A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO HELP YOU DECIDE WHETHER TO STAY IN OR GET OUT OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP
MICHAEL JOSEPH
LONDON
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the USA by Dutton 1996
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph1996
Copyright © Mira Kirshenbaum, 1996
All rights reserved
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-01-4193-952-0
To My Reader
I. THE PROBLEM
1. Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?
2. Dancing in the Dark
Issue. Relationship Ambivalence
II. THE SOLUTION
3. Enough Is Enough
Issue. Danger Signs
4. It’s Too Late, Baby
Issue. If You’ve Already Decided to Leave
5. Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love
Issue. Preconditions for Love
6. You’ve Got a Hold on Me
Issue. Power—When the Other Person Is Bossy, Controlling, Domineering, Overwhelming …
7. Talk to Me
Issue. Communication
8. What Is This Thing Called Love?
Issue. Is There Real Love Left?
9. It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
Issue. Sex and Physical Affection
10. All the Things You Are
Issue. Your Partner’s Problems
11. Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Issue. Personal Bottom Lines
12. You Say “Tomayto,” I Say “Tomahto”
Issue. Differences Between You
13. If Ever I Should Leave You
Issue. Post-relationship Options
14. R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Issue. Do You Respect Each Other?
15. Who’s Sorry Now?
Issue. Hurts and Betrayals
16. I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Issue. Getting Your Needs Met
17. Love to Love You, Baby
Issue. Intimacy—How It Feels to Be Close
18. I’ve Got You Under My Skin
Issue. Feeling You Belong Together
19. Next Steps
Acknowledgments
Mira Kirshenbaum is an individual family psychotherapist in private practice and the clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute in Massachusetts, where much of the research for this book was conducted. She is co-author of the award-winning Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach. She lives in Boston.
To my most important teachers: my patients. You have shared your lives with me over the years and I’m eternally grateful for everything I’ve learned from you; for your dedication to health; for how hard you work to find happiness; for your willingness to learn lessons I know are tough; for your trust.
To my mother. I know how much you’ve accomplished, and I know how hard you’ve struggled. I wish I could have helped you when you needed it most, but I was too young. Thank you for inspiring me to believe I could help others. Thank you for inspiring in me the desire to learn the truth about love.
And to my daughters. You’re the best, and you deserve a world of love.
This is a book about truth and love. It would not have been possible without the work of Dr. Charles Foster. Every word here is the product of a fifty/fifty collaboration between us. His research, insights, and ideas fill this book. We are full partners in everything. Because of him, in every way this search for the truth has been a labor of love.
I’m profoundly grateful to all the individuals whose lives and stories went into the research for Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. They were amazingly open and helpful, and what we’ve learned from them constitutes the bricks out of which this book is built.
There are many people I must mention if I’m to thank them properly. The debt I owe each of them makes me wish I could do more, in this small space, than list their names. These people are, one way or another, colleagues, teachers, heroes, friends who’ve given something specific to me, personally or professionally, through the years here at Chestnut Hill and elsewhere. They may not even realize the value of what they’ve done for me, but it played some role in making these pages possible. To all of them I say thank you: Louise Bates Ames, Shaye Areheart, Lisa Bankoff, Susan Bickelhaupt, Ruth Bork, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Alexia Dorszynski, Barry Dym, Dorothy Firman, Roger Fisher, Betty Friedan, Diana Huss Green, Jennifer Hack, Jay Haley, Jules Henry, Kathleen Huntington, Allan Kaprow, Alfred Kazin, Michael Kirshenbaum, Mary Jo Kochakian, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Eda LeShan, Richard Marek, Amy Mintzer, Salvador Minuchin, Nancy Moscatillo, Eli Newberger, Maury Povich, Cynthia Roe, Izzy Rudski, Ann Ruethling, Kim Schaffer, Gitta Sereny, Myron Sharaf, Judith Sills, Ivy Fischer Stone, Richard Stuart, Walter Watson, Paul Watzlawick, Rosa Wexler, Robert White, Elie Wiesel, Beth Winship, and Harold Zyskind.
Some people are sadly no longer alive to hear my gratitude for what they’ve given me. But I feel I must nonetheless express my thanks to Fred Avery, Gregory Bateson, Herbert Berghof, Martin Buber, Paul Goodman, Walter Green, Don Jackson, Pearl Karch, Virginia Satir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I want to thank my daughters, Rachel and Hannah, who cared so much about this project and who expressed their love and intelligence by letting me feel the full weight of every constructive criticism they could think of.
