Note 10: Should You Stay or Leave?

This is a common Decision Room scenario: when the cost of staying is real, but the cost of choosing feels heavier.

Every healthy relationship starts with two people who have a workable relationship with themselves. Not perfect. Not 100% healed. But honest.

Your romantic relationship is one of the choices that sets the tone for your life. It affects your energy, your confidence, your health, your finances, your work, and your sense of self. A good relationship makes everything else easier. A bad one quietly makes everything harder.

And yet, this is the choice people postpone the longest.

Not because they don’t see the problems. Most people see them clearly. They feel them in their bodies. They organize their days, their moods, and their decisions around managing them. What they avoid isn’t information. It’s consequence.

Ending or changing a relationship disrupts routines, identities, families, finances, and future plans. It means admitting that love wasn’t enough, or that potential didn’t turn into reality, or that hoping harder won’t fix what’s fundamentally misaligned. So the mind gets busy protecting stability.

Endurance gets reframed as loyalty. Self-abandonment gets reframed as commitment. Avoidance gets reframed as patience.

Healthy relationships don’t require perfection. They require two people who are willing to be honest. Most unhealthy relationships don’t begin because two bad people met. They are the result of at least one person’s toxic relationship with themselves. (Credit goes to Mark Manson for that juicy nugget.)

So often, staying feels safer than choosing. Leaving feels like failure instead of alignment.

When a relationship isn’t working, the real question usually isn’t whether it’s broken. It’s whether you’re willing to accept what staying is costing you. Clarity rarely arrives as certainty. It arrives as a quiet, persistent knowing that keeps returning, even when you try to outthink it.

If you keep revisiting the same questions, the same arguments, and the same internal negotiations, it’s often because the decision has already been made internally and hasn’t been honored externally.

The longer you delay a choice that sets the tone for your life, the more expensive that delay becomes.