Facing a martial separation can be quite difficult. But feeling like you have to act or meet certain criteria during that separation can be doubly upsetting. This is especially true if your husband announces that he wants to see if he will ‘miss’ her during the separation. Because this implies that you have to pass some kind of test to maintain your marriage. And this can make you unsure how to achieve that goal.
A wife might say, “My husband has been mumbling about a separation for about six months. I must admit I mostly ignored it because it seemed to repeat itself without doing anything. About four weeks ago, my mother had a health problem and I had to travel. to another state to take care of her. Honestly, I was almost glad to leave because my husband and I had been fighting and I wanted the break. I was only away for five days, but when I got home, my husband admitted that he hadn’t missed me much. he missed and that the end of the fight was a relief. He announced that he suspected I felt the same way. Honestly, I missed him. At least a little bit. But he claims not to have missed me and now says that we should be separated for a period longer time for him to determine whether or not he would miss me during an actual separation. I’m not quite sure how to take this. I hate that we’ve been fighting lately, but I don’t want to lose my marriage. n, but he seems determined to do so. So I asked him to get an apartment very close by so we can see each other all the time. He rejected that and said he ‘wanted the time and space to see if he misses me’. Well, if we have very limited contact, what if that makes our marriage worse? What if that makes him want to end our marriage even sooner? How do I make him miss me if he’s already distancing himself? “
Be careful not to overdo it when you experience paranoia or doubts: I fully understand how you feel because I had very similar thoughts during my own separation. In fact, now I can look back and see that I was very paranoid. I was sure my husband would enjoy his freedom so much that he would hardly have time to miss me. So I made sure to keep in touch. All the time. This was too much. He tried to be polite at first. And I tolerated my “contact base” constantly. But eventually, he began to distance himself. And since I’m sure he seemed a bit annoying to me, he probably didn’t miss me much.
This is a very difficult situation to handle because you already feel paranoid. So when he starts to pull away, your inclination may be to pull him even closer and initiate even MORE contact. That’s exactly what I did, but this made things worse and he backed off even further, going so far as to tell me that I had to let him initiate contact. And you know what? Eventually I felt like I had to do this even though it went against everything I was feeling at the time.
When what you fear most doesn’t really happen: I was sure that when things fell silent between us, my husband would celebrate his freedom and feel even more distant from me. I felt like releasing my grip was really going to be the beginning of the end. But I did it because it was the only hope I had of keeping at least part of the relationship alive.
And then something funny happened. After a few very hard days of complete silence, he did what I never expected him to do. He started to get closer to me. He initiated contact. He began to make the call. Listen, it was so hard not to pick up where I left off again. My relief made it very difficult not to get too excited. But I tried to see it logically because listening to my emotions hadn’t worked. He couldn’t deny that backing up a bit had absolutely worked. So I toned down my enthusiasm and continued to allow him to initiate half the contact.
And finally he missed me and we reconciled. But I’m not sure if this would have happened if he had continued to hold onto me so tightly. I think you may have started a no-contact divorce or separation just to have some peace. I know it’s hard to take a step back and I just hope I miss you. And I don’t advocate no contact for long periods of time. But in my experience, it can help to give things a few days between contact so that he has time and space to wonder what you are doing and how you are doing. Because when that process happens, many times, it is when it begins to miss you.
