Sara, thank you so much for your response and encouragement, it means a lot to me. I looked at some of your posts and got the idea that you & H are now one of the 'presenting couples' at Retrouville? What an amazing spiritual journey marriage is! Truly.
I'm also interested that your H is about the same age as mine. At first, I looked on the concept of MLC very skeptically, I only looked at it at all because H told me that's what he thought was happening to him. My reaction was: "Right. A midlife crisis. He thinks he's going to live to be 120 years old?" The only reason I do accept it now is because he knew all the MLC phrases/sentences/code-words (do they all read the same text-book?) And also, I found out during the deep emotional sharing conversation we had recently in response to your contributed Retrouville Question that H has been a slow developer all his life, late at going into adolescence, now late at going into midlife transition. It took him a long time to grow up, he missed most of the marks of ordinary adult development. It took him longer than the average to date, to settle on a career, to get his first job, to marry.
I knew all of these things before, but I didn't put them into any kind of framework, I didn't think they were related. And he always did seem pretty grown-up to me. A responsible, hard-working person who always looked after me very well, emotionally, in the marriage. But it is interesting to reflect on one of my earliest impressions of H, very early on in our courtship at about the point where I began to think I might have an abiding interest in the relationship -- he had come into the diner for our lunch date, I had already arrived and watched him as he perused the chalkboard menu. He kind of danced gracefully in place, moving excitedly from one foot to another as he considered his choice, reminding me of a charming little boy looking forward to his favorite meal.
Oh, BTW, a lovely response from H to my email of yesterday! I think I'm still on an emotional roller-coaster though, even though our reconciliation going so well. Last evening late a repeat of pessimism about H character and about R generally. Oh well, thank heaven for this forum and that we have some company while we go through this!
