I had mentioned to Dan that we needed to do the August schedule this weekend. He said he wanted to do it Friday (last) night. He texted me during the day that he wanted to meet up in Bellevue (where he works) after work. Then he texted again and suggested a steak restaurant. So we went and there was a wait of course, but he bought me a drink and then paid for dinner, too. So that was good! I don't eat steak near as often since he moved out, he used to grill steak 2 or 3 nights a week since he runs a meat company we get it at cost.
Weird thing is, through dinner I kept looking at him and it was like he wasn't him. I thought, if this had been a first date (I know it wasn't a date but that isn't my point), I wouldn't probably want to go out again. He had nothing interesting to say, said all he does is work, come see us, and work on house/cows.
Anyway he didn't want to do the schedule at the table (so why did he suggest dinner??), so we drove back to my house after. The schedule was pretty non-eventful, except that August included my birthday, Nathan's birthday, and our anniversary.
I had spoken to a counselor about our status (one of the Boundaries authors actually!) and he suggested a structured separation and possible Solution-Focused Brief Therapy counselor. FYI, SFBT is therapy that focuses on finding solutions vs. reliving and analyzing the past. Sounds a lot like Michelle's advice in her DB/DR books. The Brief part is that you start out with particular goals and focus on meeting them, so it is not open-ended and usually only lasts 3-6 months. The structured separation part means what is says, it is much more structured than what we have now. He has his kid days, I have mine, and we have a few PLANNED joint days for family activities.
So I told Dan I thought we needed to start the 'structured separation' process and about SFBT. He seemed surprisingly interested, wrote down the terms and said he would research them. Of course that may go the same way "talking to the pastor" went, nowhere. So we scheduled August under the idea of structured separation anyway, with more clearly defined "his" and "mine" times. Onward and upward...
