Does anyone have any suggestions for me to get out of this ambivalence? Obviously I am making a choice - he didn't force himself into the family home - I said it was what I wanted to. I do have choices. It's just none of them seem that appealing. I don't want to be in this mindset. I want to pick an option and work towards it wholeheartedly, having faith that it will improve things for me and my children, even if it is difficult or painful in the short term. I know there are no guarantees and that I will need to be resilient enough to bear some risk. I am not sure the 'prize' of being in a marriage with the man who I am currently living with is enough of an incentive to put myself through the pain and risk of wholeheartedly making a repair. Am I looking at this in the wrong way?
Hi Alison, thanks for the update, good to hear from you again! The ambivalence, well your H abused you and stripped the love out of the marriage so that is an understandable reaction. Do you know what the opposite of love is? Not hate, it's ambivalence. You cease to care. How do you get the love back? Well it's not easy. It doesn't really sound like your H is doing anything to reignite the love, sounds almost like he moved back in because it was the lesser of whatever evils he's facing down. Here is my suggestion- have you read 5LL? If not then please do so. Try and appeal to him through his love language. The book talks about how marriages die because both spouses are sitting back doing nothing while waiting for the other to fill their "love tank". So they both sit on empty, and over time resentment starts to build. But if one starts using 5LL to fill the other's love tank, then before they know it the other wants to fill theirs as well. It's human nature- we want to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. So if I think my GF is being cold and distant, then I want to "punish" her for it but if she is showing me love then I am looking for ways to show it back to her. So you might try that, the worst that can happen is it gets no response from him. But you're ambivalent anyway, so a lack of a response from him isn't going to crush you. And at least you will have tried something rather than just waiting for things to change on their own (which will never happen).
