Relationship
You're in a relationship and you're in love with someone else and you've been frozen between them for months.
You’re with your partner. You’re in love with someone else. It might be physical, it might be entirely emotional, it might be entirely in your head. You haven’t done anything you’d consider a betrayal, or you have and you can’t stop. You spend the day thinking about the other person. You look at your partner across the dinner table and feel like a fraud. You don’t know whether to leave, stay and tell, stay and not tell, end the other thing, escalate the other thing, or freeze for another six months and hope something changes.
The freezing has become its own decision. While you can’t decide, the situation is deciding for you.
The split is still here.
You very likely came up watching the adults around you stay in marriages they shouldn’t have, and you absorbed that staying is what people do regardless of what’s happening underneath. You may have grown up the kid who learned to hold contradictions silently, and you’ve kept up the practice into adulthood with two people you can’t tell about each other. You may have built your adult identity around being the loyal one, and the existence of the other person has cracked the version of yourself you’d assembled. You may have arrived at this point after years of feeling unseen in your relationship, and the new person is showing you a version of yourself you’d forgotten was there.
Holding both feels safer than choosing either. As long as you haven’t decided, neither door is closed. The relationship doesn’t have to end. The other thing doesn’t have to be given up. Each option remains theoretically available.
The cost of the freeze is steep. Your partner is being lied to, even if only by omission. The other person is being held in suspension. You’re not in either relationship cleanly. The longer the freeze runs, the more damage it does to all three positions.
If you’ve already crossed lines, see I cheated on my partner . If the other person doesn’t return your feelings, see I’m in love with someone who doesn’t love me back .
The freeze is a decision dressed up as not-deciding. It’s the most expensive option of the three.
Strategic therapy ends the freeze by removing the small daily compromises that have been keeping all three positions liveable at once. You stop being able to hold both relationships in suspension, because the behaviour that suspended them gets blocked. With nowhere to hide the contradiction, you find out which one you actually want.
You stop deciding by not deciding. What’s left is a choice you make on purpose.
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