/philosophy

We human beings have a pretty terrifying capacity to hang in there when we are unhappy simply because the situation is familiar. Staying where it hurts feels safer than packing your bags and heading somewhere you have absolutely no reference for. Except sometimes this stubbornness in dragging out a relationship that has already died goes way past emotional wear and tear and ends in the worst possible way. You can see this in cases that made headlines worldwide, like the story of Shanan and Chris Watts, who looked perfect on the internet but lived in a broken marriage that ended in that brutal way ([https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46269389](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46269389)). Or the case of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie, who traveled together in a lifestyle that looked like a dream to many, but hid an extremely unhappy and violent dynamic that ended in the middle of the desert ([https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/gabby-petito-brian-laundrie-timeline.html](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/gabby-petito-brian-laundrie-timeline.html)). There is also the classic and terrible history of Nicole Brown Simpson and O.J. Simpson, where years of fights, breakups, makeups, and deep unhappiness exploded into a tragedy that newspapers still cover to this day ([https://www.latimes.com/local/la-oj-simpson-stories-storygallery.html](https://www.latimes.com/local/la-oj-simpson-stories-storygallery.html)). If you ask anyone on the street what to do if a relationship is bad, the answer is going to be obvious. Everyone says the right thing is to break up. In theory the logic is perfect, but when you are actually living the situation, your brain plays against you. Staying in a relationship that drains your energy and leaves you crying yourself to sleep feels like a voluntary form of stupidity, but there are very practical and psychological reasons that explain why so many people stay trapped with someone who makes them miserable. One of these reasons is what economists call the sunk cost fallacy, but it applies perfectly to love. It is like when you buy an expensive ticket for a concert in the middle of a storm, you have the flu, you do not want to go, but you go anyway because the money already left your pocket. In a relationship, that ticket is the time you spent with the person. We think about the five or ten years of investment, the plans we made, and how much work it took to build a life together. The focus stays trapped on what you already lost back then, instead of what you keep losing every single day you spend insisting on the mistake. Besides, uncertainty is just too scary. The routine of a bad relationship is boring and painful, but it is predictable. You already know what the fights look like, you know exactly what is going to annoy the other person, and you know how the weekend is going to play out. Breaking away from that means facing the emptiness of a quiet house, the obligation to start going out with new people, and the annoyance of explaining to acquaintances that everything is over. For a lot of people, facing loneliness head-on seems like a lot more work than enduring the daily dissatisfaction that has already become the normal state of the house. The self-esteem issue comes into play here too. We tend to accept the level of affection we think we deserve. If someone grew up watching their parents fight all the time, or went through experiences that destroyed their self-confidence, the bar of expectations goes way down. The person looks at the partner who ignores them and thinks that if they break up, nobody else will want to be with them because of their age, their body, or their baggage. Unhappiness becomes a sort of acceptable tax they pay just to not be alone. There is a vicious cycle in this that is very biological as well. In marriages that live in crisis, affection works on sporadic rewards. A partner spends a whole week cold and distant, treating the other poorly, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, spends a day being super attentive and loving. This sudden relief causes such a massive rush of well-being in the brain that the person becomes addicted to waiting for the next good phase. When they try to break up, the longing hits so hard it feels like an actual withdrawal crisis, which makes most people run right back to the same old problem. In most cases, at least in my experience, the pressures coming from the outside matter a lot. Nobody wants to be the couple that failed in the friend group or the family. There is the issue of children too, because many people still believe that keeping the home together at all costs protects the kids. Except reality shows that growing up hearing arguments or living in an environment where parents barely look at each other creates much more trauma than seeing parents separated but living in peace. A lot of relationships do not end with a big cinematic fight or a betrayal exposed on the internet. They just die on the inside. It becomes a bit of a zombie relationship, which keeps walking but has no life left in it. You notice this when the silence between the two isn't that nice, comfortable rest, but rather an effort to not say anything that might start an argument. Or when your partner lets you know they need to work late and you feel a massive wave of relief in your chest instead of missing them. The person stops trying to fix things and just accepts the lack of color as their new reality. To get out of this cycle, the most important thing is not packing your bags in a rush in the middle of the night, but starting to realize what is actually happening. We need to stop making excuses for behavior that hurts. It helps a lot to talk to real friends or a therapist, just to make sure that a safe world exists on the outside of that relationship. Time is going to pass either way, and it is worth thinking about whether a few years from now you want to be celebrating your time of freedom or regretting another decade lost on the same couch.