Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: If you have any warning about at all about your separation, you often tell yourself that you are not going to be one of “those wives” during your separation. And by those wives I mean the wives who call their husband on a daily, if not hourly, basis. The wives who attempt to make their husbands feel guilty about wanting the separation. The wives who make it obvious how desperate they are.

To be fair, none of us want to be these wives. We truly don’t. We tell ourselves that we will take it one day at a time and that we will handle it. But, when the separation actually happens to us, we may find that we are not able to handle it in that the capable way that we originally envisioned.  The process is more lonely than we thought. It is harder than we thought. And handling an entire household by ourselves is often more difficult than we ever imagined.

To demonstrate, I might hear from a wife who says: “I honestly hate feeling so needy because of my separation. Despite how hard of a time I am going through, I still have my pride and my pride hates that I feel as vulnerable as I do. Since my husband has been gone, it is as if our entire family life has imploded. My son is having issues at school. Our roof is leaking. My husband’s mother calls me on a daily basis digging for information and I don’t have any idea what to tell her from one day to the next. My husband used to drive my kids to school while I would pick them up in the afternoons. He no longer does that since he lives across town. My kids’ school is forty minutes away.  This means that I spend three hours carpooling every day. Then I have to come home, make dinner, help with homework and get my kids to bed. I then have to answer their questions about what is going on with their father. I then fall into bed and cry myself to sleep. I am not sure how much more of this I will be able to take. I realize now that in some respects, I took the help that my husband gave me for granted. I now realize how much I need him and I want to tell him this but I am afraid that if I do, I will just sound desperate. And I know that he will not see this as attractive. How do I tell him I need him without sounding pathetic and needy?”

I get a lot of variations on this question. And the answer is tricky. Because as much as I want to reassure you and make you feel better, I can’t really tell you that your words are not going to sound needy to your husband because in fact they might. Husbands who want space will often be extra sensitive if they perceive that their wife is making demands of them or trying to make them feel guilty. (My own husband was one of these husbands.) So, it is entirely possible that if you were to just unload and tell him some variation of the above, he may in fact feel that you are being needy or demanding.

Does this mean that you have to just give up and keep your feelings bottled up inside? Not necessarily. But you may have to pick a time when you can share at least some of what you are feeling without it being too heavy.

At some point, your husband may share some of what he is feeling or experiencing during the separation. It’s normal for people to express how things can feel strange or foreign at first. When this happens, you may just want to say something like: “I know exactly what you mean. Some aspects of my life feel totally different right now. And I have definitely realized some things that I didn’t before. For example, I realize that I didn’t completely appreciate how much you helped me with the kids. It’s been a bit of a struggle picking up all of the slack because I was used to you helping me so much. I’m also not always sure how to answer your mother’s daily questions. Anyway, I didn’t want to pass us the opportunity now to acknowledge what a good father you are and how active you are in our children’s lives.  And I want to stress how much I value your help.”

Do you see what I did? I communicated a feeling of being a little overwhelmed with a compliment. This is one way to get him to listen to you. Since you’ve complimented him, he’s invested in hearing you out. And he is likely to be more sympathetic to you because of your approach.

Some wives may call this a cop out and say that you are sugar coating things. I suppose that you could say that, if you wanted. But you have to ask yourself what is more important right now. Saying exactly what you mean in a harsh way so that you risk alienating your husband and you risk that the separation lingers on? Or, putting things in a careful and deliberate way so that he has a better chance of listening to you, sympathizing with you, and possibly feeling closer to you?

I would argue that whatever gets you closer to be able to share your true feelings while still gettting your husband closer to coming home has to be the best plan. It’s unfortunate that I only understood this late into my marital separation.  If I am being honest I was one of those desperate and transparent wives for way too long. Until I finally woke up.  And then everything changed. If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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