Leslie Cane Articles

If you are separated but hoping to reconcile, you may frequently attempt to gauge how your separated husband feels. After all, it will be difficult to reconcile unless you are both willing. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to know how your husband feels because he is evasive. Other times, he bluntly shares his feelings, but they aren’t positive ones.

A wife might say, “I hesitated to ask my separated husband how he was feeling. I was afraid of what he might say. However, I thought we had a wonderful evening together, so I felt brave enough to say so. I then asked my husband if he felt the same way. His response shocked and saddened me. He said ‘I have enjoyed our time together. However, as far as romantic feelings go, I’m just not feeling it.’ He stressed that he did not want to hurt me, but admitted that he needed to be honest. I felt it so strongly when we were together. Am I really so unintuitive that he was pulling back and I didn’t notice? Is he trying to warn me that we have no future? I asked if this meant that he no longer wants to see me, and he said it did not. For whatever reason, he felt the need to share his lack of feelings with me. I am pretty devastated. As much as I enjoy and want to spend time with him, I feel like doing so is almost a waste of time. If he has no feelings for me, what are we still doing married?”

You would have to ask your husband this question, but I’d suspect that you are still married because things (and feelings) change. And ending your marriage is a major decision. Your husband is probably hoping that in time, the feelings will return. And in my experience, they can. They did in my case. My husband definitely wasn’t feeling it for me, either. Looking back, I believe at least part of this was because I applied tons of pressure. This made the situation more tense than it should have been. Below, I will list some of the steps I took to turn things around so that eventually, my husband was feeling it again. I think you have to focus on the fact that your husband is still open to seeing you, which is important.

I Gave It Time: I don’t want to imply that my giving it time was a brilliant decision on my part. It wasn’t. The truth is, I had no other choice. My husband made it clear that he wasn’t going to rush this process. When I tried to force him to, he resisted and began to avoid me. If I was to continue to have access to him, I was going to need to accept a slower pace. I honestly believe that if I had forced my husband to make a decision about our separation, he would have chosen divorce. But I knew my best bet was to wait until things improved, which thankfully, they did.

I Stopped Trying To Fix Our Marriage (and My Husband’s Feelings) Over Night: I understand that it’s exhausting and lonely to be separated. Of course, you want it to end yesterday. I understand the difficulty of being patient in this impossible situation. But what choice do you really have when every time you push, you make things worse? One of my biggest mistakes was wanting to “fix” everything immediately. I was sure that if I tried really hard, I could find the answers to all our marital problems. I just knew that if my husband spent more time with me, his feelings would return. The problem was that all of this “fixing” felt overwhelming to my husband.

Putting all of our problems on the table at one time made our issues feel insurmountable. This magnified them so that they took on an ominous feel. I realized that I would have to take a gradual approach for most things. I had to accept that our relationship was fragile and I would have to build it up again before I tried to fix it.

I Focused On Friendship: This is going to sound crazy, but I figured that if I was going to get any intimacy at all from my husband, it was going to feel more like a friendship than a romance, at least at first. That was all he could offer me at the time. Of course, this felt weird and discouraging. But it was better than not getting any contact at all.

Looking back, that light-hearted, no-expectations contact laid the foundation for what would come later. I questioned if I was using the right strategy at the time, but I’m not sure that I could have done it any other way.

I Changed Myself: If you can accept that you can only control and then change yourself, that realization will change your entire approach for the better. My husband did not respond well to pressure or demands that he make changes. Any changes that he made were extremely gradual, as needed realizations finally came into focus. So if I needed fast, dramatic changes, I was only going to get them from myself.

For example, if I found myself complaining that my husband never listened to me, then I started listening intently to both myself and to him. In short, I started to give myself what I wanted. I hoped that he would eventually follow my lead. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t, but I controlled what I could.

Sometimes, the changes that you make to yourself are more effective (and immediate) than changes that you ask him (or your marriage) to make. It also shows your husband that real change is actually possible once you take action. You are showing not telling, which is so much more effective.

I know it hurts when the person you love more than anyone else is telling you that he’s not feeling it right now. But that doesn’t mean that he will never feel it again. As circumstances change and improve, so do the feelings. Believing in this is a leap of faith, but it is often the only choice you have. It was my only choice, too.  But I am still married today.  You can read the story of how I turned it around with both dumb luck and determination here: http://isavedmymarriage.com

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