Good day LL,
Sometimes I do have trouble keeping up with your thread, but I finally got caught up again. Quite an eventful past couple of days.

Sharing about your parents put into perspective why you are having a hard time dealing with putting your demons behind you, but you mustn't let your parents demons haunt you. Its not fair to put your H in your father's footsteps.

Hours before you long for your H to start showing some gesture that he wants to be with you and not OW, to talk to you, open up and just last night he took one the first steps. Like you said LL ... baby steps ... but what is important here is he is doing it on his own. He took action to cancel the service, instead of just telling, he chose to take action to show LL he wants to do what he thinks will make LL feel good - throw the phone out the window. He is starting to do some of the you wish for. He is trying to learn your language. He is doing this because he chose to ... he wants to be happily married to you.

I understand it doesn't seem to work for you to keep your thoughts pent up and not be able to share with H. Since he told some of the reasons why he doesn't like such talks, perhaps if you did some 180's in the way you converse so that he won't see the conversation taking the same pattern as they have in the past. Instead of him feeling you're trying to get in his head or be to analytical or too deep. Start with "I would like to take 5 to 10 minutes to tell some of how I feel. You don't have to say anything, answer anything. I don't expect you to change anything, I just think it would help me alot for if I could talk about it." Try to keep it to one line of thought. It might be good to start with some of the parallels you fear your M has taken comparted to your parents ... or perhaps better yet, talk about how you felt about your parent's M first, then your concerns about some of the parallels. Afterwards, kindly thank him for listening. Let him know it means a lot to you to let these thoughts out. By keeping it short to 5-10 minutes, you are not apt to get too deep for him. By keeping to "I" statements, then he will see you are not trying to get into his head. If it seems to work, try to keep the talks at regular times like once or twice a week, but continue to keep them short. In time maybe, he will start to volunteer some of his thoughts or even be the first to start talking...

Its SPRING!

'til later,
KAW