![]() ![]() I know the thought of getting over your grief sounds just as upsetting as being in it. I know that advice isn’t overly helpful, though. Or rather, the inevitable healing that will happen within that time. I know that dark place really well and (platitude incoming) the only thing that helped was time. Am I a monster for leaving someone who loves me unconditionally? But on the other hand, my ex-girlfriend wants nothing more than for this to work and I’m afraid I’m making a huge mistake. My mind says I did…that if we got back together, I would just continue the cycle of going through the motions and being half-bored all the time. ![]() I guess I’m wondering…how do I know if I made the right decision in leaving? Did you regret it? Why did you leave? Was it a chemistry issue? A lack of compatibility? I’m in the midst of intense guilty sadness and am questioning whether I made the right call. ![]() I recently broke up with my girlfriend of four years, and almost everything you described in this story about leaving a happy relationship, I felt, too. I still get questions all the time about staying in or leaving relationships that feel just left of “right”-and while I more so believe in a shifting set of pros and cons than a divine path forward-I do think most people have a deeper truth hidden somewhere in their guts, layered under a lot of secondary emotions like fear and guilt. For people with an avoidant attachment, consciously paying attention to challenging feelings and concerns is important to do in spite of the emotional discomfort.I wrote the below advice column in September of 2017, and am re-sharing it today in honor of Mistakes Month. On the other hand, chronic indifference may be a sign of an underlying avoidance of intimacy and lower consideration of both staying and leaving factors. Slowing down to recognize anxious feelings which may be driving over-thinking-and dealing with the anxiety more effectively-may be useful. Recognizing that this ambivalence may be driven by anxious attachment can help one think more clearly about the decision-making process. People who remain ambivalently involved in a long-term relationship may struggle to participate in the relationship in a way which leads to greater satisfaction, and may have difficulty making a clean break when they do decide to leave. The question of whether people are making decisions based on what they are seeking or what they are staying away from may affect the outcome of the decision, and so is important to bear in mind in order to be better informed about a major life decision.įinally, it is important when considering ending a relationship to be aware of one's attachment style and to recognize the presence of ambivalence and indifference in our thinking. Because the average age was comparatively low, it would be interesting to see if future research finds the same trends in older married couples contemplating separation and divorce. When it comes to reasons for leaving, however, they are less dependent on marital status than reasons for staying. With dating relationships, we may more strongly consider staying in order to find what we are looking for, and with marital relationships, we may stay because of what we don't want to deal with, at least in this sample. This work reveals several important features about decision-making when the future of an important relationship is in doubt, and spells out that we weigh a variety of factors related to feelings about and consequences of both leaving and staying.ĭepending on where we are in a relationship, we may more heavily look at some factors over others when it comes to thinking about staying. A quarter of these participants were married, or in a common-law relationship they considered equivalent to marriage the rest were dating seriously. In that group of 171 participants, the average age was 31.7 37 percent were men and on average the length of their relationships was nearly four years. In the third sample in Study 1, they looked at an older group of adults who were (then) currently considering ending their relationship. ![]() There was a diverse range of experiences of contemplating relationships, and some of the relationships were newer and some more established. The three samples were two groups of undergraduates averaging about 20 years old, few of whom were married 40 percent men and dating for about 17 months on average. In Study 1, they looked at three samples, asking participants open-ended questions about reasons they would consider staying or leaving, and analyzed those responses to develop the survey tool for Study 2. Find a therapist to strengthen relationships. ![]()
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