Week Thirty Five - A Day in The Life -  Holding Weather Pattern - or Pattern on Hold?

How does t feel to be married and be dating at the same time? Confusing! Yes, this is what is happening with Paul and me these days. We are married, but don’t live together and… we are dating. Once a week, after our therapy session, we head for our bar for a couple of drinks and talk.

This week, when Paul asked me again if I wanted to spend some time with him, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes right away. I must confess several times this week I have been thinking about the “date’ we had last week and hoped he would invite me out again. And he did.

Paul looked so cute, with a shirt I had bought him for his last birthday and the jeans he knows I love. I wonder if he thought about this before dressing that morning, or it was just pure coincidence. At any other time I would have said the second, but now I am not sure. He seemed to be looking at me more often than he did in previous weeks. In session, his tone of voice was softer. He asked me if I agreed with what he was saying, and listened when it was my turn to talk.

Of course it is too early to know what’s going to happen between us. Yet I can’t help thinking that he notices, he is concerned, he is apologetic when appropriate and he is empathic rather than telling me what I should feel. It feels like he has been reading self help books to understand what happened between us and what needs to be done to fix the problems.

I know I shouldn’t trust this transformation yet. Let’s see if it continues, I tell myself. After all, it has been only three weeks… But I am glad for all these changes, nonetheless.

Today in our session we discussed Paul’s job and what happened when he was laid off (or fired?) Paul talked about his shame about not having a job, and his fear that I would think my father was right in not having a very high opinion of him and would stop loving him. I wished he had felt comfortable telling me these things back then, rather than months later. It certainly would have saved us a lot of aggravation and pain. But, said Marsha, perhaps we needed for things to develop the way they did, as Paul has had time to reflect and is now able to talk about his true feelings, rather than hiding them behind an air of bravado, as he used to do.

The bartender winked at us when we entered the bar. We headed for the back table again, hoping none of our friends would come in for a while. We had a half hour to ourselves, before some of our friends joined us. And in that half hour Paul sat very close to me, rather than across the table, and took my hand again. “It’s lonely without you,” he said softly. “I can’t wait for us to be together all the time again.”

I said nothing, because I had so many feelings all at the same time that I did not know which one to pay attention to.