What incredible good luck to have a mensch like Howard Morhaim as my agent. Without his gifts and his belief in me and in this project, all the people who need it would be denied the help this book offers. I am profoundly grateful to him. And a thanks to his assistant, Kate Hengerer.
My editor, Deborah Brody, has wowed me with her intelligence and enthusiasm. I thank her for caring about this book and for her marvelous ability to translate her caring into effective action that’s enabling this information to reach as many people as possible.
I’d also like to thank all the other terrific people at Penguin and Dutton who I know have helped and will help this book and me. I can’t mention everyone’s name but I would like to single out Marvin Brown, Judy Courtade, Arnold Dolin, Elaine Koster, and Peter Mayer. A thanks to Julianne Barbato for her excellent copy editing, and a thanks for the care she’s taken with my work to Jennifer Moore. Finally, I know how important Lisa Johnson’s inspired work on my behalf has been in the past and will be in the future, and I’m grateful for it. And a special thanks to Tracy Guest.
I’d like to thank all the readers of my previous book for their incredible support. It means so much to me. I’d like to particularly thank the countless numbers of people who called and wrote just to tell me how much that book helped them.
Last, but not least, I must thank those patients of mine who kept asking me to write this book. I can’t mention your names, but you know who you are.
You are not alone. There are 140 million Americans today in a relationship, and one-fifth of them—that’s 28 million people—just can’t decide whether to stay or leave.
You deserve the happiness you’re searching for. I’ve dedicated years to developing a simple but comprehensive series of questions and guidelines that will help you see clearly, once and for all, whether it’s best for you to stay in your relationship or leave it. The women and men you’ll meet here have struggled with the same issues you have. Their experiences will help you discover what’s real in your own relationship, regardless of how long you’ve been with your partner or how long you’ve been stuck in ambivalence.
This book contains only good news. If it’s best for you to stay, you’ll have the satisfying experience of facing all the issues and discovering that your relationship is truly too good to leave. You won’t be settling; you’ll know your heart is home.
And if you’ll be happiest leaving, you’ll get the reassurance that comes from finally understanding why your relationship has been too bad to stay in. When you end a relationship that deserves to end, you’re liberating two people to move on to better lives.
Either way, because you’ll see what’s best for you, you’ll be far happier than you’ve been. Everything in your life will be better. I’ve written this book to help you make this happen.
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy.We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.
So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.
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You’ve gone through a lot to get to this point.
You’ve hoped that love would be enough. And you’ve worked to resolve the problems in your relationship. And you’ve tried to accept things the way they are.
And you’ve agonized over the possibility of leaving.
But you just haven’t known what to do. Now you’re ready to face the choice that’s been weighing on your heart. That’s what this book is for—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.
Up until now you haven’t found the kind of evidence that speaks to your heart and makes clear what’s best for you. You haven’t found a sign like one of the following:
Leaving. He wouldn’t make her a sandwich. Heather had been working in the garden in the hot sun all morning, and Bill had been doing God knows what inside the house. Through the open kitchen window she’d heard him grab a beer, and she asked if he’d throw together a sandwich for her. “No, you do it,” he said, as if she’d asked him to do something too hard, too inappropriate.
That’s when it hit her, clear as day, once and for all, that his selfishness was undeniable and bottomless, that for her the relationship was over, that there was nothing here for her, and that she’d be better off getting out. And she did. And she’s never regretted it for a moment.
Staying. What had happened to the sweet woman he’d married? Now, three years later, Steve felt that Lynn had turned into someone who did nothing but complain. Then one Friday coming home from work Steve heard a song on the radio—“When a Man Loves a Woman.” Something about it got through to him, something about his having a responsibility to make sure she knew he loved her. They’d gotten so polarized, he saw, that he’d overlooked the possibility that she was unloving because he was unloving.
Steve spent that night and all weekend trying to show Lynn he loved her. It wasn’t until Sunday that it got through to her. Then she just melted. Her old sweetness came back. It was suddenly clear to Steve how easily they could overcome the problems that had been making him think of leaving. Steve decided to put all thoughts of leaving out of his mind.
It’s terribly frustrating to be able to do nothing but wait passively for signs like these. Fortunately, new hope is now entirely realistic for you. That’s why I’ve written this book. You can find answers to the questions most important to you:
No matter how hard it’s been for you to decide, now you can find out the truth about your relationship one way or the other, the whole truth, your own truth, the ultimate-reality-at-the-heart-of-everything truth. Now you can achieve the clarity that will enable you to feel confident making one of the most important choices of your life.
