I got to talk with Harville Hendrix, the author of Getting the Love You Want, last week. He's in Portland for a conference of Imago Relationship Therapists, the school of therapy he and his wife pioneered.

In the hour we talked, Hendrix answered my questions with great depth and careful consideration. Typed-out, his replies to each of my four queries were several pages.

Boiled down, edited and over-simplified, here's the heart of it:

"It really is very simple, how to be in a great relationship," Hendrix says. "It can be stated in a few sentences."

1. Your relationship will become more satisfying to the extent that you get it that you live with another person. This person is not you. They are an other. If you get it that you are living with difference and you give up trying to make them be like you, then the conflict starts to go away.

2. You have to drop negativity. Negativity is all an attempt to change the other person. Replace it with affirmation and finding all the things about your partner that are beautiful and wonderful. If I'm getting curious about my wife when she's doing something that makes me uncomfortable, 99 percent of the time, my discomfort has nothing to do with what's she's doing. It has to do with her not matching an inner image I had of her. She moved out of my picture frame, and I want her back in the frame.

3. Affirm and advocate their otherness. Become curious about it. And the way I can make all this happen is to engage in dialogue. So I can hear her disclose who she is and get at who this person is I'm living with. 

The other day I was cruising around online for success/failure statistics on re-marrying your ex and the closest thing I could find was an un-sourced article that said there are none. Helpful.

If I'd found the numbers, they wouldn't really apply to me anyway, being as I never technically divorced my ex before the reunification.

And, really, who cares about the numbers anyway?

What I found way more practical than a bunch of numbers that have little to do with my husband, my relationship, and my attempt to raise it up from the ashes was a list of 10 tips for making a second marriage work.

It's the kind of stuff we talk about in therapy every week. Right now the biggie for me is flexibility, figuring out how to integrate all my solo routines back into a partnership lifestyle without feeling like I've forfeited myself.

These first few weeks it's been rough transitioning back to being on as a mom everyday; I've mourned the me time I had half of every week and I realized I'm just as exhausted by the change in routine as I was when I left two years ago.

Aha, there's that aha moment. The change in routine. It's the transition exhausting me, the recalibration itself, more than specifics of how things are changing.

That whole first year of separation was a struggle to figure out how. How to do it all myself. How to get dinner on the table every night and kids to school on time every morning. The second year, I had it down.

Easy isn't the right word, but it stopped feeling impossible.

Flexibility for me right now is all about figuring out how to do it differently, and remembering that's okay. 

A year ago when Sam and I began round three of counseling, our therapist recommended we draw up a contract, a kind of pre re-nup agreement, spelling out our needs and expectations.

Said it's a way to protect yourself — not your finances — the self that is YOU from being swallowed whole by enormity of committing to forever as part of a pair. Fear of losing myself in this, or any other, relationship ever again is huge for me.

She said it could be a detailed as, "If I want to go traveling in Asia alone for two years, it will be alright with you."

I never drafted it. Truth is, back when she was giving that advice I still thought I was in counseling to end my marriage, not to consider how best rebuild it.

What a difference a year makes. Closing in on this reunification, here's the rough draft of my Soul Protection Contract:

-I will always have a room within our house that is mine alone to work, think, be, and sometimes sleep in. It will have a locking door.

-We will have each have one "off duty" weekend every month with no responsibility for parenting, housekeeping, or partnering.

-We will have one free day (or night) every week.

-If someone does not use his/her time, that decision does not affect the other's right to do so without guilt.

-If I have the opportunity to travel for work to a place you would like to go, but can't because of your own work, this will be okay with you.

-When I need space for friends or I need to spend nights-on-end holed up in my room to write and think, and I emerge only help with the kids, this will also be okay.

-We will maintain separate banks accounts in addition to our household account.

-If you want to take an extended road trip with the girls during your summer break (Sam is on a school calendar) and I cannot go because of work, this will be okay with me (and with you.)

It's 4 AM and the pillow wrapped half-way around my head is insulation from the snores across the bed. Every night together is like this and I just want it to stop. Steals my nights, that noise.

Sharing a bed again, a room, with someone takes big recalibration. We're not living in one house together yet, but half the week Sam and I stay in one place.

