Worth one more try

What this means

What you described has a specific shape. The thing that ended it has a name, he says that name roughly the way you say it, and something in his ordinary week is genuinely different because of it. Not different in a speech at one in the morning. Different on a Tuesday, when nobody is watching and there is nothing to win. That gap between a promise and a Tuesday is the entire question, and on your answers it is at least partly closed.

That does not make this safe. It makes it workable, which is a smaller and more useful claim. What holds a repair together is unglamorous: both people can describe the same event, the person who did the damage can sit in the discomfort of having done it without turning the conversation around, and the change started before the ultimatum rather than the morning after it. You described some version of all three.

What this is not

This is not a verdict and it is not permission. Nothing here knows him. It knows twelve answers you gave in two minutes, on a day when you were probably not at your steadiest, and it cannot tell you he is safe to trust. It also has no business telling you that you owe him another attempt. The quiz is a mirror, not a ruling. If all of the above looks reasonable and you still do not want to, that is a complete answer on its own and it does not need defending.

It is also not an eraser. Repair does not undo the thing it repairs. You are allowed to go back and still be angry, still flinch at the reminder, still need a year before it stops sitting in the room with you.

What to do next

Put a number on it. Vague second chances rot, because there is never a day on which anyone can say whether it worked. Pick the one behavior you would need to see and pick a window. You can say it plainly: "What I need is that you tell me the same day when something goes wrong, not three weeks later. I need that to hold through the fall. If it slips, I am not doing this conversation again."

Slow down the expensive parts. Moving back in, merging money, telling both families, getting the dog — those are the moves that make leaving costly later, and there is no urgency here that is not coming from fear. Ninety days of ordinary life will teach you more than any long talk will.

Keep what you rebuilt while you were apart. The friendships, the routine, the evenings that belong to you. People who go back tend to quietly hand all of it over in the first month and then have nothing to stand on if it goes wrong again. If the hard conversations still come out sideways, it helps to work out the words before you are in the room, which is roughly what the conflict script builder is for.

Then check in with yourself in six weeks rather than six months, and ask one question: is this actually easier than it was, or have I just gotten better at not bringing things up?