Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Of all of the concerns that I hear about during a trial or marital separation, communication is one of the most common.  Feelings are right up there too, but this article is going to focus on communication – specifically, telephone calls.

Many times, the spouse who never wanted to separate is very unhappy with the frequency of the calls.  And sometimes, because of this, they will take matters into their own hands and be the one to do all of the calling. Unfortunately, the outcome isn’t always what they had hoped.  Because their husband either doesn’t always pick up or he seems very annoyed or distracted during the call.

Sometimes, the strategy is to let the husband be the one who makes the calls.  But when you do this, you are stuck accepting his schedule, which can be sporadic and light.  And then you can start to wonder about what it all means – this lack of calling regularly.  And your mind may start to strategize as to how you might change this.

A common question is one like this: “we have been separated for about three weeks.  The only time my husband called every day was during the first three days of our separation, mostly to tell me that he made it to his destination OK and that he was getting settled in.  After that, though, there was very little.  He doesn’t call every day.  He may go days without calling and then for a while, he’ll go every day.  And so I will take the initiative and call him, but that’s not the answer either because he either doesn’t answer or gives me one syllable answers when I try to talk to him. I don’t understand why he would call one day and not the next?  I can’t imagine that he would forget.  And I can’t imagine that he would be so busy that he can’t fit in a very short phone call just to keep me from wondering and worrying.  Why can’t he do this?  Why does he call one day and then there’s only silent the next?”

I can only speculate, as I don’t know your husband. However, from the correspondence that I get and from my own experiences, it seems like this is a common practice.  And I admit that it’s the kind of behavior that I saw from my own husband.  My guess is that they are trying to see how it is going to feel to have limited communication.  And they are trying to get that space and distance that so many of them have asked for.  They may call one day because they miss you or are genuinely curious and they may not call the next day because they’re just trying to get a handle on their feelings.

I understand firsthand how hard this is and how difficult it is to just accept it.  But every time I tried to push my husband into doing more of what I wanted him to do during my own separation, I mostly regretted it because it got me more of the behavior that I was trying to stop in the first place.

I know that this doesn’t sound reassuring, but I think that there are things that you can try to help this situation.  I know that it’s tempting that, when he calls less, then you want to call more. In my experience, that’s risky because very often, he will retreat even more so that when the calls do occur, they don’t go very well.  That makes him dread the calls so that while you are getting the call that you insisted on, nothing productive is happening.

I’ve come to believe that it’s important that the calls go as good as they possibly can.  Even if this means that there are less of them at first. Sure, you can’t expect every phone call to be wonderful, but if you can have a pleasant and productive conversation, then he will look forward to the next one, which in turn will usually make him call more.

The other option is to try to establish a more settled routine.  You can say something like: “I know that I am not supposed to, but I worry when I don’t hear from you.  Is there anyway that we can check in more regularly?  If you don’t feel like talking, maybe you can send a text? It feels so odd not to touch base every day.  Do you think we can work out a compromise of some kind?”

His answer should give you more information about how open or defensive he is about this.  When this happened to me, I would text my husband and ask if he was free to talk.  That way, I didn’t have to endure listening to his frustration when he got a phone call from me that he didn’t want at the time.  Eventually, I vowed to just let him call me for a while because I found that my chasing him via text or calls just wasn’t doing anything for me.  This did seem to help some.  What helped the most in our situation was the face to face meetings.  They didn’t happen as often as I liked.  But like the phone calls, I tried to make them count so that I could be sure that there would always be a next time.  Of course, I made many mistakes, but I eventually found the things that helped the most and the things that caused the most damage.  After that, I made careful choices. There’s more on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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