But finding clarity depends on whether you actually want to find clarity in the first place or whether the most comfortable place for you is staying up in the air the way you’ve been. Your relationship is either too good to leave or too bad to stay in. But it can’t be both. So there are definite answers for you here, but if you really don’t want to come to a decision, you’ll find that out as well.
We’ll talk a lot about love here. The clarity you’ll reach will also help you see how real your love is, and how strong. Love, which made everything so definite at the beginning, now makes everything more complicated. Sometimes things are terrible but your love still seems strong, and then what do you do about love? Sometimes things aren’t so bad but there’s little love left to hold them together, and then what does love mean for you?
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.
My mission is to do two things.
First, it’s to share with you the experiences of people who’ve wrestled with the issues you’re wrestling with and come out on the other side and to report what they discovered. For example, think about something that bothers you about your partner, that strongly weighs on the side of your leaving. Wouldn’t you want to know how other people bothered by that felt once they left? You’ll find that out here. And if something else pointed to a basic strength in a relationship that made people happy they stayed, you’d want to know that, too. And you will. And if yet another issue you’ve been stewing over really turned out not to make too big a difference one way or the other, you’d want to know that as well so you could stop stewing over it. And you will.
Second, my mission is to help you rediscover the value of your own experience. I’m not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat that has nothing to do with what you’ve felt and seen about your partner and your relationship. Just the opposite. We’ll keep returning to the basics of your own experience. The problem isn’t that you don’t know what’s going on; it’s that you’ve had trouble sorting it all out.
The choice you discover will be one you feel good about after you make it, and better and better about as time goes by. It will be a choice that leaves you free of regret. Which is exactly what you were looking for in the first place!
If you’ve suspected that it’s not good for you to stay up in the air, you’re right. Staying ambivalent, in fact, can cause tremendous damage. Being stuck like this can end up killing you emotionally if you stay when you should be getting out. And it can end up killing your relationship if you keep thinking about leaving when it could be fixed if you only put energy into it. You can end up being deprived of joy and of freedom, of intimacy and of hope. And it’s not as if waiting around is going to show you what’s best for you. Ambivalence doesn’t produce real answers. It’s just a dangerous trap.
Dee, a twenty-nine-year-old buyer, had lived with Keith for four years. There were good things about the relationship, like their strong sexual chemistry, but Dee was never really happy. They kept fighting about many things, like what Dee thought of as Keith’s irresponsibility, which she was afraid would only get worse in the future.
After they broke up last year, Dee was happier. But she was lonely. Now they’re dating each other again, partly because of her sexual needs, partly because she didn’t meet anyone better, and partly because Keith promised to grow up. And so their relationship chugs on, no better than it was before, filled with the same mixture of familiarity and misery it’s always had.
Dee’s not on the verge of making a commitment one way or the other. She’s on the verge of being stuck not knowing what to do with her relationship for a long time, possibly years.
Can you believe forty years? That’s how long another woman, Kate, spent neither being in her marriage nor leaving it but miserably camped on the outskirts of it, waiting for a sign to tell her what to do.
As you’ll see in a moment, Kate’s one of the most important women in my life; and the fact that she never broke through her ambivalence had an unhealthy impact on both of us. So its not only professionally but personally that I’ve experienced the terrible price we all pay for not knowing what to do with our relationships, all the pain and wasted time millions of people suffer from staying endlessly undecided.
Kate had married on the rebound after getting divorced following a brief first marriage. Her second husband, now dead, had been a businessman, volatile, quirky, sometimes unpleasant, but in some ways a decent guy. They were able to put up a good front, and their friends envied what from the outside seemed like one of the better marriages in their circle. But it was hard for Kate to remember when they’d ever had much in common. They usually couldn’t talk without fighting; when they weren’t fighting there was usually nothing to talk about.
It wasn’t the most terrible marriage in the world. There was just a lot of unhappiness in it flowing from distance and discord. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being best), Kate would’ve given it a 3. And yet she stayed in it, doing what she saw as her duty.
What do you think she should have done? Kate had two good alternatives. In spite of myths about women needing marriage, the evidence is now unmistakable that a woman like Kate could have been happy if she’d been on her own. And I believe she also could have had a chance at happiness if she’d stayed, working on the relationship more (perhaps going into couples therapy) instead of finding her energy sapped by thinking of leaving.
The Cost of Staying up in the Air. But Kate was terribly unhappy for forty years because she did neither. She waited for one milepost after another to pass—the kids starting school, her going back to work, the kids leaving home, her husband’s retiring—hoping that she’d get a sign that would tell her what to do.
