Why Can’t I Just Decide?

Deciding whether to stay or leave is one of the hardest things a person can do. Not because the answer isn't always clear, but because knowing something and being able to act on it are two very different things.

One thing worth understanding before you read further: there's a difference between hurt and harm. Leaving hurts. The grief is real, the loss is real, and the pain of ending something you loved is real. But none of those are harming you. Doing something that hurts is painful, but it's temporary and there's little, if any, long term residue.

Staying in something that's harming you is different. The painful parts of the relationship are actively causing damage: making you doubt yourself, making you feel small, silencing you to keep the peace, chipping away at your self-worth, conditioning you to blame yourself for everything. These are not temporary problems that will go away when the relationship ends. These are things that cause actual damage and can take years to overcome. 

Most people are so focused on avoiding short-term pain that they don't realize they're choosing long-term damage instead.

Why is knowing what to do so hard?
Because leaving is often about much more than just them. It's about everything attached to the relationship: your history, your identity, the memories of better times, the future you imagined with them, hope, fear of being wrong, fear of being alone or starting over, what leaving might say about who you are as a person, what others might think.

Your brain is telling you this isn't safe anymore, but your nervous system is playing every worst case scenario it can think of. It's making every negative outcome feel catastrophic even thought they're never as bad as you think. It makes fear so loud that it drowns out everything else. Your nervous system doesn't care about happiness or inner peace. It cares about immediate safety, which often comes at the expense of your long-term happiness and well being.

What happens if I stay?
More of the same. Guaranteed.

The patterns that exist in your relationship right now are unlikely to change without significant intervention. And even then, change is slow, painful, and not guaranteed. Most people who want to change never do. That's not cynical, that's just how it is. People go to therapy, make real efforts for a few months, maybe see some progress early on. But sustaining it is hard. Really hard.

Look at New Year's resolutions. More than 90% of people abandon them by March. The average person stops trying to make the changes they want to make within weeks or months. Not because they stopped wanting it, but because starting is easy and maintaining is hard. Other things take priority, the work gets harder, the price gets higher, and pretty soon you've stopped trying.

The success rate is remarkably low among people who are eager and motivated to change. Odds are , your partner is neither. Even if they were, this isn’t just building a new habit. This kind of change requires changing deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It means changing their internal belief system. It means changing their values. That's much, much harder.

You're not making a choice between the pain of leaving and the joy of staying. You're choosing between the temporary pain of leaving and the ongoing pain plus long-term damage of staying.

What would happen if I left?
Probably not what you think.

It starts hard. Really hard. Grief, heartbreak, self-doubt, second-guessing, wondering if you made a mistake. You’re starting over, you feel alone. You're definitely going to feel worse before you feel better. Your nervous system will use that to convince you that you've made a horrible mistake. But that's just how it responds to pain. It was wired to protect you from life or death situations. But we're not outrunning saber tooth tigers anymore, we're navigating emotions. It’s just that our nervous system doesn't know the difference. So it tells you leaving will destroy your life when that’s almost never the case.

What you're feeling is real. But it's not accurate.

Over time the anxiety fades. The things you were afraid of either never happen or aren't nearly as bad as you expected. You start feeling better. You don’t walk on eggshells anymore. It's not an easy road, but neither is staying. At least this one has a light at the end of it.

Leaving is like ripping off a bandaid. It hurts like hell but you get it over with. Staying is death by 1000 papercuts. It drags out the pain and prevents healing. Two years from now you can be in the same relationship: confused, hurt, anxious, and desperate for relief and still facing the same decision, or you can be largely healed and living a better life.

Can they change?
Maybe. But probably not in the way you're hoping, on the timeline you need, or without significant professional help over years, not weeks or months.

Real change requires someone to first acknowledge they're causing harm. Then they have to genuinely want to change. Then they have to actively work on changing, consistently, over an incredibly long period of time. It’s a brutal, painful process. Most people fail.

In the beginning you may see glimpses of the person you fell in love with. They’re kinder, less reactive, more affectionate. You’re fighting less and not having to walk on eggshells all the time. Things seem to be getting better and you feel really hopeful and happy again.

This is very common, but it doesn’t mean there has been any meaningful change. The beginning is the easiest part. Most people don't stay with it long enough (again we’re talking years) and end up reverting back to their old ways.

So can people change? Absolutely. Do they? Not very often.