Julia and transformer, thank you for your warm welcomes!
To answer your question, the majority of my communication with H over that 5 week period was mutual communication back and forth. We have had a running dialogue since March 2009 when I did a HUGE 180 (left a career I'd spent 20 years building but that gave me far too little free time for my private life and the people I care about). Jody has always encouraged me to show generosity to H and I strongly believe this is one of the main reasons that we have a fairly friendly relationship now. The primary communication change that I made in early July was to delay many but not all of my replies at least 24-72 hours. As I indicated earlier, this process really made me feel depressed. During that time I worked extra, extra hard to GAL. As it turns out, one of my new GAL activities (I've begun cycling with a local cycling club) seems to have piqued H's curiosity. Jody and I aren't certain why, but it will be interesting to see how that affects the dynamic. I don't know what will happen in my sitch, but if you don't change something, nothing will change, will it?
I decided to try to change the distancer-pursuer dynamic after listening to Harville Hendrix' CD "Finding and Keeping Love" (my favorite of the 3 CDs I've listened to of theirs). I realized that in our marriage H was the maximizer (i.e. pursuer) and I was the minimizer (i.e.distancer) but since the separation the roles have been reversed. I thought that if H was predisposed to being a pursuer, he might return to that role if I could provide an adequate trigger for that behavior to return.
BTW, Jody also said that dropping the rope in this way, by delaying your responses to H, is a way to see if there is some form of reciprocity in the relationship. I would think that it is hard to judge a negative response by H though if you don't have day-to-day knowledge of his schedule, because he may have big deadlines to meet at work or other responsibilities (e.g. broken car, sick parent) that could slow responses.