I try to fall asleep first, get deep into REM before the rumbling starts because I remember something now. It's not easy to share my sleeping space. Sam's snores engine-loud; you can hear it down the hall.

I used to wonder why a married couple would ever want separate bedrooms. It seemed to me like sleeping separately was a tell tale sign of T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

We're sold a packaged picture of how happily ever after should look, and it never has more than one bed.

Why is it no one ever tells you about the importance of space before a first marriage? Nobody ever says while you are busy building a life together, don't forget to develop an equally sound life of your own so you maintain a strong sense of self.

These nights together are good practice, just the way sitting in a therapist's office every week hashing out the "how's this going to work" is good practice. Going back into this marriage a second time after two years on my own is, I guess, like preparing for any second marriage. You have the benefit of practice and wisdom and experience that were impossible the first go around.

You have the perspective of age and knowing yourself and your expectations and your limits in way that only comes with years. Lessons hard won and learned slow.

And after two years apart I know this: I like sleeping in my own bed by my own self without a pillow wrapped around my head to dull the snoring. Sex is one thing, but sleep? That's another, and I don't get much of it sharing a bed.

Since my somewhat, mostly ex-husband Sam and I have agreed to give it another go and started house hunting for a place to put our family back together, I've been crazy-hyper sensitive to anything that feels like old stuff.

A couple weeks ago in counseling I brought up a silly little something that pissed me off. We'd been camping at a weekend music festival with friends, trading off on the mommy and daddy duty.

He stayed at camp one night with the sleeping kids while I stayed out late partying with our friends. I slept in, he did the morning routine. I took afternoon shift while he took a nap. Back and forth the way you do.

Or the way you should do, but we've never been good at it. And yet, there it was, working out just like a dream. Until dinner. He'd been mostly relaxing and I'd been schlepping 35 pounds of sleeping kid over hills and paths for an hour-and-a-half and I wanted a nap and he wanted me to help with dinner and none of this is important.

What matters is this: We were back to the same old always. We didn't communicate, I gave in and got up and got angry. But I didn't say anything. And, I got over it.

That lazy gene that Jill Brooke wrote about in the news section last week? We both have it. I've got it worse, but there's always a push and pull between Sam and me.

It goes like this:

Lila says, "I really bad need to poop."

Sam looks at me. He says, "I've already taken her to the port-o-potty once today."

I say, "Awesome. I've gone three times."

So last week in therapy I did what you do, took that minor thing and took it apart.

He said, "I just don't think it's a big deal. I didn't even know you were mad. You're just looking for old patterns."

I put my wedding ring back on this week, just to see how it would feel. Sam and I have been apart almost two years, but we never fully split, never filed for divorce, or even for legal separation.

This whole time, I've considered us divorced. I've thought of myself as a single woman and envisioned life on an unknown path.

But Sam never gave up. He begged me to go back into counseling — the same man who once sat in that office, week after week, telling me "he was who he was."

He said, "You met me in line for Grateful Dead tickets. Who did you think you were marrying?"

I thought I was done. Told myself it was just legal fees that kept me from filing. Maybe it was true for a while or maybe it was always an excuse to stay together.

If I've learned anything about myself in the last two years it's this: When I want something, really want it, I make happen.

I never even called a lawyer.

I don't know what kind of category we fit in anymore. The marriage never ended. We still live apart, and the kids split time 50-50 between our houses. I'm still single parenting, but now Sam and I are looking for a place together.

I consider what we're doing a second marriage.

I'm not the same woman who left and I won't tolerate the marriage I had. We've been part way into a relationship and just as far out for almost a year now.

But we have been sleeping together.

The kids have grown re-accustomed to family dinners and camping trips. All along I thought I was waiting for the right time to end it for good. The right time. In the three years I agonized over our relationship before moving out, I learned there really is no good time. There's always a birthday or a holiday or summer plans or some other something to make you think leaving would be easier somewhere down the line.

Never is.

Seven sexless months into my separation from Sam I found that the saying “necessity is the mother of invention” is more than a meaningless cliché. 

I’m at my friend Heidi’s and my daughter Lila is shadowing Heidi’s son, George. Lila adores George, who is 3. So George and Lila jump off chairs and laugh, George in his blond hair, Superman boxers, Buzz Light Year shades and nothing else.

