And so imagining what your life will be like if you leave hasn’t helped.
Friends Try to Help. And your friends haven’t really given you the clarity you’re looking for either. I’m not saying they haven’t listened and been supportive and offered advice. It’s just that as you’ve tried to sort out all the issues and figure out what’s best for you to do, your friends haven’t been able to convince you about what’s best one way or the other.
I’ve seen cases where every friend a person has says leave, leave, leave! and yet somehow instead of it making everything clear it makes nothing clear. In spite of this passionate consensus, you might feel that your friends don’t really know your partner or your relationship, that all they’ve heard most clearly are your complaints as you’ve used their shoulders to cry on.
And I’ve seen cases where every single friend says stay, and you just feel that for whatever reason your friends are somehow invested in your staying together, that they’ll somehow be more devastated if you break up than you’ll be.
And so all your wrestling with issues and trying to put them into perspective has given you little clarity. This confusion can be tormenting. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve prayed for their partner to do something really awful, just so they would get the clarity they need. But that clarity doesn’t come.
And so here you are. You’ve spent what must feel like a very long time now dancing in the dark, flip-flopping back and forth about whether to stay or leave.
LOOKING FOR CLARITY IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
I’ve talked about what’s similar in what people go through, but the actual experience of relationship ambivalence itself varies widely. Here are some snapshots of what it’s like for different people to be stuck in relationship ambivalence:
• One person goes through long stretches when things are really bad and she feels she’s definitely going to leave, but then there’s some mysterious atmospheric change and suddenly things are okay and she doesn’t want to rock the boat by even thinking about problems, much less thinking about leaving.