Separation

This morning I wake up really early with a plaintive OneRepublic song in my head,

Come Home.

Lyrics :

Hello world
Hope you're listening
Forgive me if I'm young
For speaking out of turn
There's someone I've been missing
I think that they could be
The better half of me
They're in the wrong place
trying to make it right
But I'm tired of
justifying
So I say you'll..

Come home
Come home
Cause I've been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there's a war between the vanities
But all I see is you and me
The fight for you is all I've ever known
So come home

Oh

Everything I can't be
Is everything you should be
And that's why I need you here
Everything I can't be
Is everything you should be
And that's why I need you here
So hear this now

Come home
Come home
Cause I've been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there's a war between the vanities
But all I see is you and me
The fight for you is all I've ever known
Ever known
So come home
Come home

It's an anti-war song, is the truth, or so I learned on YouTube trying to find you a link. Watch it after you read this.

This isn't a political blog, but I do have an American flag drooping over our front-room window, and I'm thinking I should bring Old Glory to the cleaners, but don't want to take it down, not even for a day. The song has nothing to do with my personal politics, fyi, I just like it. There's a love song in there somewhere. Has to be.

This post is about marital separation, and the feeling that characterizes this stage of marriage. It isn't the same as wishing someone home from a war, but usually there's missing. Emptiness defines separation, and loneliness.

With separation one of two partners has to leave home. Someone has to pack up and go or it isn't a real separation. Sometimes a spouse will leave voluntarily, walk out, close the door, and that's it, game over. Too little, too late. Therapy didn't work. The love is gone, the relationship dead, the formal beginning of the end. From here we go to dissolve the marriage, dissolution, another D word, a softer word, as in dissolve into water. Means divorce.

Feels harsh, divorce, and it is. Also lonely. Dissolution-- soft, like water.

Yet there is no limit to the cheer-leaders, family, friends, colleagues who encourage the divorce option, who have been there and profess to be quite happy about it; and so many others who have suffered abuse in marriage, who see everything in terms of abuse, who support the leaving, toast to it. Bring on the party. Here's to a new life. The old one is over. Move it along, jump to the chase; what is this no man's land, anyway. Make a decision, please; it's been three weeks.

Relationship therapists don't see separation this way, actually. We don't see it as an entre' to divorce.

First of all, we know that no matter how you label a relationship, it is never over. These reside in our heads for years and years and years, no matter how we label them, even relationships of our youth. So what is the rush to finalize the ending of a committed relationship? It isn't over until the ink is dry. Boyfriend, fiance, lover, friend, spouse, partner; what happened there, in the relationship, the meaning of that person, will not disappear with a signature.

Therapists see all kinds of separations, you should know. So we snuff out the panic when a couple nervously asks, Might it help, a little space, some time apart? This one quotes the statistic that 3 out of 4 married couples endure a separation, generally not due to abuse or neglect or even a marital problem.

Normalizes it, doesn't it, that 3 out of 4 couples separate? That's well over a majority.

When separation is not about the relationship, it is usually due to a work transfer, or the needs of a sick family member, perhaps a change in status, like having to attend to the estate of a lost loved one, executorship, maybe. When crises happen, togetherness is the expected outcome of the separation--as soon as possible, if you don't mind. Fix whatever this is so we can so we can be together again soon. There is stress, being apart is stressful, but ways of communication transcend geography mainly because a couple wants to transcend geography. There is no discord.

Come home.

When separation is due to marital distress, however, therapists are in less of a hurry (depending upon one's treatment perspective) to push a couple back to the same home. We entertain objections, surely, from one of the two partners, but might advise :

Take a break.
get some space,
give yourself a chance to heal, to think.
Rearrange priorities,
see your own behavior, own your part of these problems, don't minimize.
Understand your significant other in a more rational way.

A little distance and we gain perspective. Of course this is within the context of therapy, for sure. If your time is spent at the bars crying in your beer looking for sympathy, it's unlikely any light bulbs, epiphanies, will be going off any time soon.

Thoughtful separations like these are healing for older couples, but for people new to marriage I tend not to recommend them, although there are certainly exceptions. But young people do well in marital therapy living together, not apart. The therapeutic mission will be to test new behaviors with one another in-house.

Young marriages are still in the test tube, the laboratory phase, everything is an experiment. The therapist can add a twist of this or that, present new perspectives, but the successful couple, with a little therapeutic insight, will comes up with the ideas that work independently, will finesse the experiment. And voila, it's back to being in love again.

Therapy is more complicated for older couples with history and emotional inventories . Negative emotions associated with a partner's misdeeds feel hard-wired to the victim, intractable. So many memories, so many disappointments, repeated enactments of dysfunctional behaviors, reactions. We can change these in therapy, work to understand one another, but the love won't catch up with the intellect, not so quickly. Not usually.

Time. But did you say you want to know how long you should be apart?

This depends upon each of the partners, how committed they each are to change, and how disassociated they feel from one another. Can we predict it? Can we predict how long a couple will stay separated?

Some of us take pot shots, guesses. I have a short but open-ended list of questions that make mine feel educated.

(1) How huge is the inventory, the list of pain, the wrongdoing?
(2) How deep is the anger, the hurt? Is this really immeasurable?
I actually measure it in terms of days, then hours, number of tears, holes in the plaster.

Every therapy for separated couples will be a designer therapy, by necessity, with a designer treatment plan. Objectives and goals are discussed, as well as an exhaustive investigation of each partner's emotional life. That certain responses are predictable, based upon that history, unfolds over time, and this is the insight we're looking for.

Thus there can be no textbook treatment for any particular marriage, which is why the work itself is as much an art as a science. We have our methodology, but procedural order will depend not only upon the broken dish of the day, but the way the therapist determines it to fit back together.

Is it time to block that metaphor yet?

Not to beat a dead horse, for those of you who read me, but there are three patients, three patients, remember, to every marital therapy-- the two partners and the marriage. That's a lot of therapy, a big treatment plan, so sorry. And the emotions don't just heal up overnight. People forgive, but they really can't forget. That memory thing will get you every time.

It would be nice if there were a switch, if we could will ourselves into loving again. Hypnosis, maybe.

Sorry.

That's why, if the rabbi or the priest, or the mullah, etc., has one thing to advise a young couple, it should be that they should stay out of denial, not brush any problem aside, look to the family of origin, the roots to the tree, the reasons people do what they do, the reasons they don't do things they should do. Attend to this right away, don't ignore "issues" let them build up inside until you have reached the point of no return.

Cuz that's a very, very bad place.

The Anti-Relationship drug, the thing that will ruin you is denial. You lull yourself into thinking, If I don't discuss this it will resolve on its own and I will love my partner again. These problems will go away in time.

Right.

Think again.

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