Heidi and I are at the table, steam rising from our teacups. Heidi makes a mean cup of green tea. And she used to sell sex toys.

She was a rep with one of those companies that hosts in-house parties, like Tupperware, but with vibrators and nipple nibbler cream, instead of airtight leftover containers.

Somewhere in her house is this box of lonely, untouched sex toys, and I’m a separated single mom and I haven’t sex in seven months. I lean forward. I need that box.

I’ve been asking for months. Where is that box, girl? And, she’s stumped. She knows she put it somewhere... back of a closet, behind her husband’s guitars... but where?

Didn’t she see those capital letters forming over my head when I spoke: WHERE? (By “where” I was saying “urgent.”)

It was almost time to get Roxie on her way, but I was not leaving empty handed.

“You need to find the box,” I say, and now I say “the box” and we both know what I’m talking about. “I’m going to rip your house apart, girl. Seven Months. It’s been seven months,” I say. “Seriously, I’m going to rip the walls out to find that box.”

She says, “Oh my god, I forgot to tell you. I found it!.”

A pause.

“Oh my god. Seven months. I’m so sorry. That’s so long.”

In the back corner of the closet is a pretty pink case with white polka-dots, filled with black satin bags that are stuffed with vibrators.

The longer I'm half-in, half-out of this thing, the clearer I see myself.

I have a good friend, a therapist, who says we don't keep returning to the same type of man with the same type of issues (the ones our parents had) only because it's familiar, we keep going back for more because we're trying to work out our own issues and these are the places we can do it.

She's always right.

I was telling her the other day over lunch that I hesitate to get all the way back into it, because Sam had this underlying negative something that looks totally different than my parent's negativity. But's it exactly the same.

With my parents the glass isn't just half empty, it's cracked and leaking slowly. Present them any scenario and they go first to what could go wrong.

When my niece who just graduated high school was "hang a good paper on the fridge" age, my dad once looked at a her spelling test up there, 99 percent, and said to her "Oh, Ella, how could miss .... You know how to spell that."

She's a fabulous student. National honor society. One misspelling and it's what he sees before everything that was right.

Like I said, Sam is a different kind of negative. It's more an undercurrent, not so overt.

But it has the same effect on me. The way it feels heavy, like something weighting me down.

Whatever it is I'm trying to work out, if I leave this relationship, I plan on working solo for a long time to come.

Sam didn't want me to go. He begged and cried and left a haiku stuck to the mirror on Post-It notes every morning.

He said marriage is forever and we promised to be in this together forever.

He said I said I was ruining the kids.

He asked if I could find it in my heart to give him one more chance.

The thing is, he was miserable in it, too. Was so unhappy, months before I left he went to a friend's house to ask if he could live there for a while. Until he figured things out. Got a place of his own.

But he didn't ask. Sam said he knew that night, in coming so close to leaving, that he wanted to stay, would stay in it forever trying to make it work.

I wonder why sometimes. Love or fear?

He wasn't getting what he needed from me any more that I was getting it from him.

I know it's true, because I wasn't giving it. He blames himself. Outsiders, when they look at our relationship, they blame him too. The things he "did" were tangible.

You could name them.

And some were just reactions. Ways of being in relation to the ways I was being.

I thought I was taking my time in this separation to see if there was changes in Sam that could make us better together. That's not what I'm doing.

What I really doing, I know now, is taking my time to see if there are changes in me.

The other night I lay in bed with Sam at his place. The bed that used to be my bed, my favorite piece of furniture. The nightstand that used to be my night stand. The husband that used to be my husband.

And none of it felt like mine anymore. Laying there, body next to body, I was thinking: This man is my husband. And the words surprised me.

I don't feel married. Haven't worn a ring since before I left.

This man is my husband. I don't know what that means anymore.

There's no judgment, no longing. Just the thought. This man is my husband?

It's close to two years we've been apart together. I haven't dated anyone else. Haven't kissed anyone else. Haven't had sex with anyone else. In 15 years there hasn't been anyone else.

When I write these posts, I always feel like they should to go somewhere deep. Land on some wise thing.

I don't have that. No clarity to offer.

I'm just keeping with these words, meditating on the thought: This man is my husband.

This man is my husband.

If I repeat them enough, they'll lead me to the truth.