Just think about what it must have been like to spend all those years thinking about leaving. It meant spending years stewing over all the things that were wrong with him and all the things that were wrong with her for staying with him. You pay a price for feasting on negativity like this. Suppose that it would have been best for Kate to leave. 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.
The woman I call “Kate” is my mother, with some details changed to protect her privacy (as I’ve done with all the people you’ll meet in this book), and her husband was my stepfather. In many ways, Kate’s a heroine, as a Holocaust survivor and a self-made businesswoman. But in this important way she didn’t know how to choose happiness. And in her ambivalence she’s like far too many of our parents, far too many people in middle age, and far too many people just starting out. I wrote this book to save others, to save you, from going through what my mother went through.
You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with you to feel so stuck. But the fact is that there’s an epidemic of ambivalence about many things these days. 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. We learn more and more things about ourselves without learning ways to sort them out or to sort out the feelings they generate in us.
This is particularly true when it comes to our relationships. As one actress said on TV, being interviewed about her marriage, “You’re supposed to reevaluate your relationship every day, aren’t you?” Only if you want to confuse and exhaust yourself. We’re told so many contradictory things: to be responsible to ourselves and to our partner, to be happy in ourselves and to be mature about our obligations, to fix our own lives above all else, and to fix our relationships no matter what.
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.
No wonder so many of us have trouble figuring out what’s best for us to do. But you can find the clarity you’re looking for if you want to. And I believe you do want to, and that you have everything it takes to see what’s best for you.
What makes a book like this possible is the fact that an individual can be unique and yet still be similar enough to other people to learn from them. Without our similarities, medicine and psychology would be impossible. It’s because we are similar that a diagnostic test or a wonder drug can help millions.
But it’s because we’re unique that medicine and psychology remain an art as well as a science. I know as a therapist that I can’t meet my responsibility to you if I forget for a moment that you are an individual. Just because you’re similar to other people in some respects doesn’t mean there aren’t profound differences as well. And I always have to take those differences into account.
But I also can’t meet my responsibility to you if I fail to probe for the experiences that link people. That’s the power that research and clinical practice give, not just mine but that of countless others, particularly Dr. Charles Foster, whose shoulders this book stands on.
This book is based on an attempt to answer questions people have asked for a long time:
Our research involved talking to people in the same situation you’re in. They were asked about their ambivalent feelings and their partners’ positives and negatives. They were followed over time, during which many tried to solve their problems (and many were successful) and many ended their relationships.
Then we tried to figure out what made some people say over whelmingly this made me happy I left and made other people say overwhelmingly this made me happy I stayed. These answers evolved into the questions and guidelines that form the backbone of this book.
The ultimate test of all this is in one-on-one work with people like you. Only when these sturdy truths make sense for a wide spectrum of individuals can any of us feel confident that real help is available.
To be fully responsible to your uniqueness, I have to be very careful about telling you what to do. But if I’ve found deep and powerful truths that hold up for large numbers of people, truths that have been validated over and over, don’t I also have a responsibility to tell you these truths? I can’t tell you what to do, but I can and must tell you what I know. I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you the odds.
It’s what trusted professionals in our lives do all the time. For example, about ten years ago I went to my dentist with a dull, intermittent toothache. He said I’d need a root canal to save the tooth and eliminate the source of the pain. He said that without a root canal the pain might go away for days or months or maybe even a year or two but it would come back and it would get worse. A root canal was the answer.
“How do you know for sure?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Everyone’s unique, but this is how things will probably work out in your case because, based on what I can see, it’s how things generally work out for people in the Kind of situation you’re in.”
I’m a show-me kind of person, so instead of following my dentists recommendation, I waited. I was betting that some quirky feature of my uniqueness would exempt me from the patterns my dentist knew so well.
Of course, he was right. I ended up in the worst pain of my life until I got the root canal I should’ve gotten earlier!
So here’s the deal between you and me. I won’t pull back from making definite recommendations about whether it’s best for you to stay or leave based on your realities and my research and twenty years of clinical experience. In turn, you won’t blindly follow my recommendations for people in a relationship like yours. You’ll certainly want to make sure that you listen to yourself first, to make sure that the reality you’ve uncovered does ring true for you.
And if you have a therapist or other trusted advisor, you’ll definitely want to run by them what you learn here. Nothing in this book overrules what a good therapist you’ve been working with might tell you.
