Kirshenbaum, Mira - Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

• “Her family is so nosey and bossy and they control her with money—I sometimes feel she’s got to get a divorce from them or I’ve got to get a divorce from her.”

• “It’s one thing for me to complain about him, but when I get embarrassed for my friends to see him or know about the stuff he does, that’s really bad.”

• “Aren’t married people supposed to have sex? I mean, hello? How little sex can you have and then it’s no longer a marriage?”

• “Is there a future for us if we can’t even agree about where to go on vacation?”

• “We always have huge fights over money because I’m a saver and she’s a spender.”

• “He’s such a strict and controlling father, and I think he gives our kids a sense that I’m a bad parent; but he’s the bad parent and I really think the kids and I would be better off if he just stayed out of it.”

• “Sometimes I feel we’re doomed because I’m a people person and I really need having people over to the house. But she’s a real solitary person and resents our having people in our lives.”

• “He was this successful older guy and it was sort of fun admiring him when we first got together, but what it turned into is from morning till night he judges me. I don’t know how much of this you’re supposed to take.”

Once problems like these that make leaving seem desirable are added to all the forces that make you want to stay, you’re in a state of relationship ambivalence. But there’s more to the experience than just feeling all the pros and cons of your relationship.

Stops Along the Way

It’s been a while since you first felt “jerk shock”: the realization that the person you’re with has feet of clay. But instead of giving up, you tried everything you could think of to improve the relationship: honesty and romantic vacations and how-to-have-a-great-relationship books and maybe even therapy. You’ve tried overlooking all the things that hurt or annoy you, and you’ve tried dealing with them. You’ve tried to make the other person happy, and you’ve tried to get the other to make you happy. You’ve tried ... it’s probably hard to remember all the things you’ve tried.

After working on the front lines as a therapist for more than twenty years, I’ve learned that almost no one gets to this point without having worked hard to make the relationship better. We take love too seriously to give up on it without a fight. At the same time, on almost the very first day that love isn’t enough, we also feel hurt, and we withdraw and stand back, waiting and hoping for the other person to make things better.

Looking for the Exits

But thinking about leaving hasn’t helped either. It’s not that you don’t know how to go about it, at least in general. It’s just that you aren’t sure you’ll be better off leaving. Even when you’re fed up with the person you’re with, it’s still not clear that leaving will be better than your entire current life with that person.

Every time you start trying to focus on leaving, thoughts creep in about how you’ll find a place to live, and how you’ll be able to afford it, and whether you’ll find love again, and how expensive childcare or child support will be, and endless other details about how you’ll live. Worries like these just make it harder to leave, and the more of these worries there are, the more you’re willing to put up with a relationship that would otherwise be too bad to stay in.

And so imagining what your life will be like if you leave hasn’t helped.

Friends Try to Help. And your friends haven’t really given you the clarity you’re looking for either. I’m not saying they haven’t listened and been supportive and offered advice. It’s just that as you’ve tried to sort out all the issues and figure out what’s best for you to do, your friends haven’t been able to convince you about what’s best one way or the other.

I’ve seen cases where every friend a person has says leave, leave, leave! and yet somehow instead of it making everything clear it makes nothing clear. In spite of this passionate consensus, you might feel that your friends don’t really know your partner or your relationship, that all they’ve heard most clearly are your complaints as you’ve used their shoulders to cry on.

And I’ve seen cases where every single friend says stay, and you just feel that for whatever reason your friends are somehow invested in your staying together, that they’ll somehow be more devastated if you break up than you’ll be.

And so all your wrestling with issues and trying to put them into perspective has given you little clarity. This confusion can be tormenting. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve prayed for their partner to do something really awful, just so they would get the clarity they need. But that clarity doesn’t come.

And so here you are. You’ve spent what must feel like a very long time now dancing in the dark, flip-flopping back and forth about whether to stay or leave.

LOOKING FOR CLARITY IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I’ve talked about what’s similar in what people go through, but the actual experience of relationship ambivalence itself varies widely. Here are some snapshots of what it’s like for different people to be stuck in relationship ambivalence:

• One person goes through long stretches when things are really bad and she feels she’s definitely going to leave, but then there’s some mysterious atmospheric change and suddenly things are okay and she doesn’t want to rock the boat by even thinking about problems, much less thinking about leaving. This lasts until the atmosphere changes back to terrible again.

• Another does everything he can to put the choice he’s facing out of his mind. He asserts his right to complain about everything, and yet he stands next to this mountain of complaints and denies that he wants to leave. Occasionally one too many things go wrong or he spends just a little too much time with his partner, and then all his thoughts of leaving creep back in.

• Another talks to everyone, asking all the people who know her and care about her to tell her what to do.

• Another person obsessively and endlessly and constantly thinks about whether to stay or leave all day and half the night until her head’s ready to explode.

• Another denies there’s anything to be ambivalent about in the first place: he thinks it’s not the relationship that’s iffy, that the problem is just his fear of commitment.

• Another spends hours meditating alone, trying to remove all thought from his mind, so that he can allow an irrefutable signal to emerge all by itself and show him what’s best.

• Another goes for the superrational approach, assigning a numerical value to every positive and negative, so he can add up the score and get a single number that will tell him what he’ll be happiest doing, and he always gets some number but he never trusts it and never acts on it.

• Another keeps walking out, not because she wants to but because she’s hoping that breaking up will make things clear. But then she keeps starting the relationship up again.

But while everyone expresses ambivalence a little differently, there’s one thing people have in common: 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.