Relationship
The thought arrives every day for years and you make breakfast and pretend it didn't.
The thought of leaving has been with you for two years, or five, or fifteen. It arrives in the kitchen, on the commute, when they say something that lands wrong. You imagine the conversation. You imagine the apartment you’d live in. Sometimes you write the message in your head. You don’t send it. You don’t say it. The next morning you make breakfast and pretend yesterday didn’t happen. The pattern has been running long enough that “thinking about leaving” has become its own activity, separate from any actual leaving.
The thought is there every day. The decision never gets made. Both facts are part of the same pattern.
The thought is back tomorrow.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up watching the adults around you stay in relationships they shouldn’t have, and you absorbed that staying is what people do, regardless of how it feels. You may have grown up with a parent who threatened to leave for years and never did, and you learned that the threat is the whole conversation. You may have built your adult identity around being the one who keeps things together, and leaving would mean dismantling not just the relationship but who you’ve decided you are. You may have arrived at this point after years of believing things would change, and you’ve stayed through enough small losses that the cost of leaving has come to feel bigger than the cost of staying.
The thought of leaving is doing something for you. It might be releasing pressure, providing the imagined exit you don’t actually want to take. It might be substituting for the conversation you can’t have. It might be the only place you get to feel like the decision is yours.
The thinking-about is the loop. As long as the thinking is providing the function, the leaving doesn’t have to happen and the relationship doesn’t have to change. The middle position is sustainable in a way that’s terrible for everyone involved.
If you stay because you’re afraid of being alone, see I stay because I’m afraid to be alone . If you’re in love with someone else, see I’m in love with someone other than my partner .
The thinking-about is what’s letting you avoid the decision. As long as it’s doing that job, you won’t make the decision.
Strategic therapy unwinds the thinking-about itself, because that loop is the thing keeping you in place. You stop being allowed to rehearse leaving as a private activity, and the rehearsal stops absorbing the pressure that should drive an actual choice. Once the loop loses its job, the decision arrives, and it arrives as yours.
The day you stop thinking about leaving is the day you find out what you’re going to do.
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