A friend of mine was trying to decide whether to leave his marriage. Through neither partner’s fault, it was clearly headed nowhere good, but he felt paralyzed by two equally appalling options. To walk away would mean causing anguish to his wife, and scandalizing his traditionalist family; but to grit his teeth and stay would be to condemn both of them to decades of misery, or force his wife to do the leaving. As it’s all too easy to do in such dilemmas, he’d subconsciously concluded that if a given option wouldn’t be painless – and it was clear that neither option would be – it must therefore
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