With Jennifer’s training and ability, you’d think she’d be smart and knowledgeable enough to avoid this dilemma. She’d graduated from medical school in the top quarter of her class, had started out on a promising career as an oncologist, and had switched to psychiatry when she got tired of seeing people die and wanted to help them find a way to live.

Finding a Balance. You might think being a psychiatrist would have given Jennifer an edge in figuring out relationships. But it didn’t help: as you’ll see, it produced only more confusion. She couldn’t remember what started her ambivalence; maybe it wasn’t anything specific. But for six years her heart was burdened by more and more considerations that piled up without ever sorting themselves out or producing a resolution.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the mass of things Jennifer had to weigh, but this will give you the highlights:

• On the plus side, her husband, Don, was great with the kids, charming when he wanted to be, a good income earner as a computer executive; they shared some spiritual values, he said he cared about her, and he gave Jennifer the space she needed to do her work and be with her friends. She thought she still had some love for him.

• On the minus side, he was angry with her most of the time, picked fights with her, kept expressing his disappointment with her, kept trying to change her, had had an affair, and had once shoved her during a stormy argument after she’d shoved him. She didn’t think she loved him enough.

Maybe you look at these two piles of evidence and it’s clear to you which way Jennifer should go, but it was never clear to her. There were times when she vacillated minute by minute, and long periods when she seemed to have made a final decision that never turned out to be final.