limbo, many thanks for your encouragement and good wishes. H and I have talked a bit about Retrouvaille weekend coming up, H still a bit skittish about the whole thing. We are 'reconciling while separated', so I have to be careful to send the clear message that I don't expect Retrouvaille to 'save our marriage' so much as to 'preserve our reconciliation' and to enhance the new relationship we have developed following the marriage crisis.
The new relationship is going very well. It seems like our 'homework' on the Retrouvaille Question contributed by Sara really kicked off a drive, from H, for deeper communication. I can easily say that H is working as hard on relationship repair as I am, sometimes harder. But he is still not wanting to fully embrace the traditional live-in marriage -- and frankly I am not really wanting that either, yet. For one thing, our sex life has improved exponentially over what it was during the last few years of the 'live-in marriage', and getting better all the time. And for another thing, our present set-up of two date days/nights, sometimes more, each week offers so much in the way of intentionally scheduled good times together. It is like a second courtship, but on a deeper level.
I had another anger melt-down recently, at his place, and I left right at the beginning of a 'special' long weekend event which had been planned for awhile. It was related to an aspect of the EMA, that he had 'said uncomplimentary things about me' to OW after the EMA got up. H would like to leave EMA behind and to move forward in our relationship, to put it in the past. So would I, actually, but there it was, it came up again. Not only the sexual selling-out of appleroad, but the failure of the loyalty that one expects in a friendship. In a way, it was a demonstration of the advantages of 'reconciling while separate' -- I had a home to go to, and I decided to go there, to not be with H while I was feeling so 'sold out' -- but also, the drive calmed me down, and I realized that I had the choice to return, which I did after an hour, and H received me gratefully, said he was glad I'd come back. And then, this was the important part I think, I told him how much I regretted the emotional melt-down, how much I too wanted to move forward, how I was really tired of looking under rocks, and how easily it would have been for this not to have happened: he hadn't responded to an email I had sent him the day before, "It would have taken only one line from you in response to my email to have kept me on track and going forward".
So guess what? The day after I left H apartment after our weekend together, he (unexpectedly, unscheduled, voluntarily)sent me 3 emails! Very nice, like getting love letters, sometimes one can be much more eloquent in print rather than in a direct physical encounter. But another thing that I also think is important happened that weekend -- I found out, this is something H has been signalling to me for some time now but I've always rejected it, that he feels like my telling him to leave last April, and the extreme depression he felt around that, "April was the worst month of my entire life!" -- is in his mind the equivalent of his EMA. So over the weekend I made a choice to embrace that perception of his. That we had equally suffered. That we still wanted to be together and would let the past be the past and would enjoy the present and would not be overly concerned about the future.
