Verke Editorial

Should I stay or leave? How to decide about your relationship when you can't tell anymore

Verke Editorial · September 28, 2026

You have been having the argument for months, and the other side of it is also you. In the car it is obvious that you should go. At the kitchen table, when they laugh at something on their phone and turn it to show you, it is obvious that you should stay. You have made lists. You have typed this exact question into a search bar at two in the morning and closed the tab before anything loaded, half afraid of the answer and half afraid of who might see the history.

Everyone else seems certain. Friends who have met your partner twice. Your mother, in either direction. The version of you from three years ago, who would not recognise the person putting up with this, or the person thinking of throwing it away. The only one who cannot decide is the one who has to. Meanwhile life keeps making decisions on your behalf: the holiday gets booked, the lease gets renewed, someone asks about children, and each of those feels like a choice you made by not making one.

This article is for that state. It explains why the question loops instead of resolving, separates the two questions you are almost certainly running together, gives you four exercises that turn the loop into evidence, describes what a fair trial period looks like and how to end one, and says plainly when this is not a decision question at all but a safety one. It will not tell you what to do. That part stays yours.

Most decisions are a choice between something good and something worse, and the mind is well built for those. This one is a choice between two things you want, each of which costs you the other. You want the history, the shared language, the person who knows how you take your coffee and what your father was like. You also want to stop feeling the way you feel on a Sunday evening. Wanting both is not indecision. It is an accurate reading of a situation in which both losses are real, and the mind treats an unresolved loss the way it treats an unresolved threat: it comes back to it, again and again, checking whether anything has changed.

Emotionally focused therapy, the approach to couples work developed by Sue Johnson, adds something useful here. Underneath almost every long argument between partners, it says, is a much shorter question that neither person is asking out loud: are you there for me? Do I matter to you? When the answer feels uncertain, people protest in one of two ways. One partner pushes for contact: raises the issue again, asks why, gets louder, gets critical. The other protects by withdrawing: goes quiet, gets reasonable, changes the subject, finds something to do in another room. Each reads the other's move as proof. The pursuer sees the withdrawal and thinks they do not care. The withdrawer sees the pursuit and thinks I can never get it right. Round it goes.

After enough rounds, something changes that looks like peace. The pursuer stops pursuing. The house gets quieter, the arguments stop, and both partners tell friends that things are calmer now. This is the stage at which the stay-or-leave question most often arrives, because the pursuing partner has not stopped wanting; they have stopped asking. Our article on The same fight over and over — why couples loop, and how to break it describes the cycle itself in detail. What matters for the decision is this: if you recognise the cycle, then what you are trying to judge is not your partner. It is a pattern the two of you built together, and patterns respond differently to effort than people do.

It also explains why the question cannot be settled from inside your own head, however many hours you give it. You are trying to decide about a relationship using half the data. Your half. The other half is what actually happens when you reach for this person honestly, and that is something you cannot think your way to. You have to do it and watch. Most of this article is about how.

"Should I stay or leave" is not one question. It is two, and they have different answers, and running them together is a large part of why the loop never closes.

• Can this relationship be repaired? A question about the pattern, about both of you, and above all about whether the other person is willing and able to meet you if you reach. It has an empirical answer, and you can find it out.
• Do I want to repair it? A question about you alone: what you want, what you have stopped wanting, and whether the version of you that stays is a person you would choose to be. Nobody can find this out for you, but the exercises below make it easier to hear.

The two get tangled in predictable ways. It could probably be fixed, so I should stay is the first question answering the second, and it produces people who remain out of obligation and call it loyalty. I do not feel like trying, so it must be unfixable is the second answering the first, and it produces people who leave a repairable relationship and then spend years wondering. Held apart, each becomes answerable. Held together, they cancel each other out and you get another year of the loop.

One practical suggestion before the exercises: ban the word "should" for a month. Every time it appears in your head, replace it with "want" or "could" and notice what the sentence turns into. "I should stay for the kids" becomes either "I want to stay for the kids" or "I could stay for the kids," and those are different sentences with different feelings attached. The word "should" hides which one you mean.

