Should I stay or leave my relationship? How to think it through

First, the one exception

Most of this page assumes you have time to think. If you're afraid of your partner, are being threatened, watched or cut off from money, friends or family, or have been physically or sexually hurt, this isn't a question to weigh up calmly on your own. Please talk with a support line first. They can help you think about options, without pushing you in any direction. Leaving and staying can both carry risks in these situations, and trained people can help you plan around them. Be careful about using shared phones or computers to look for help.

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Being torn is normal, not a failure of nerve

Samantha Joel, Geoff MacDonald and Elizabeth Page-Gould (2018) asked people what makes them want to stay in or leave a relationship, and gathered 27 kinds of reasons to stay and 23 to leave. When they then asked people who were actually weighing a break-up, many of them leaned both ways at once. Reasons to stay and reasons to go don't cancel each other out. They just both sit there.

So if you've been waiting for one side to go quiet, it may not. You can usually stop treating the mixed feeling as evidence of weakness, or of anything else. It is simply what this decision tends to feel like.

It's also why friends' advice can be so unhelpful. Your friend hears a bad week and tells you to go. Your mother remembers her own marriage and tells you to adjust. Both may love you. Neither is living your life.

Four questions from research on commitment

Caryl Rusbult's investment model, measured in a scale she published with John Martz and Christopher Agnew in 1998, looks at what tends to keep people in relationships. Her terms were satisfaction, alternatives, investment and commitment. Used as prompts rather than a score, they can help you see what's holding your decision in place.

• Satisfaction: leaving aside everything else, on an ordinary week, what's it like to be with this person?
• Alternatives: what do you imagine life would be like without them? Is that picture accurate, or is it shaped by fear, or by fantasy? Someone new often looks better than a shared electricity bill.
• Investment: what have you put in that you would lose? Years, shared home, children, family ties, shared friends. These are real. Are they a reason to want this, or a reason it's hard to go?
• Commitment: when you imagine next year and five years from now, do you see yourself in it? Do you want to?

Two columns: wanting and fearing

Here's an exercise that many people find clarifying. Take a page and write out your reasons for staying and going, and then mark each one with a W for something you want, or an F for something you fear.

'I love how we laugh' is a W. 'I don't know how I'd afford rent' is an F. 'What would people say?' is an F. 'I want a life with more peace in it' is a W. Fears aren't bad reasons, and some, like money and children, are serious and practical. But they're a different kind of reason. They can sometimes be addressed: by a plan, a job, a lawyer's advice, or a talk with a sibling. A want often tells you more about what you actually want your life to be. There's no right ratio. It's just worth seeing which is which.

Two related things are worth noticing. Joel and colleagues (2018, in a separate study) found that the more dependent people believed their partner was on the relationship, the less likely they were to initiate a break-up. Caring about what it does to the other person is a decent impulse, and it's yours to weigh. And if you find you're staying only to avoid being the one who causes pain, that's useful to know too. Neither is the wrong answer.

Tired of this, or finished with this?

These two can feel almost the same at eleven at night. Some differences that may help you tell them apart:

• If the problem stopped tomorrow, would you want this person? Or would you still want out?
• When you imagine good news, is your partner someone you want to tell?
• Do you want things to be different, or do you want to be somewhere else?
• Has the feeling lasted through good weeks as well as bad? A decision that only exists after fights may be about the fights.
• Have you ever really said the thing that's wrong, clearly, in a way they could hear? Or have you been waiting for them to notice?

How to tell if a relationship problem is fixable →

Put a limit on the not knowing

You don't need to decide tonight. Endless deciding has a cost of its own, though. A bounded period can help: 'For the next two months I'm going to try these two things, and then I'll look honestly at what changed.' If it's a safe relationship to do this in, you can write it down, including what would count as change. You could tell a friend so you can't quietly keep extending it.

Please don't expect a clean signal. Joel and colleagues' 2020 study of over 11,000 couples found that change in relationship quality over time was largely unpredictable from self-reported data. So no checklist can tell you how things will go. What you can get is more honest information about how it is now and how it responds to effort.

A counsellor can help, even if you don't know yet whether you want to stay. William Doherty and colleagues developed 'discernment counselling' for couples where one partner is leaning out and the other wants to work on it. Its aim isn't to save or end the relationship, but to help people reach clarity and confidence about the next step. In their analysis of 100 cases, about half chose to begin couples therapy and most of the others chose to divorce. Neither is a measure of success. An individual therapist can also help you think it through on your own.

How to find a counsellor or therapist →

Words you could use

What ELOVIYA will and won't do

ELOVIYA won't tell you to stay or leave, in any result, ever. It helps you notice what still feels strong and what feels strained, and if you decide to try, gives you a small and bounded way of doing that. If you tell us you feel unsafe, it pauses the exercises and shows support first. If you've already decided, you don't need us, and a counsellor or trusted person may help you more with what comes next.