Hi all,

I've posted here before about my depressed husband who moved out 4 months ago. I am dealing with this quite well, but just want to check what people think is the best way to get oneself 'healed' and move on, while at the same time staying open to possibilities of reconciliation.

Here's a brief summary of the situation:

My husband of over 12 years and I spent the best part of a year fighting before we separated. The main issues, which I now see more clearly than before (of course, with the excellent vision of hind-sight), were his needing to 'find himself' at long long last, deal with some issues, and my stopping being the understanding and patient one in the relationship andp putting myself second. This is a dynamic that developed over years and we were both dealing with things in an unhealthy way; meaning simply that neither of us was very good at expressing our own needs or being very independent of the other. I think that for me, resentments developed, understandably, but that I had also become used to using his issues as a handy way to avoid my own.

The separation was very hard for me, at first. He had nothing to say except that we couldn't go on as we were and he knew nothing about what he wanted in the future, but he did know that he loved me. To my way of thinking, this was a betrayal and a refusal to deal with things. I had been jealous and unfair and very combative for many months, and the more I pushed him the firmer he became in his conviction that there was no way forward in the relationship.

The space of being separated has done us both good. I have remembered what a strong, fun, and self-sufficient person I am while also learning to rely on friends for more support. I really feel I've grown and am enjoying my life now in ways I hadn't for years. He has finally decided to get counselling, after years of talking about it, and is making progress in his own way.

What I find confusing, still, is where we are going with this. He did say very recently, for the first time, that he could imagine us talking to someone together about us, ie marriage counselling. I agree that he has to 'sort' himself out a little more first, to see the wood for the trees, so to speak.

Here is the part I am hoping for help with: I find that my way of dealing with this whole thing has been to look to myself, to make myself stronger and more easy with being vulnerable too. I try to stay positive and keep any nostalgic thoughts at bay. I try to not think 'at this stage in my life' (I am in my late '30s) I should be doing this or that or have this or that kind of a reciprocal relationship. I try to expect nothing in particular from him, and be gracious and more or less honest towards and about what he is able to give.

We are in daily contact by telephone, but I try not to see him more than once or twice a week as it seems strange to be in touch talking about ordinary things as though we are just two people with common interests and not two people who have shared so much of each other's lives.

I feel as if something I have always cherished is being forced into a past that must not matter to me anymore. I think this is necessary in the short-term, but I wonder about the long-term effect.

I wonder if we are losing each other, if I am losing interest in re-gaining each other because I am beginning to think he is someone who will never be there in the way I would need him to be. Someone who will always be less ready to be really involved because he feels tremendous pressure to put things right and guilt if he cannot. I realise this is his problem more than mine.

I have to work this out in my own head, because talking about it is fraught and difficult and I am reluctant to try and make sense of things because in the not so recent past I tried very hard and was just pushy. He has been very evasive for months, but is now beginning to open up a little.

I guess there is progress but it is very slow and meanwhile life has to go on.
I feel a little as if I have always known what needs to be done and have waited for him to do it, and put myself on hold in the hope that my love and understanding would eventually fix him. And eventually it didn't but made me angry and impatient.

If I have one question it is this: It's clear that couples counselling is the solution. But what if it takes him another 6 months or longer to be ready to even try. What do I do in the meantime? I am looking into counselling for myself. I feel as if I could just make a decision to stop all this and let it go and that would be it. Perhaps I'm wrong and it wouldn't be that simple at all. There is no structure to this separation, no time limit, no plan of action, not even the expressed hope of a certain kind of result. So it makes it confusing and weird for me to 'understand' the mind processes of someone I feel I've always understood extremely well but now I don't feel like or trust my own understanding and want him to say something clearly.

That wasn't a question. Sorry, I'll try again: maybe my question is still far too vague to myself. Maybe it's: how far away can I allow myself to go in my mind, not to speak of my body, before I've gone too far to come back?

Does that make sense?