At the same time, you know how easy it’s been for you to stay stuck in ambivalence, and this book is about finding clarity in your situation and giving yourself permission to act on that clarity. So our responsibility to each other requires me to tell you the truth as I know it, as definitively as I can. And it requires you to face your truth and then do something about it.
The truths I’ve discovered here are the kinds of things we all recognize when we hear them. They make sense to people. Your responsibility is to give them a chance to make sense to you. Don’t act on them before they make sense to you, but don’t fail to act on them afterward. Your life is too important to you to waste any part of it stuck in ambivalence.
Issue: Relationship Ambivalence
If you’re in a relationship that seems both too good to leave and too bad to stay in, every time something happens that clearly points to staying or leaving, you probably find yourself saying, “No, it can’t be that simple. There’s so much more for me to think about.” Then a dozen memories and feelings creep in and you say, “I’d better not make a decision until I see what’s best for everyone.” But you never do see what’s best for everyone.
This state you’re in is called relationship ambivalence.
We all feel doubts about our partners from time to time, and we all occasionally speculate about what it would be like to be on our own or live with a different person. But that’s not relationship ambivalence.
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. This shift can take place at any time, from soon after you meet to the day after your twenty-fifth anniversary or even later.
Before that shift, there’s a taken-for-granted quality to your thinking about the relationship, even if from time to time you get upset about things.
Then one too many things go wrong. New problems appear. Bad qualities in the other person or in the relationship get worse while good qualities dwindle or get lost. You find yourself complaining about things like the following:
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.
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.
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. Its 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.
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:
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.
And like all the other things you do in your ambivalence, distance only serves to make it worse. Now your ambivalence has taken on a life of its own.
What is it about relationship ambivalence that gets us stuck in it and keeps us stuck in it? Good question! The people I’ve worked with over the years are a smart bunch, and for a long time it didn’t make sense to me that women and men with all kinds of street smarts and academic smarts and every other kind of smarts could be so stuck.
I figured, wearing my researcher hat, that with all the differences among all these people there had to be something they shared deep down that was responsible not for their feeling iffy about their partners—we’ve all felt that from time to time—but for their getting stuck in feeling iffy, so stuck that they couldn’t find their way out.
I discovered that everyone stuck in relationship ambivalence shares an image so powerful, so controlling, that it shapes their entire experience of deciding what to do about an iffy relationship: the image of a balance scale. You know—the kind of scale the figure of Justice holds in her hand in front of the Supreme Court, with a pan on one side and a pan on the other side, all set up for weighing the evidence, pro and con. You might have used a scale like this yourself in high school chemistry.
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. |
All by yourself, you do what the opposing lawyers do at a trial, each lawyer piling up evidence on one side or the other. Then after acting as lawyer for both sides, you act as the jury, looking to see which pile of evidence weighs more. It’s instinctive. It’s universal. And it’s guaranteed to drive you crazy.
Weighing the pros and cons of staying or leaving isn’t like weighing a can of tomatoes against a box of cornflakes. It’s like placing puppies on a teeter-totter: everything constantly moves and shifts, nothing stays pinned down.
When it comes to relationships, the balance-scale approach is the problem, not the solution. It gets us into trouble, not out of it. How can you weigh the things you know about your relationship in the present against a huge uncertain future? How can you weigh a problem that’s bad for you against the knowledge that a lot of people have this problem but don’t seem to be breaking up their relationships over it? How can you weigh a problem that makes you want to scream today against the possibility that it won’t bother you so much tomorrow?
With the balance-scale approach pieces of evidence keep sliding in and out of the picture. You try to add things up that don’t add up, to compare things that can’t be compared. Like a tenderfoot in the woods, the more you try to find your way, the more lost you get.
Just look at the balance-scale approach in action. Here’s how Carol described it:
Two weeks ago Tom was so nice to me. I wish it could be like that all the time. But then last week he went back to being the way he usually is, where he’s so nasty and everything I do is wrong and he keeps putting me down and making my life miserable. How do I add those up? He leaves me alone to watch sports all the time and he yells at me if I want to talk about our problems, but sex is still okay with him. What does that add up to? To make it even more confusing, sometimes things are going well with me and the things I have trouble with about him don’t bother me so much.
There are more details, but Carol’s provided a good sketch of some of the pros and cons in her relationship. Is it clear to you what she should do? I don’t think it’s clear to anyone. Weighing the pros and cons just sucks you in to adding more and more things to the balance, and every time you add something the picture gets more confusing.
