OMG Shelia, in your last two posts I can see me and my XW before the bomb. It hit me in the first post some. I could feel what your H was feeling. It hit me more in your follow up post because I could close my eyes and hear my XW say those words. I'm going to try really hard to give you what I sense about it all because it sounds like I may have insight. I cannot, I am afraid, be really good about saying how and why your H can act to make things better because my wife left me and we divorced and I will never have the chance to test anything like that now. I can however, tell you how it was before that, and I think it is similar for how it is for you two now.
To answer your general question, yes it is a guy thing in a way. Let me see if I can paint a picture of your H's perspective over the last day or so.
There he sits with you watching TV. He feels fairly comfortable. He knows you two have things to work through, to work on. He knows he has things about himself that are part of the problem, and even in a general sense what those things are. But he is happy because you love him and want to stay and work on those things. He is happy because the two of you are having a normal moment,sitting there watching TV. And then you get up and announce you are going to your room to be alone and think.
The bottom drops out of him. It is brought forcibly home to him that things are not truly fixed, that he has not done what he needs to do yet and that you are not happy yet. He loves you and this thought makes him VERY anxious and concerned. Another thought makes it worse. He knows you are unhappy, and in a general, loving way, not connected to what it means to your marriage, he doesn't want you to be unhappy.
So what does he do? He seeks you out. He wants to know where you stand. He wants to make you feel better, if he can. He wants reassurance that you love him and although you two have not resolved everything and he is not perfect by any means, that you are not "done" but that you really do want to stay married to him.
Now as a sideline, you are right. If you had told him the problem, he would have defended. Why? Becasue he desparately needs to convince you that you can stay together that it will not fall apart. If he can argue away some issues and promise to fix the rest, that may do the trick. Part of him may know he won't get the fixes done, but most of him firmly believes right then and there that he will, from now on, do the right thing and keep the marriage alive.
But you don't say what is wrong, although he can probably guess. If he were me, he would push you and push you for as long and as hard as it took until you broke down and told him, and then he would follow the same defensiveness pattern. He didn't, either because that is not him or because he HAS learned and he HAS grown in this process. I hope it is the second one.
But your not saying, worries him even more. Like him, I would have done SOMETHING to try to (a)make you happier and (b)make you happier with me. My something would follow my love language. His MAY have followed his own love language, but it SEEMS to me that what he did was reach beyond that just a little and TRY TO DO THE THINGS YOU SAID YOU WANTED. Is it great that it took this to get him to do it? Hell no. It sucks. But it IS great that he did it. To me, in guy talk, it screamed "I love you Shelia and I want to make this work". I know it is not what needs to be done, but it is what he is capable of right then and there.
Sure, it's sh^t he should do any way. That is not the point. It's all sh^t we should do anyway. Whatever IT is, it is never something outlandish or over the top. It is usually something that we, the other spouse, would do as a matter of course. That's WHY it's something we want. We don't have what we feel are unreasonable demmands. We don't have what an indepent observer would see as unreasonable demmands. We have a need for something that is not there, whatever it is.
Why can't he keep doing these things? Why can't he follow through on his promises? Why can't he just do those little things you ask for? Hell, I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't be divorced. But I can tell you what it ISN'T. It isn't because he doesn't love you. It isn't because he is not willing to work on the marriage. It isn't because he doesn't care.
I wish I had the magic bullet for you Shelia. Some days I see you two as so close. Some days I sense you pulling back from that, tired and worried and anxious for your future. I don't blame you a bit. You have needs too. I guess if I could give your H a tip that I learned from all this, it would be to turn everything upside down. To 180 his perspective, his understanding, his outlook or whatever. To turn it over and over like that fricken' Rubric's Cube until he finds the side of it that tells him the solution. Like the cube, he may have to keep twisting and looking and keep finding those sides, little by little, but the pattern will start to emerge. I may also tell him he is damn lucky you are sticking it out and giving him the chance. Many of us were not that lucky.
