Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: When you are separated, your holy grail is your husband coming back home. Of course you are concerned with reconciling and with saving your marriage. But if you are like most separated wives, what you think of when you envision these things is your husband actually walking in the door, setting down his things, and declaring that he is home.

Most women envision that he will come home first before the whole “saving the marriage” process truly begins. This the ideal anyway. Because once he is home, you hope that you will have a captive audience and the whole process will just fall into place. It’s really nice when this happens. But not everyone has everything go according to plan. Sometimes, your husband may he open to saving your marriage (or who at least will be receptive to you,) but who will drag his feet on coming home. Many wives will think that this might mean that their dreams of saving their marriage are over or at least delayed. It doesn’t have to be this way. I lived apart from my husband while I was actually working very hard on my marriage. And eventually, I was successful.

I can understand and sympathize with the wife who says: “I have worked so hard to be patient and upbeat during my separation. There were times when I had to literally force myself to back up and to back off even when it broke my heart to do so. I did this because I felt like I needed to do whatever was necessary to keep the possibility alive that we could save our marriage one day. This was very difficult at times but I always thought of my long term goal. I was thrilled when I started to see some progress. I felt like I’d won the lottery when my separated husband and I went on dates. We started cuddling and being intimate again. Against my better judgment, I started to get my hopes up for a reconciliation. And this didn’t seem that far fetched because my husband started being very attentive to me. We started talking about the future. I honestly thought that it was appropriate to start to feel my husband out about him moving back in. I wasn’t over reaching. He had been talking about it himself. That’s why I was so shocked when my husband said that he wasn’t coming back home. At least not yet. He did immediately stress that he was open to saving our marriage one day. He said that he was encouraged by the way that things are going between us. He said that we both had reason to be hopeful. But he didn’t want to put pressure on us by moving back home too soon. I’m trying hard not to be too discouraged by this. We have gone out together since this conversation. Things seemed a little off between us, but not too bad. I guess I am just wondering if people really do save their marriages after their husband hesitates to come home.”

You probably don’t really need for me to tell you that yes, people do get back together and save their marriages even when their husband doesn’t come home the first time that he is asked. The truth is that reconciliations do fail when husbands come back home too soon. It is not at all uncommon. It’s happens all of the time. People try to force the issue before they have completed all of the work. It could be that your husband is just being careful to ensure that this doesn’t happen to you.

I know how you feel because I was desperate for my husband to come home too. It took a very long time before I started to make progress. In fact, I made many mistakes that severely delayed any signs of hope and I risked my marriage in the process. There were many times when I was tempted to beg my husband to come home, but I was afraid of the answer. So I vowed just to do what I could to work on our marriage while we were living in separate homes.

Slowly, deliberately, I saw progress. Even though I truly wanted to ask him when he might move back, I was always afraid to and I told myself that I would let him be the one to bring it up. His pace was much slower than mine. The wait was excruciating. I often wondered if I was only fooling myself and was seeing only what I wanted to see.

However, this slow pace forced me to really pay attention to what was going on between us and to really work on the small things that still stood in our way. This was very frustrating at the time, but it turned out to be the very best thing. Because that slow pace strengthened us. He did eventually come home, but not before we were both extremely confident that we would make it. And we have. So I’m glad we waited. I  You’re welcome to read more about this process on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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