I found this article at my Mom's house in October's edition of More magazine. It is about two people who reconciled after 3 years of separation. It is kind of long, but you ought to take the time to read it. It found it to be inspirational.
"My husband and I never intended to work together. It just happened. We were both journalists of a certain age—slightly restless and eager for bylines with more staying power than the next day’s newspaper. So when a chance to write a book together came along six months after our wedding, we grabbed it. Better to work as a team, we figured, than to have one partner hunched over a computer for several years while the other felt abandoned, relegated to folding the laundry while the auteur created a masterpiece. The publisher faxed the contract to us in Napa Valley, where we were on vacation. We celebrated with a glass of Schramsberg champagne. By the time the book was published five years later, the fizz was out of our relationship. We had kept our day jobs, his at a newspaper, mine at a newsweekly—which meant that nearly every morning, weekend and holiday were taken up with the Big Project. Our tiny apartment became a home office with a bed so crammed with filing cabinets, bookshelves, computers and papers that our indignant cat regularly urinated around the base of my desk chair to protest our neglect. The book was a critical success. My husband and I were just critical—of each other, of the time and intimacy we had sacrificed, of who had done more and who had done less. What had once been mutually appreciated virtues—his joie de vivre, my Protestant work ethic—were now mutually reviled vices. I yearned for him to be more structured; he wanted me to lighten up. We were like two oxen in a yoke, I confided to a friend, unable to move without the other feeling it. After the publication party and the promotional tour, we vowed never again to work together, and looked forward to making up all those weekends we’d missed. Barely a year later, however, we were back in harness, this time on an even more daunting project. Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but we were certain we had cracked the code. We had both just left our 9 to 5 jobs, and would have more control over our time, we reasoned. Having completed one book, we knew who was best at what and could apportion the load accordingly. We agreed to erect a wall between our work life and our marriage so that the tensions in one didn’t pollute the other. I was so smugly confident this time would be different that when a magazine asked me to write a piece about husband/ wife teams, I profiled three harmoniously working couples and portrayed our own cases as blissfully free of thrown crockery and marital mayhem. Our second book took seven years—a period, I joked to friends, identical to that of indentured servitude in the Old Testament. Shortly after it hit Barnes and Noble, we were separated and contemplating divorce. I stayed in New York, commuting to North Carolina several days a week to teach at Duke University. He moved to Boston to take a job teaching media studies at Harvard—a place freighted with memories for both of us. My husband and I had met at Harvard while he was on a one-year fellowship and I was in a one-year mid-career graduate program. It was like being on a long honeymoon cruise with better-than-average guest speakers and off-ship weekends in romantic New England B&Bs. We were in our thirties, but we acted like giddy teenagers—inseparable, a couple from the instant we met. On the nights we stayed together, we fell asleep with out fingers intertwined and feet touching. The couple next door said they loved hearing us laugh in the morning. We married on a golden autumn day in Vermont. He sang “My Girl” to me at the reception while I danced in a 1920s-style ivory handkerchief-hemmed dress. Family and friends later wrote to say it was the happiest wedding they’d ever attended. Long before we separated, I would return to that moment and wonder that had gone wrong. Whatever happened to that crooning groom, that twirling bride? Would they have been more understanding, more tolerant, more giving, if they had been just mates instead of office mates? In our first book, a biography of a well-known media family, we had described the unusually close parents as “not just wedded, but welded.” It was a phrase that could just as easily have applied to us, before working together reduced us to squabbling over turf, credit, time and the oxygen of self. I was out of town the day my husband left for New York to take up his new life. I returned to find cleaned-out closets, an empty space where his chest of drawers used to be, and a potted peace lily on the dining room table. In the accompanying note, he told me it was the sort of plant that could live indefinitely. The bloom would pass, to be replaced by others. All it needed was a little light and water. The metaphor, he said, was clear. Before he left, we had sent letters to our closest friends and family, announcing our separation, telling them it was amicable, and asking them not to choose between us. This wasn’t the final word about our future, we assured them; it was just a trial. But in our hearts, we feared it was the first step in a grim march to The End. I got my first taste of separated singledom a few days later when a never-married friend, alerted to my new status, invited me to accompany her to Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, a subtitled version of the corny classic in which theatergoers dress up like the characters and belt out the songs in a kind of communal karaoke. Great, I thought, this could be my life from now on: dressing up as schnitzel with noodles and traipsing the city with single women in their forties. Not long afterward, my doctor who was recently divorced, called to offer his sympathy. He then asked me out for dinner. “But you’ve seen me naked!” I cried before turning him down in a huff. The following week I changed physicians. It wasn’t these experiences alone that made me reluctant to remove my wedding ring. I wasn’t just separating from a person; I was separating from our story. Imperfect though our union was, my husband and I had been fellow travelers on the same journey. Now I was confronting a roadblock