These take two to three weeks, and they involve writing things down. That is the point. The loop lives in your head, where the same three memories get replayed and weighed and replayed again. Evidence lives on paper, where it can be read on a good day and a bad one and stays the same. The first and third exercises answer the question about the relationship. The second and fourth answer the question about you.

Most "trying" in a struggling relationship is undated and unspecific. "We will see how it goes." It goes the same, because nothing in particular was asked of anyone, and the trial expires never, so the stay-or-leave question simply resumes the following spring. If the exercises above left you leaning toward repair, the way to protect that decision from becoming another year of drift is to make the trial a real one. A fair trial has four parts.

Should your partner know the relationship is on trial? Ideally, yes. If they do not, you are grading an exam they do not know they are sitting, and you will end up leaving over things they were never asked to change. Telling them is the hard conversation, and it is also, in itself, a bid: "I am not sure about us, and I want to find out with you rather than on my own." How they receive that sentence goes in the left column too.

When the date comes, there are three honest outcomes. Enough moved: you drop the trial frame and carry on, with the named changes becoming how you live. Nothing moved: you have your answer, and it is a kinder and clearer answer than the one you would have had six months ago, because you tried in a way you can respect. Or something moved, but not enough. Then one more term, with a new date, is fair. Only one. A trial that renews indefinitely is "we will see how it goes" wearing a calendar. If the effort keeps collapsing at the same point, and both of you are willing, a couples therapist is the next step rather than a third term; our article on Emotionally focused couples therapy: how it works, what a session is like, and three exercises to try tonight describes what that looks like.

Some of what brings people to this question is not ambivalence. If there is violence in the relationship, or the threat of it. If your partner controls your money, your movements, who you see, or your phone. If you are afraid of how they would react to your saying any of the sentences in this article. If you have started to feel, year on year, like less of a person than you were. Then the exercises above are the wrong tool. Every one of them assumes two people who are safe with each other, and a soft bid made to someone who is not safe can make things worse.

That is not a decision question. It is a safety question, and it has a different order of operations: talk to a domestic abuse service in your country before you talk to your partner. They plan exits with people every day, they will not rush you, and they know things about money, housing and timing that you do not yet. The crisis numbers at the bottom of this page are for tonight; a local service is for the plan. If you are unsure whether what you are living in counts, that uncertainty is itself a reason to call and describe it to someone who has heard a thousand versions.

If both of you are willing to try, the best-evidenced help for the cycle described here is a human couples therapist, ideally one trained in emotionally focused therapy. A therapist in the room can do what neither of you can do alone: catch the moment you both reach for armour and slow it down enough for something else to happen. There are also short, structured formats designed for exactly the state this article is about, where one partner is leaning out and the other is leaning in, and a good therapist will tell you which fits. If you can get that help, get it.

And notice whether the question is sitting on top of something else. If you have been low for months, sleeping badly, unable to remember what you enjoy, and the stay-or-leave question feels less like a choice than like a fog, it may be that a low mood is answering the question for you. A depressed mind tends to answer "stay or leave" with "nothing will help either way," and that is a symptom, not a verdict. See a doctor or a therapist for yourself, whatever happens with the relationship. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, or of harming yourself or anyone else, do not wait for a better moment. The numbers at the bottom of this page are for tonight. For the longer road, whichever way you go, our article Moving on after a separation or divorce: what actually helps picks up where this one stops.

Almost all of the loop happens when you are on your own: at 2 a.m., on the commute, in the minute after your partner leaves the room and you replay what you did not say. That is where a coach is useful, and you do not need your partner's agreement, or even their knowledge, to start. One person getting clearer changes what happens between two.

Marie, Verke's relationships coach, is built on the EFT frame this article uses. With her you can sort what you feel from what you want, which are tangled right now and which the people around you tend to tangle further. You can hold the two questions apart when they run together. You can keep the two-column week honest, because she will ask whether a camera would have seen the thing you just wrote on the left. And you can rehearse the bid. Marie can play your partner, including the response you are most afraid of, so that the first time you say the soft sentence out loud is not the time it counts.

She works in text or by voice, at any hour, and she remembers what you told her, so you are not starting the story again each time. She has no stake in whether you stay or leave and will not steer you toward either. She will tell you plainly when what you are describing needs a couples therapist, a doctor, or a safety service rather than a coach.