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. So whenever we see something “bad” that one person does, we look to see what the other person does to elicit it. For instance, if you say your partner’s nagging drives you crazy, we’ll say, okay, maybe your partner’s nagging but maybe you’re not listening.
But when you’re helping one person decide whether it’s best to stay or leave, you’ve got to look for the fly in the ointment, and it doesn’t matter who put it there. The balance-scale approach doesn’t work for anybody. I don’t think you’d be reading these words if the balance-scale approach had worked for you.
So no more relationship ambivalence, starting right now. No more putting your relationship on trial. No more weighing huge, unwieldy piles of evidence pro and con. No more listening to the voices on both sides producing endless arguments and very little clarity. Fortunately, there’s a much better alternative, one that will help you see straight through to the truth about your relationship.
Issue: Danger Signs
Here’s how to find your way out of relationship ambivalence. Don’t put your relationship on trial the way lawyers do. Make a diagnosis the way doctors do.
That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll ask one question at a time, step by step, responsibly searching for that one fact, that one piece of evidence about your relationship that makes clear what’s best for you to do. And it’s all based on what research shows are the experiences of other people in situations like yours.
It’s like going to the doctor for stomach pains. If she can diagnose appendicitis after some questions and a few tests, you’re all set. You don’t need to go through every test and weigh every possible piece of evidence pro and con. If your answer to one question doesn’t provide a diagnosis—“No, doctor, it doesn’t hurt there”—you move on to the next question or test until you find the smoking gun that points to a specific ailment.
It works much the same way here. Instead of balancing pros and cons, we’ll try to arrive at a diagnosis of your relationship. At each step you’ll answer a question about an issue between you and your partner. In most cases it’ll be a straightforward, easy-to-answer, yes-or-no question. Depending on your answer, you may be able to get a clear indication right then and there of whether it’s best for you to stay or leave. You’ll have found out what’s real about your relationship without needing to go further.
The order of the questions is carefully arranged. The main principle, as with any diagnostic procedure, is to deal with the clearest, most obvious issues first. For example, if your TV is on the fritz, the repairperson will check if you’ve forgotten to plug it in or if the cable box is properly connected before looking into the subtler malfunctions deep in the electronic bowels of the set.
In the same way, earlier diagnostic questions here deal with clearer, more obvious issues, and later questions deal with more nuanced issues. By the end we’ll have dealt with all the major issues that might bother you—from intimacy to power, from affairs to lying, from sex to money, from your hurts from the past to your hopes for the future, from signs you really hate each other to signs you really belong together. We’ll investigate everything that goes on in relationships from the point of view of what makes them too bad to stay in or too good to leave.
By the end you’ll know which is true for you.
All that needs to happen as you read is that you trust yourself, take things a step at a time, and think of each question as an opportunity to find out what’s real for you. Often you’ll know the answer right away, but sometimes you may have to sift through your thoughts and feelings and memories.
Most people come up with their answers fairly easily, because that’s how these questions were designed. It’s no more difficult than when your optometrist clicks those lenses back and forth and asks you if you can see better the first way or the second way. Either one is better or the other is better or you can’t tell the difference: they are all valid answers. The point is that with the step-by-step approach all you have to do is come up with one answer to one question about one issue at a time.
The diagnostic questions here include everything that’s important to pay attention to in deciding whether to stay or leave. If it’s not in the questions, it’s not so important in deciding what’s best for you, and you can let go of worrying about it. So let’s get started.
You’ve probably put a lot of energy into thinking about the bad times in your iffy relationship, but in this first step I’d like you to think about the good times for a moment. The best time, in fact. Try to remember when you felt most comfortable, most satisfied, most optimistic about the relationship you’re in. It could have been the day you met, the time you took your first trip together, a special rainy weekend the first year you were married, a period when you were working together to achieve some joint goal. If you’ve been together a long time, don’t worry about being too thorough. Trust your unconscious to throw a searchlight on a “best” time even if it’s not the absolute best.
Now ask yourself:
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?
This is a simple question. Were things between you actually very good when they were at their best?
What do I mean by “very good”? Some people, even in relationships that feel awful now, know that there was a time in the past when things were wonderful. They were in love, they were genuinely happy, they felt good about themselves when they were with the other—there was a kind of happy magic of warmth and connectedness. Their answer to question #1 is yes.
But other people realize that the “best” was never very good. Something was wrong. They’re usually referring to an empty, distant, tainted, painful quality at the core of their relationship, even back then. Their answer to question #1 is no.
Here are some things people have said describing “best” times that weren’t very good: