And like all the other things you do in your ambivalence, distance only serves to make it worse. Now your ambivalence has taken on a life of its own.

What is it about relationship ambivalence that gets us stuck in it and keeps us stuck in it? Good question! The people I’ve worked with over the years are a smart bunch, and for a long time it didn’t make sense to me that women and men with all kinds of street smarts and academic smarts and every other kind of smarts could be so stuck.

I figured, wearing my researcher hat, that with all the differences among all these people there had to be something they shared deep down that was responsible not for their feeling iffy about their partners—we’ve all felt that from time to time—but for their getting stuck in feeling iffy, so stuck that they couldn’t find their way out.

I discovered that everyone stuck in relationship ambivalence shares an image so powerful, so controlling, that it shapes their entire experience of deciding what to do about an iffy relationship: the image of a balance scale. You know—the kind of scale the figure of Justice holds in her hand in front of the Supreme Court, with a pan on one side and a pan on the other side, all set up for weighing the evidence, pro and con. You might have used a scale like this yourself in high school chemistry.

The image of the balance scale lies at the heart of how most people deal with the stay-or-leave decision. It’s what I call the balance-scale approach. You try to figure out whether to stay or leave by piling up all the evidence about your partner on a kind of giant scale and seeing how it balances out:

On one side you pile up all the evidence for staying and against leaving: all the good things about your relationship, all the things you hope for, all the things that make leaving seem scary.