Limbo over, now separated but in lockdown (part 3)

[Pommy99]

Thanks for your messages OG and May

Well, it’s like the last 9 days never happened. H and I are back to being completely distant. Is this normal WAH behaviour? To say you want to come home and act like a happy, affectionate couple, to (understandably) sayIng that we should take things slowly, to completely backtracking and saying I don’t know what I want and not having any affectIon and hardly seeing each other for 5 days?

So after my last post on Tuesday, H was a bit distant on Weds (saw him briefly when he dropped kids off but he still kissed me) and Thurs he had an IC. After his IC he said the therapist had questioned his mental health and said he was putting a lot of pressure on himself (the pressure is him telling himself he needs to be 100% sure he will never walk out on me again before he can recommit). He was basically intimating that we slow things right down as things weren’t normal right now (referring to lockdown). I think I got very uptight and questioned how the heck he could say he wanted to come back and then backtrack. He said again he needed to be sure he was coming back for me and not for any other reason. In a further conversation he said that he’d felt pressured to coming back, pressured to do the right thing for me and the kids but that none of that took into account his feelings and something still didn’t feel right, it didn’t make him feel happy. I’m struggling to buy into this. What about the statements that deep down he felt like he wanted to be with me? That he finds it hard to imagine life without me. And that he was certain it was the right thing to do!!

By Thursday night we were having a pretty hostile FaceTime chat, with him giving the old “you’re not flirty/dirty/spontaneous/cheeky” and my usual response of “you’ve rejected me for the last year and asked me not to put pressure on you re sex”. I can’t win! I didn’t validate, I just got defensive.

We had a chat on Saturday when he popped round and he now won’t even consider trying to make it work, or commit to moving forward. Coming home is completely off the table. We exchanged some nice texts on Sunday. I told him I missed him and he said he was missing my company too. I said I had woken up and wished he was here as I miss lying next to him and chatting about random stuff, and he said he missed all that too, and how much he loved my passion for travel and telling him about places, and how much he relies on me for that, and he loves how I listen to him ramble on about cars. And that’s been it.

I don’t know what to do next as in walk away, try NC as much as poss or see if we can get back to talking about reconciliation. I guess DBing would be NC and detach?

Did I mess up last week? Did I push him away when he was asking to slow down and let him get through some IC sessions to soart out his head? I feel like I went cold and upset on him when I should’ve just taken a step back and talked gently about what we do next. We might have been able to carry on building up the affection and trust but I basically shut him down when he said started to back track and blamed him for leading me on. Help!