Sometimes I hear of estranged wives who want nothing more than for their husband to come home. I understand this thought because it is what I felt when they separated me. I used to wonder how many more days or weeks I could tolerate. I kept telling myself that I could probably only tolerate a few more days. But guess that? Unfortunately, it wasn’t my choice how much I could take. I had to put up with many more days, many more days than I ever anticipated. But I actually survived, and eventually my marriage did too.
However, during my separation, I always wondered what I could do to get my husband back home. And I know I’m not alone. I hear wives say things like, “My husband has been living apart from me for almost two months now. He has been unhappy with our marriage and wanted time to see how he would feel living alone. Honestly, we haven’t seen a single marriage.” as much as I would like. He always puts me off. We talk because I call him. Last night, I asked him when he was coming home. He replied that he did not know. I asked him no. Does he want to come home? His response was ‘not now’. I don’t necessarily understand this. We haven’t been fighting as much as before, so I don’t understand why he needs to stay away.”
I understand how you feel. During my own separation, I did not understand why my husband did not want to run home, because being apart seemed so bad to me. But clearly, he didn’t share my feelings. For a long time, I did not understand why. After we made up and had some honest talks, I began to discover why men sometimes take a long time to come home. I will share these observations below.
It could be that it hasn’t changed enough. (At least for him). Here is an important thing that I did not understand in the initial stages of my own separation. My husband was actively seeking real and ongoing change before he would even allow himself to be open to a reconciliation. I just assumed that once things calmed down, he would get tired of living alone and we would fall back into our marriage. Well, this was not going to be considered good enough for my husband. He wanted a much better marriage. And to believe that this could be a reality, I wanted to see the concrete and continuous changes that were going to make this possible. He was watching and waiting for that. And, until he saw it, he was perfectly willing to go through with the separation.
He is waiting to see if the changes are real: Here’s another thing I didn’t understand. Once I realized that my husband expected changes, I started working on those things, and so did he. However, in my anxious mind, I hoped that when he saw me making an effort, this would be enough. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. My husband only wanted to reconcile once. So he wanted to wait until he could be absolutely sure that the changes made were real and lasting so that we could actually make those changes stick. At first, he hated this. I thought that he was needlessly delaying our reconciliation or that he didn’t love me enough to dive in.
However, now that enough time has passed and the pain from this is not so recent, I realize that I was right. She moved back in very gradually. At first, she only stayed for a night now and then. Then he spent the weekends. This allowed us to gradually make adjustments as issues arose. Of course, I was impatient, but, at the same time, I was very afraid that my husband would become distant and cold towards me again if something went wrong. So he didn’t want to curse anything. I had to work very hard to get my husband to be receptive to me again, so if I had to wait a little longer to make sure I didn’t have to go through a separation again, or even worse, a divorce, then I was ready. do it (although not always patiently).
The good news with this is that some of it is in your control. You can try to make the changes he’s looking for (either alone or with your own help and/or a counselor) and you can watch and listen carefully for clues when he’s on the right track. I learned to be very good at watching and listening. When something I changed didn’t get a good response, I did less of it. When a change I made had a good response, I did more of that and introduced more behaviors like what had already been successful.
