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Should I stay or should I go?
—The Clash
A good friend of mine, Linnea, recently separated from her partner.1 He had struggled for a long time with his own demons, and she finally decided she had to leave.
It’s a tricky thing, deciding when a relationship is beyond repair. Nobody’s perfect, and nothing lasts forever. If you’re dissatisfied, should you hold out hope that the other person will change? That they’re just going through a phase, and you should wait it out? How long does undesirable behavior have to last before it’s no longer a phase? Is there some way the relationship could still work? Maybe if you change your expectations? Or accept what you can’t change?
There are some behaviors that cross a line, like addiction, infidelity, and abuse. Our culture tells us these are acceptable reasons to leave a relationship. Many stay anyway, for a variety of reasons: religious beliefs, entanglement, codependency, sunk cost, or emotional investment. Decision-making gets even murkier when you get into relational differences that don’t fit into one of these categories. At what point does a partner’s annoying habit (leaving dishes in the sink) become intolerable or start seeming like a symptom of a larger problem (being inconsiderate)? Which incompatibilities are actual dealbreakers?
I’m in a season of life where many of my friends’ relationships are being tested. The honeymoon phases are long gone, the kids are little, the house is always a mess, stressors are piling up, the consequences of bad decisions are coming due. People are taking stock of where they are in life and whether they’re getting what they wanted from it. And many women in midlife feel disillusioned with the institution of marriage, which has not delivered on its promises (at least to them).
Much of the time, the “right” thing to do is subjective. We have to feel our way to our own answers, and then live with our decisions. But one of the good things about midlife is that we start living much more for ourselves rather than being so concerned with what other people think. Who cares if someone judges you for getting divorced? It’s your life!
Can the other person change?
No.
Well, yes, they can, if they want to. But not if you want them to.
It’s a common trope for hetero women to get involved with a man they think they can “fix.” And then to be dissatisfied and unhappy when the man refuses to conform to their wishes. Meanwhile, the man gets tired of hearing complaints about his behavior, when all he wants is to be enough for her. So he withdraws.2
How do we know when to accept and make peace with our differences, and when to push for change? In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John Gottman and Nan Silver3 argue that every couple has unsolvable problems—topics that cause recurrent conflicts over the lifespan of the relationship. For example, should we spend money more freely or save it? The key to a happy partnership, they say, is to choose someone whose unsolvable problems you can live with.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer
We all fundamentally want to be accepted and adored for who we are. We might decide to try to change something about ourselves if we think it’s the right thing for our own personal growth. But we only feel safe enough to stretch ourselves and do the hard and uncomfortable work of change if we already feel loved, worthy, and enough on our own.4
If you are unhappy with an interpersonal situation, you cannot fix that situation by changing the other person (or asking them to change). That’s not a real solution.
Suddenly, I saw that control was just fear.
—Lindy West, Adult Braces5
So let’s take it as a constant that the other person won’t change—at least, not in any way we have control over. Let’s assume, unless we have evidence to the contrary, that they will continue to behave as they have been behaving. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.6
Now what?
The only thing we have any control over changing is ourselves: our thoughts and interpretations, our feelings and behavior. Whether we choose to stop fixing and accept the other person, just as they are, full stop. Whether we want to do the work of examining our own part in any relational dysfunction, in healing our own wounds. If the relationship ends, we will know that we tried. We changed what we could, and we accepted what we couldn’t change. And acceptance doesn’t have to mean settling. Sometimes it means accepting that a relationship can’t continue.
We can only choose our own growth. And that is slow going.
Can relationships change?
Relationships consist of the habits, expectations, and ways of interacting that two people build together over years. Every long-term relationship develops habits that eventually feel inevitable. For example, a common dynamic is pursuer-distancer, in which one partner seeks connection (stemming from fear of abandonment) while the other seeks space (fear of enmeshment).7
Many hetero relationships also have gendered imbalances in invisible labor. Frequently, an overfunctioning / underfunctioning dynamic develops where one partner (usually the woman) handles much of the mental load in a relationship, managing emotions and decisions, navigating others’ preferences and anticipating their needs, while the other partner (usually the man) takes a more passive role.8 Having kids often exacerbates these gender differences.
The longer the relationship, the more time we give these habits to calcify and resentment to build. What started as a slight imbalance or a “I’m better at this, let me handle it” will, with time and repetition, form deeply ingrained grooves of thought and behavior.
If you drive the same path repeatedly, over time the tracks from your wheels will become ruts. And it’ll be hard to take a different path. Without conscious effort, your wheels will slip back into those well-worn grooves. So it is with habits.
