Dating your wife during separation

Five months after our pledge, and six months into our separation, my husband called. Three years ago, when I was 56, I suggested to my husband that he move out of our house in New Jersey. As he was settling into his new apartment in Manhattan, he called. We would stay separated for a year and, somehow, together, figure out this whole thing. (The article focuses on marriages, but I think it applies just as well to any committed relationship.) Rather than a preliminary step to the foregone conclusion of divorce, these temporary separations, planned out carefully between partners for a predetermined length of time and with guidelines regarding finances and child care, provide a cooling-off period with the added benefit of allowing the partners to see what life will be like without each other.

He didn’t try to hold my hand, hug me, or even really get close at all.

“If you are not free to marry, you are not free to date!

When you start dating someone else while you are separated, you make reconciliation more difficult. Unfortunately there are those of the opposite sex who would like to take advantage of your vulnerability.

There are several reasons that the issue of dating during a temporary separation is so "fraught." As Ms.

Viken says in the quote above, if a desire to see other people was a primary motivation behind the separation, that may signal that the relationship is too much danger for a temporary "break" to solve.