Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Some of the time, after several weeks or months have passed during a martial or trial separation, one or both parties begin itching for the other to move back in or to come home. That can be the nature of things – even when you vowed that you would fix your marriage or address any problems long before even talking about coming home.

The truth is that once many people get a taste of being or living alone, they decide that it’s lonely and they don’t much like it.  It becomes obvious to them that they’d rather have their spouse home with an imperfect marriage than to wait for the absolutely perfect marriage. But what happens when you have already laid out very specific things that your spouse was required to do in order to come home, but suddenly you find yourself REALLY wanting for him to come home? How do you handle it then?

For example, a wife might say: “I am not going to say that I kicked my husband out, but when he started complaining about our marriage and started with veiled threats about leaving or pursuing a separation, I actually encouraged him to move out for a while. The reason for this is that I almost feel like he was testing me to see if I would beg him to stay without requiring any real changes. The thing is, I believe that the changes are absolutely necessary. My husband has gotten very complacent in our marriage. He takes me for granted. He never compliments me or makes any effort. He does not help out. I have repeatedly told him that he has to do more and that he has to treat me better. I have told him that I want to go to counseling. This has mostly fallen on deaf ears.  Or he acts as if I am a nag. So I pushed for him to move out, thinking that this would teach him a lesson. He did move out. And we have missed each other. And if I am being honest, I want him to come home. But he has not gone to counseling. He has been more sweet to me, but I suspect that this is because he is trying to butter me up because he wants to come home. I want him home, too. But I worry that he hasn’t met the conditions that I set forth. And if I let him come home, then he will never meet those conditions. We discussed this the other day. I basically said: ‘you know that there are changes that you need to make before coming home.’ His response to me was that he was aware of this, but he insisted that he thought that he had made some progress already. Frankly, I doubt this progress and I worry that he’s just saying this to come back home and then we will be right back to where we started. Don’t get me wrong I DO want him home. I want him home very much, but I’m concerned that the changes just won’t happen once I allow this.”

The Risk Of Him Coming Home Before The Work Is Done: Your concerns are valid. It’s not unheard of for couples to attempt to reconcile and then to have one of them return home too early and have the whole thing fail. And it’s probably common sense that each time a spouse comes back home and then leaves, it becomes harder and harder to work it out and reconcile once again. Every time you repeat the process, it gets harder and harder to believe that your marriage might actually work.

Setting The Wheels In Motion Before He Returns Home: I don’t think that you are being unreasonable to ask for real, identifiable and ongoing change. It’s not that difficult to put this into motion BEFORE your spouse comes back. You can actually spell out what needs to happen, continue your reconciliation as it is happening, and then have him move back in once you’re absolutely sure that it has happened.

It would look and sound something like this: You’d say, “You know that I’ve missed you terribly and that I want you to move back home so that we can reconcile. However, the last thing that I want to happen is for our reconciliation to fail. And I’m afraid that this is exactly what is going to happen if we rush things and we don’t make the changes that we need to make. I’d like to set a target date of two months out for your moving in. During those two months, I’d like to book weekly counseling sessions and I’d like to continue on making progress in the way that we are. That way, we’ll both know that we’re actively working toward our goal and we will both have confidence that our marriage is going to work so that you will never have to leave again. I’ll make the arrangements with the counselor.”

Basically, all your husband has to do is show up to counseling and be willing to do what the counselor will lay out for him. (This is the beauty of a counselor. The directives are coming from the counselor – and not from you.) If he is resistant to counseling, you could try some very good self help. But you want to see him be very willing to put forth the effort and to meet you half way. If he doesn’t, you are right to be concerned that you’re going to fall back into old patterns. It takes real work to break a habit – and that is what complacency about your marriage can become – a habit. Hopefully, your husband is going to be more motivated right now because he is very motivated to come home.

I understand where you are coming from because I actually delayed my husband coming home until I was absolutely certain that we would make it.  The separation was so painful that I wanted to be sure that we never repeated it.  I have never regretted the slight delay because we did make it.  You can read more on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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