I think KAW is bang-on!!!! Couldn't have worded it better myself. OK, tree. there was a time when your H felt controlled by these kinds of things. The DB way is to eliminate this source of contention. But once the pattern is broken, and is seen to be broken, I can't see why things have to stay that way forever.
The worst thing to do is to go back to old patterns. But there's a difference between reverting to old patterns and occasionally doing something that was part of an old pattern.
Spontinaity is an important thing, tree. You can't spend the rest of your life planning everything in advance in order to avoid the perception that you're reverting to the bad old days. That would only create new "bad old days."
When we start DBing, we hafta go overboard to get the pendulum swinging in the other direction. But, there comes a time when we have to act more naturally.
The closer you get to centre, the less you should push - in either direction.
