Debating this when you’re already living apart is like stepping backward. The most efficient thing to do might be to switch gears and now address what it is going to take to get him home. For most people, that is the addressing of the conflict and reestablishing the bond so that he realizes that he is going to be happier at home than somewhere else.

But back to the original question, I firmly believe that separated couples can and do still love another. It’s not always the love that is at issue. Frankly, I firmly believe that my mother still loves my father and yet, they have been divorced for twenty years. They never learned to live together without fighting all of the time. And eventually, neither of them wanted to live like that anymore. So they moved onto other people and ended up divorced to their second spouses.  Because they never took the time to learn how to communicate with their partner – no matter who that partner turned out to be.

I think it’s really smart to focus on the right issue. If he’s telling you it’s not the lack of love, then focus on what it really is. You would know the core issue better than I would. But I suspect that if you focus on what is truly causing his concern, you will get a better result.

There were times when I doubted my husband’s love during our separation.  He certainly didn’t act very loving during that time.  But after our reconciliation, he admitted that he had never stopped.  There’s more on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

Filed under: Uncategorized by admin