called divorce. Peering around it and into the distance, all I saw was grit and gravel trailing off into the underbrush. Who were we if not married to each other? Who was I, and where was I going? That Christmas, I phoned my husband moments before boarding a plane to visit my sister. It was the first time in 17 years we’d been apart for the holiday. When I confessed how odd that felt, I heard trembling in his voice. We were both close to tears. But with the start of the New Year I resolved to begin my new life. Dating as it turned out, was both hilarious and sad. How can I ever forget the jazz trombone player who brought me a CD of his music on our first (and only) date, and then insisted that our waitress put it on the restaurant sound system? Or the overweight former chef who showed up with a suitcase full of knives, took over my kitchen, and tried vainly to woo me with a flaming dish of duck in cherry sauce? It was fun—sort of—and it took the sting out of the fact that my husband had recently reconnected with an old college girlfriend. Even though we were seeing other people, we continued to reach out to each other. We spoke on the phone nearly every day, just to “touch base.” When I turned 50, he paid for the party and gave a sweet toast. On September 11, 2001, he was the first person I called. We sent flowers on our anniversary and presents on birthdays. “I hope you don’t become each other’s prisoner’s” a friend told me worriedly. I knew what she meant. A decade earlier, during an Outward Bound expedition in Maine, the one exercise that had paralyzed me involved standing on a rope stretched tight between two poles, high above the ground. Wobbling uncontrollably, I had found it impossible to let go of the overhead knot I was grasping for balance in order to lunge for the next overhead knot, dangling just out of reach. I couldn’t go back, and I couldn’t move forward. I came to think of it as a metaphor for the anxiety I felt leaving the safety of the past for the uncertainty of the future. Was I uncomfortable with change, with risk? Was that what this was really about? At the moment that my husband and I had separated, we were equally stuck. We had gone through so much therapy and marriage counseling that we were practically shrink-wrapped. But we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Working together had made us competitors and enemy combatants—“two bees in a bottle,“ as I told a friend. Yet we never exploded, never shouted, never lashed out. Instead, we maintained a surface calm and suffered in silence. A man who had once seen us give a presentation described us admiringly as “one smooth pair,” and that was precisely the problem. We had so thoroughly bought our own P.R. as the perfect working couple that we found it nearly impossible to be authentic inside the marriage. We were polite and mutually respectful, words more suited to colleagues than to spouses. As painful as the separation was, it gave us the chance to rewrite an unhealthy contract. We both had a license to grow and change, and that helped break the emotional gridlock we had somehow gotten ourselves into. After years of accommodation, it felt good to find my own voice again and remember what it was like simply to be me. In time, I also remembered why I had married this man, whom I now say more clearly from a distance: because he has an amazing laugh, because he is kind and fair, generous and good, and dazzlingly smart. I don’t just love him; I like him and admire him. Slowly, the hard nub of anger I had carried around for years began to melt. One day, I woke up to find that he had disappeared completely, never to return, replaced by what can only be described as tenderness and empathy. My husband, however, was going through his own adjustments and had become reluctantly persuaded that divorce was the best course. I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. We were far more open and accepting of each other than we had been before the split. Didn’t that tell us something? Being apart had been good for us; perhaps it was wise to make it permanent. Yet even then, after we had hired attorneys and finally taken the first steps toward a legal separation, there were signs of ambivalence. During a visit to what had once been our shared apartment, my husband spent 20 minutes searching for a scarf I had given him as a present—a sign, I thought, of far more than a cold neck. I spent an entire evening poring over old journals and calendars, trying to locate the “if only” moment when we might still have had a chance to save ourselves. A rerun of Forest Gump reduced me to tears; I nodded in recognition when Tom Hanks told Robin Wright Penn, “I know what love is.” The property settlement was awaiting our signatures when my 83-year old father had a brain hemorrhage. My voice full of fear, I called my husband and then set out in a monsoon-like rain for the hospital in New Hampshire. He arrived at the ICU the next day, and for several long minutes we clung to each other amid the sigh and chuff of respirators. The setting wasn’t romantic, but the experience was one of deep and abiding love. We were family, we had a history, we depended on each other and, despite an impending divorce, there we were still helping each other, still holding out our hands and hearts. It took looking death in the face—the death of my father, the death of our marriage—to make my husband and me see “what love is.” That night, over a long dinner and several glasses of wine, he nervously floated the idea of a reunion. I said yes. And why not? Working together had inflicted deep wounds on us and our marriage, but during THREE YEARS of separation, we had never stopped loving each other. We just needed time to reclaim ourselves, and to breathe in ways that were impossible when we were Siamese twins, our faces only inches apart. It’s been merely two years since we put our wedding rings back on, and we’re still working things out. Nothing is perfect—certainly not us or our relationship. When people ask me about the separation, I tell them I prefer to call it our “sabbatical,” a word that means a time away to study, reflect and learn. And learn I did. Not long after we got back together, a publisher approached us about doing a new book together. I said no."
