I’m a show-me kind of person, so instead of following my dentist’s recommendation, I waited. I was betting that some quirky feature of my uniqueness would exempt me from the patterns my dentist knew so well.

Of course, he was right. I ended up in the worst pain of my life until I got the root canal I should’ve gotten earlier!

So here’s the deal between you and me. I won’t pull back from making definite recommendations about whether it’s best for you to stay or leave based on your realities and my research and twenty years of clinical experience. In turn, you won’t blindly follow my recommendations for people in a relationship like yours. You’ll certainly want to make sure that you listen to yourself first, to make sure that the reality you’ve uncovered does ring true for you.

And if you have a therapist or other trusted advisor, you’ll definitely want to run by them what you learn here. Nothing in this book overrules what a good therapist you’ve been working with might tell you.

At the same time, you know how easy it’s been for you to stay stuck in ambivalence, and this book is about finding clarity in your situation and giving yourself permission to act on that clarity. So our responsibility to each other requires me to tell you the truth as I know it, as definitively as I can. And it requires you to face your truth and then do something about it.

The truths I’ve discovered here are the kinds of things we all recognize when we hear them. They make sense to people. Your responsibility is to give them a chance to make sense to you. Don’t act on them before they make sense to you, but don’t fail to act on them afterward. Your life is too important to you to waste any part of it stuck in ambivalence.