Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: When you’re going through the trial separation that you never wanted, you can intuitively know that every interaction that you have with your spouse during this time period can be quite important. So you can put a lot of pressure on yourself to have the perfect conversations and interactions. Unfortunately, things can be quite awkward between you and your spouse during this difficult time. And the added pressure doesn’t help.

One place where this can be particularly evident is in conversations. There obviously needs to be an easy rapport between you. After all, if you are going to reconcile, you’ll need to communicate effectively. But the words can be difficult and the conversations can be tense. Sometimes, you almost feel as if you have to resort to small talk with your own spouse and you wonder why in the world it should be this difficult when you’re known this person for so long and have shared your life with them.

A wife might say: “I know that I need to spark some very good conversations with my separated husband. It feels as if our marriage is on very thin ice. Unfortunately, I do not get to talk to him nearly as much as I’d like. He sort of brushes me off sometimes when I call him, so we basically talk about once per week – mostly about the kids. I understand why it’s very important that we talk about the kids and I’m not complaining about this. But when I try to steer the conversation to something else – like our marriage – things get uncomfortable or awkward. We struggle with the conversation or there is silence. My husband and I used to be able to talk about anything. We used to effortlessly talk for a long time. Now it seems like everything is a struggle. The only conversation that goes well is when we talk about the kids. Last night, I resorted to talking about politics and that was a disaster. I am not sure how to spark a good conversation and that is just so ironic because this man is my husband and I should be able to talk to him.”

Why Forcing It Is Not Always The Best Option: I totally understand your concern. I had the same issues during my own separation. It seemed that the harder I tried, the worse things got. It got so that I was afraid to even open my mouth. But I knew that I had to, because obviously, if you want to reconcile, you have to talk. But here is something that I learned the hard way. You don’t always need to talk about your marriage – especially at first. In fact, from my own experience, I came to the opinion that it was better NOT to talk about the difficult marital issues until our relationship could withstand it. Because it seemed to me that attempting to do so was only making things worse.

I got the best results when I was able to keep the conversation very light hearted and even funny. So we talked about mutual friends, uplifting stories or conversations we’d heard, our parents, our mutual friends, our childhoods, my new hobbies (that I’d picked up during the separation,) some funny stories about living alone, books we’d read, movies we’d seen, etc. If this sounds like small talk, well, in a way, it was. But since you’ve having light-hearted small talk with someone who you already know very well, there should be a bit of intimacy within it.

The reason that keeping things light worked well is because it allowed my husband and I to gradually become more comfortable so that eventually, we were talking much more often. Sure, in time we did need to broach those hard topics like our problems, what to do about our marriage, etc. But it was much better to save that until we were on firm ground again and until is was clear that we could withstand it.

Keeping It Simple: So my suggestion as to how to spark a conversation is to stick to what is going to be easy to talk about. And sometimes, that is the kids. That’s perfectly fine. Of course, you don’t want to be limited to just the kids. There are usually enough current events to chat about. But you want to keep it light and you want to keep it flowing. You may have to start out slow and work your way up. It’s even okay to limit the time so that you are both left wanting more. Once the conversations flow more easily, you’ll find yourself talking more frequently and for longer periods of time.

The whole idea is to start slowly and with easy topics. From there, you build up to more talking. Once you are very comfortable and have an ease with one another, you can then ask yourself if you are ready to discuss the more difficult or more important topics. In my experience, there is no reason to rush this. If there is any doubt, it is better to wait. You want to create a sense of intimacy, and not distance, through talking. If the hard or awkward conversations create distance, then put them off for now and work on the intimacy instead.

As I alluded to, I learned this the hard way.  My insistence in pushing my husband almost lead to a divorce.  So I backed up and I kept things very easy, simple, and gradual.  I rejoiced over very small victories.   But by not pushing, I was able to save my marriage, which was the goal all along. You can read more on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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