You’ve been with your partner for a while now, maybe you live together, maybe there are kids. In the beginning, the pair of you were all passion and promises, but now? You’re more roommates than romantic lovers. You orbit one another in your shared space, asking about dinner or bickering over money, simply existing in relation to the other, but this is no longer the love story it once was.
It’s not just that you have settled into a familiar routine with one another, you’re beyond that. You’re not happy anymore. Maybe you’ve had “the talk”, maybe more than once. Perhaps one of you suggested counselling, but the truth is that you know there isn’t anything left to save. So why are you staying? Yes, you. The person reading this who is currently going through the motions of a relationship that they know is over. I see you. Why do you stay? It’s never an easy question to answer.
In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says to the eponymous Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), “a relationship is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward, or it dies. And I think what we have on our hands here, is a dead shark.” I have always loved that quotation. It so succinctly captures what a heathy relationship needs to thrive: movement, energy, and a sense of direction.
Of course, just knowing that hasn’t stopped me trailing after a number of dead sharks in my own dating pool over the years. So why do so many of us stay in relationships long after we realised things have gone belly up? I have done a considerable amount of research into this question, both studying the peer reviewed data, and considering my own relationship cock-ups in order to try and get an answer for you.
“Sunk cost fallacy” is one possible explanation. This is a term used in business and economics when a person is reluctant to abandon a course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even though it would be better for them to just walk away. Another way of putting it would be “throwing good money after bad”, and this phenomenon has been observed in long term relationships. A 2018 study from the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, and published in Current Psychology, found that, on average, people will stay in a bad relationship a whopping 294 days after they realised they wanted to leave, if they have been with their partner for a decade or more.
I get that, in fact, I’ve done that. The longer you’re with someone, the more time, effort, and resources you sink into that relationship, the harder it becomes to just cut your losses and walk away. I don’t have kids, but I know that leaving a relationship becomes even harder when children are in the picture. A 2019 survey by Direct Line Life Insurance found that 22 per cent of parents said they had stayed together for the kids. Whether or not that is a good idea is another article for another day.
It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that a lot of people stay in relationships they know aren’t working because they worry what their partner will do if they leave them. A 2018 study from the University of Utah found that “the more dependent people believed their partner was on the relationship, the less likely they were to initiate a breakup.” Samantha Joel, the lead author, suggested that “in making that choice, the unhappy partner may be hoping that the relationship will improve”. Now, I know I’ve done that.
I will hold my hands up and admit to wasting years of my life hoping a relationship will improve, clinging to an idealised image of a partner, of what could be, instead of accepting the reality of where we really are. I wonder how many other people are out there doing exactly that right now. Just hoping that things will get better. Forgive me for sounding incredibly cynical, but I’m here to tell you they probably won’t.
It’s not cited in any research paper I’ve read, but I suspect how we conceive of time plays into why we stay in bad relationships. There’s an old expression: the days are long, but the years are short. That has certainly cropped up in the various relationship implosions I have been a part of. I knew I had to do something, but just not yet, not today. And before I knew it, a year had passed, and I hadn’t done a thing. It’s so easy to just keep putting off the inevitable.
Having trawled through many scientific journals and articles to try and understand why we do this to ourselves, I noticed the one underlying motivator behind it all was fear. Fear of being single, fear of change, fear of loss, and fear of the break-up itself. Actually, I don’t think that last one gets enough credit. The process of breaking up with someone can be incredibly traumatic, and I mean that in the most literal sense. A bad break-up has been found to cause post-traumatic stress disorder, and the length of the relationship doesn’t impact that as much as you would think it does. A bad break-up is a bad break-up.
It sounds extreme to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder when considering the impact of the break-up, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. A break-up can rock your sense of security and wellbeing to its absolute core. The emotional grief that can provoke can be profound. You have to face loss, rejection, and an entirely new life on your own. It’s terrifying. No wonder people would rather stay where they are than go through that.
Not only do I think there are a lot of people out there, staying together rather than facing a break-up, I am pretty sure that the fear of a bad break-up is a factor in why I am single. Don’t get me wrong, I love being single, but I can’t deny one of the reasons I enjoy it as much as I do is because I know I don’t have to endure the death of a relationship and the resulting trauma of a break-up. I have been through bad break-ups, and I would honestly rather stay single than go through that again. I can’t pretend to speak for my fellow singletons here, but I am betting I’m not on my own in this. I would rather eat my own feet than swim around after a dead shark ever again.
Now, I can see that this is not a very healthy way to approach romance. In the same way that fear of breaking up is keeping unhappy people together, it is preventing me from experiencing a good relationship. That does trouble me. It’s not my sole motivation for solo life, but I can’t deny it is there in the background, gnawing away. But then again, why shouldn’t I be worried? So far, my romantic relationship failure rate is 100 per cent.
Fear is a very useful emotion, but it can also be a bully that prevents us from doing what we need to, and there is only one way to deal with a bully. You have to stand up to it. For me, that will mean opening myself up to the possibility of a relationship and running the risk of another crappy split, but for those reading this who know that they are witnessing their own relationship supernova, you too will have to face things head on.
There is no “good time” to end things, so if you are hanging on, waiting for the ideal moment to tear the plaster off, stop. It will always hurt, and it will always be horrible, but I promise you, life on the other side can be quite wonderful. Yes, break-ups can be incredibly traumatic, but do you know what can be even worse? Staying in a bad relationship. An unhappy relationship will deplete you of just about every resource you have, not to mention the most important resource any of us have: time.
Ultimately, there’s only one way out, and that is right through it.
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