Quote: In other news, last week MC told H to commit to coming to bed with me just ONCE a week (he still has kept the habit of staying awake at night as his decompression time), and we go back to MC tomorrow with that UNachieved in the last 9 days. sigh.
I think I read in "getting the love you want" that this is called an exit. That book (required reading in Imago therapy, which my C practices) suggests that couples work to close all such exits. The exit is a way one spouse builds something into the R that allows them to escape from it without seeming to do anything out of the ordinary. An affair can be an exit, but like your H, my W uses that "late night time" as her way to decompress, as she says, and have her "me" time. I suspect that it has a lot more to do with NOT having "GH" time as it does her being alone. She's alone all day long...alegegly...lol.
I think your C is on to something, but I don't know if the "so-we-can-talk-and-hand-out" part helps. To me, this is just more pressure. I have found that since I STOPPED trying to start talks in bed and really just allowed it to be "close" time between us, she is a lot more likely to come to bed with me than stay up. I used to start deep conversations ALL the time when she came to bed. It got to the point where I think unless we were to ML, she didn't come to bed with me for well over 2 years. Damn...wish I woulda seen that back then. Oh well, live and learn.
