Should You Stay or Should You Go?
How to make one of the hardest relationship decisions.
I don’t know about you all, but May felt 100 years long while June has moved at a supersonic speed. Maybe it’s because June had a lot of family milestones, including one of my kids graduating from elementary school and another graduating from middle school (there’s a third one, too. He’s making a less momentous transition into second grade).
June also involved another fun milestone: our very first Relational Riffs book club! A number of paid subscribers joined me for an truly delightful conversation about the book Wellness, by Nathan Hill (I’m still on a book club high from this thought-provoking, laughter filled conversation!).1 Sparked by a comment during the book club, today’s newsletter will explore a profoundly important relationship question: how do you know whether to stay or go?
To stay or to go, that is the question.
When The Clash penned their song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” in 1981, they offered the perfect anthem for folks struggling with this most difficult of relationship questions. The question of whether to “grit or quit” is one most of us ask ourselves at one point or another. Though we’ll talk today about relationships, it’s a question we might also ask about a job, friendship, side hustle, or a poker hand. I mean, who doesn’t have at least one area of life dominated by a struggle between staying or going?
Sadly, the song doesn’t have an answer for knowing when to walk away. Maybe it’s because The Clash was wise enough to know there really isn’t a simple recipe to be had? But we don’t need to throw up our hands entirely. We can find helpful, science-backed guidance that helps us productively frame our approach to deciding whether to grit or quit.
What does it mean about your relationship that you’re asking the question?
Wondering if you should stay or go often results from having invested a lot in the relationship, yet finding yourself feeling deeply unhappy, unsatisfied, or unsure if this relationship is the “right” one to remain committed to.
It’s easy to read unhappiness as a clear sign. But the good news (or bad, I suppose, if you’re looking for a clear answer) is that unhappiness isn’t, in and of itself, a sign of what you should do. In fact, it’s pretty normal to have crummy phases in long-term partnerships. As longitudinal research shows, relationships often go through ups and downs.
But there’s a difference between being in an unhappy relationship worth committing to versus being unhappy enough that it’s wise to consider quitting the whole enterprise. I’d argue that the difference has a whole lot to do with what you and your partner are willing to do with the relationship.
Unhealthy relationships can become healthy ones if you and your partner are willing and able to do the work of repairing and strengthening them. I’ve been seeing couples for two decades in private practice and have witnessed many partners on the brink of divorce, having gone through betrayals, or simply feeling like they aren’t a good match find their way back to one another. Yes, this reconnection takes a lot of work and willingness to be uncomfortable. But those willing to do it have a decent shot tn their relationship at turning their relationships around through therapy, or by doing the work on their own.
Of course, not every couple has a happy ending, even if they try hard. Some things aren’t worth trying to overcome, some relationships are too unhealthy to save. In these cases, going makes sense.
But the decision is trickier for some couples: those who find themselves uncertain about what is possible to try to achieve. Hence the questioning about whether to stay or go.
Why we get stuck in decision-limbo.
Finding yourself preoccupied by the question of “stay or go” can motivate deeper inquiry or forward-moving action—that’s a good thing! But rather than inspiring movement, many people instead find themselves in an earworm-like limbo. They’re unhappy but unclear about whether they’d be happier by leaving. Plus, it’s scary to exit into the unknown. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, as the old saying goes.
Limbo is a hard place to exit, but it’s not a good place to stay. Take it from this cat.
who writes the Substack , is a decision-making guru and retired world class poker player. She is also an advocate for rebranding quitting, which she says gets an undeserved bad rap. Duke explains that we often stay in limbo instead of quitting (even when it’s clear we should) in her book, Quit.2An abundance of research shows that when we are confronted with the choice to walk away from a relationship (or the poker table, a job, or a tedious book), our brains default to believing something that we’ve already invested in is superior to something we haven’t yet tried (this is called the “endowment effect”). And sometimes, we are reluctant to walk away because we’ve invested so much into the relationship (this is called the “sunk cost effect”). These cognitive biases can keep us chugging along, not changing a thing, even when it’s clear that a different course of action would be wiser.
How to exit inaction inertia.
That doesn’t mean you should quit whenever you have doubts or feel unhappy. But it does suggest that people need tricks to help escape inaction inertia.
Consider this valuable tip from science exploring ways to exit decision inaction: take a trip to the future. Think out two or ten years from now and ask, “Looking back on myself during this phase, what would I wish I had tried?”
It’s unlikely that you’ll wish you had done the ostrich move and stuck your head in the sand. More likely, you’ll identify a desire to have given yourself and your relationship a shot by giving it your all. Or you might identify a wish to have taken a cue to exit the relationship to give yourself a real shot at happiness. Either way, thinking from the position of your future self can help provide motivation to try something different.
Of course, even if you do decide it’s worth it to try, there are no guarantees in improving your relationship. Instead of allowing yourself to default to remaining trapped in limbo, use Duke’s strategy of “kill criteria” to help create a structured action plan.3
Kill criteria are predesignated goals that, if unmet, anchor you to a decision to quit. They prevent hanging on too long. To develop these criteria, ask yourself, “Given what’s most important to me, how long do I think the current situation is reasonable to tolerate?” Then, identify signals that things have improved, as well as signals that things have not improved, to look for at the end of that timeframe.
But here is an important key: don’t wait for change to happen to you. Instead, together with your partner, consider what kind of efforts make sense to try. You might decide, for instance, to give yourself and your partner six months to work on reconnecting. Signals of improvement might include more joyous moments together or greater willingness to try to understand one another. Efforts might involve therapy, weekly check-ins, or date nights.
Setting kill criteria jointly and agreeing on a plan to work toward achieving goals helps you and your partner be on the same page about what it would take to give your relationship a chance to survive. It motivates you to try, and to try in a structured, goal-oriented way. And it helps avert the possibility of singing The Clash anthem for the rest of your life since, if objectives are not met, you are contractually obligated to follow through on your predesignated quit plan.
In summary.
Here’s a summary of the “should I stay or go” tips:
Don’t make too much of unhappy phases. In and of themselves, they aren’t meaningful indicators of what you “should” do.
If you find yourself stuck in inaction for an extended period, take a trip to the future. What would your future self want you to try?
If leaving is a serious but not final consideration, develop “kill criteria” together with your partner. Try to make progress on reaching them in a designated timeline. If you can’t, then you’ve collected valuable evidence suggesting you should go.
1 The book club will meet quarterly to discuss books—fiction and nonfiction—with relationship themes. To join the fun, consider a paid subscription.
2 I go on obsessive jags about books where I pressure everyone I know to read something that I found powerfully transformative. Duke’s book, Quit was one such read. I highly recommend this book, and you can also check out my interview with Annie Duke, where I get her to discuss quitting relationships.
3 In addition to Quit , I also highly recommend the book, Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions by Myra Strober and
(and also Abby’s awesome Substack, .
Love the concept of "kill criteria" for any domain in which you're investing resources - career, relationships, financial investments.
Appreciated this so much