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May 4 - July 17, 2025
to help you discover which is best for you: To stay in your relationship, recommitting to it free of doubt, free of holding back, free at last to pour your love and energy into the relationship and get back everything there is to get from it or To leave your relationship, finally liberating yourself from it, free of confusion, free of pain, free at last to get on with a new and better life.
You can find answers to the questions most important to you: • Whether the two of you really do fit together or not • Whether the things that bother you will get better or worse • How you’ll feel if they do get better and if they don’t • Whether you can improve the relationship on your own or with the best of therapists
What you’ll find if you leave and whether it’ll be better or worse than what you have now • How to balance the responsibility you have to yourself and to the people you care about
The clarity you’ll reach will also help you see how real your love is, and how strong.
I just want to assure you that as you see what’s right for you to do, you’ll be able to put
love into perspective among all the other things you care about.
To live with all that negativity and not leave could only destroy your sense of yourself as a valuable, effective person. Or suppose that it would have been best for her to stay. Then living with all that negativity could only pollute and ultimately destroy what would otherwise be a viable marriage.
Kate paid another price for a lifetime of not deciding. The tension and misery she felt, directly traceable to living stuck in ambivalence, put a strain on her relationship with her children that took years to heal.
We live in an age that promotes self-awareness but fails to show us how to use our self-awareness to arrive at good decisions.
Whatever love we feel for the other person feels so real, and yet we know we also have a responsibility to love ourselves. We see therapists on TV who claim they can bring any relationship back to vibrant life, but we know how difficult it is to change even the smallest thing in our own relationship.
Nothing in this book overrules what a good therapist you’ve been working with might tell you.
I’m talking instead about what happens when the bulk of your attention shifts from being in your relationship to trying to figure out whether to stay in it or leave.
You find yourself complaining about things like the following: • “He’s made a million agreements about doing his share of the housework and never kept one of them.” • “She had this affair with a guy from work, and I really think it’s been over between them for a year, but I’m having so much trouble letting go of the whole thing. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
Worries like these just make it harder to leave,
ambivalence in your heart goes hand in hand with distance in your relationship. When you feel ambivalent about your partner you make distance from your partner. You spend less time together. You talk less, and about less important things. You stop doing things together. There’s a cool, formal, ritualistic quality to the relationship. You make distance from your partner because you’re having an emotionally intense affair with your own ambivalence.
The image of the balance scale lies at the heart of how most people deal with the stay-or-leave decision. It’s what I call the balance-scale approach. You try to figure out whether to stay or leave by piling up all the evidence about your partner on a kind of giant scale and seeing how it balances out:
On one side you pile up all the evidence for staying and against leaving: all the good things about your relationship, all the things you hope for, all the things that make leaving seem scary. On the other side you pile up all the evidence for leaving and against staying: all the bad things in the relationship, all your fears, all your hopes for being on your own again.
When it comes to relationships, the balance-scale approach is the problem, not the solution.
Therapists do this, too. One way we get suckered into using the balance-scale approach is that we try so hard to avoid playing the blame game when people come to us for help.
Don’t put your relationship on trial the way lawyers do. Make a diagnosis the way doctors do.
works much the same way here. Instead of balancing pros and cons, we’ll try to arrive at a diagnosis of your relationship.
Try to remember when you felt most comfortable, most satisfied, most optimistic about the relationship you’re in.
Diagnostic question #1. Think about that time when things between you and your partner were at their best. Looking back, would you now say that things were really very good between you then?
Were things between you actually very good when they were at their best?
Quick take: If it never was very good, it’ll never be very good.
you can often fix what was broken, but you can rarely fix what
never worked in the first place.
And the truth here is that a relationship that was never very good is unlikely to become good in the future.
What makes a relationship actually too good to leave is when it has that satisfaction-producing core.
We’ve all known houses that look good on the outside, but there’s structural damage due to a poorly laid foundation or major termite infestation or water damage or many other problems.
if love has any function it’s as our servant, not our master. Love is an important part of our lives, but we’re not love’s slaves.
Love isn’t blind and it isn’t stupid. It can see and it can learn. If you allow your love to see the truth of your relationship, if you allow your love to take care of you, it’ll respond appropriately.
Diagnostic question #2. Has there been more than one incident of physical violence in your relationship?
Slapping, punching, shoving, and other acts of physical violence, if they happen more than once, will not stop by themselves. They will escalate.
Abuse that happens more than once means you must leave the relationship.
Quick take: Physical abuse means love is dead.
Tell him he’s got to find a program for abusive partners
And one of the most important kinds of damage is loss of your self-trust. Think about what happens when you’re stuck in relationship ambivalence: every day you give yourself the message that you’re not able to figure out what’s best for you.
This is a psychological process called the Ambivalence Trap. The more we try to weigh the mountain of facts and feelings we’ve accumulated, the more confused we get. The more confused we feel, the less we trust ourselves. The less we trust ourselves, the more we feel we have to wait, allowing more confusing evidence to pile up. This is where relationship ambivalence becomes a self-perpetuating trap.
Deep down they’ve already decided to leave the relationship and yet they’re sticking around anyway.
Sometimes the best way to figure out your truth is to look at what you do, not at what you say.
Diagnostic question #3. Have you already made a concrete commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner?
If you’ve actually made a concrete commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that excludes your partner, then on some level you’ve already decided that you’ll be happier if you leave your relationship.
Quick take: If you look like you’re leaving your relationship and act like you’re leaving it, you’re leaving it. You know best.
Here are a couple of examples to make this distinction clear:
Applying for jobs far away when you know your partner can’t relocate does not mean you’ve already decided to leave.
Here’s where your having an affair does mean you’ve “made a concrete commitment to leave”: If you stop caring whether your partner finds out or not, then an affair is a sign of your having taken practical steps to set in motion some course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner.
you have to treat feelings carefully. They’re real and important but they can also be complicated and misleading.
If you made your choice in a responsible way, you will get over the loss of a particular partner.
are doing things you care about and staying connected to people.