With enough repetition, we stop experiencing behaviors as choices. They become automatic, rote.9 We experience patterns with our partner as just “how we are.” As I wrote in A Love Letter to Friendship:
Each friendship has a personality. That personality is influenced by the early experiences in that friendship. [It] gets established and entrenched by force of habit, and can be hard to change. You might think of this as the “nature” of the friendship.
For example, my long-term partner tends to be more patient and more of a peacekeeper than I am, so he will usually deescalate a conflict before it turns into a fight. I am quicker to calm down, so usually I will apologize first.
Let’s say I want to change this dynamic. Maybe I want to become more patient in this relationship. The question then becomes how I can consciously create new relational habits by taking ownership over only what I can control (myself, my actions), and whether becoming a different partner begins with becoming a different self.
Change is hard and nonlinear work. It’s breaking out of those well-worn grooves of habit and consciously choosing a different path, each time, until that different path itself becomes habitual. Change inevitably brings discomfort as we trade out the familiar and automatic for the new and effortful. To change in a way that aligns with our growth requires discerning whether that discomfort comes from trying to be something we are not (which takes us further from ourselves) or from trying to grow into the version of ourselves we want to become.
New relationship = new me?
When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. In each new place I lived, I wondered: Could I start over here? Could I be a different person? Maybe this time, with this new group of potential friends, I’ll be more confident or funny. I have a new chance to make a first impression. And yet, inevitably, wherever I’d go, I’d still be the same me.
Theoretically, every day we get a chance to make different choices. And yet as time goes on, we become more and more settled into familiar ways of thinking and acting.
I’m polyamorous, and I’m currently developing a new romantic relationship while also maintaining a long-term one. I have lots of established habits in the long-term relationship, many of which are comforting and familiar, and some of which I’m actively seeking to change. The new relationship, by contrast, has none of these habits. I get to create them from scratch.
Having these two relationships side-by-side has given me a chance to get curious about who I am in each relationship and a real opportunity for reflection about my own capacity for change.
We generally tend to act better in new relationships than we do in established ones. New relationships are uncertain, which is both exciting and anxiety-provoking. We tend to be on our best behavior, wanting to be liked, looking for cues of the other’s interest. As a relationship develops, safety and certainty increase. We become more sure of our standing with the other person and less worried about whether they will leave us if we say or do the wrong thing. Certainty can breed complacency. Over time, we may treat the people we love the worst—because we see them as safe. As I wrote in The Paradox of Desire:
As we grow more secure in [our partner’s] affection for us, we feel safer with vulnerability, wanting to be known fully in all our imperfections.
Many kids misbehave more with their parents than with other adults. If the kid has a secure attachment with their parent, that means they feel safe to be their full, messy self with their parent because they know they will be loved no matter what. We use this early blueprint for relationship safety with our romantic partners. As we feel safer with someone, we get to be more authentic and more deeply known—but also, we become less careful about being our best selves with that person.
I’m on my best behavior in my new relationship; can I keep it up?
Maybe it’s not just a matter of time before my fall from grace. Maybe I can set better habits in my new relationship, ones that reflect my self-knowledge and growth in the 15 years since I started my long-term relationship. I am (probably) wiser and more mature now than I was in my 20s. I’m definitely more settled into who I am. I know a lot more about managing my emotions and communicating effectively. And this relationship doesn’t yet have any well-worn grooves (although its participants are each bringing their own baggage). Maybe, without any existing bad habits, my new partner and I can continue to work through our differences in a healthy way, set boundaries, own our emotions, and treat each other well.
Maybe this is a chance to embody the best and most current version of myself.
As I wrote in We Contain Multitudes:
When I meet someone new and click with them, am I more myself, in that moment, freed of history and assumptions and the burden of all my past mistakes?
Each relationship brings out a slightly different version of us. When I think of who I am with my long-term partner versus my sister, for example, there are a lot of similarities and a few important differences. Some of these differences are structural; we have different expectations for the roles we’ll play in each other’s lives, including what and how much we ask of each other. And some of them are interpersonal; for example, my sister and I laugh together more. We don’t have one authentic self. We contain many possibilities, and each relationship makes these different possibilities easier or harder to inhabit.
Growth can be a practice of authenticity.
Once more from We Contain Multitudes:
A supportive partner doesn’t simply admire who we already are; they help us grow by affirming and nurturing who we want to become.
It’s not such a stretch to think that I might continue to treat my new partner with as much care and grace as I do now, if our relationship brings that out in me. Maybe my dynamic with my new partner will create a different blueprint for how I want to show up in my romantic relationships. And maybe these new habits and behaviors will help me become a better partner in my long-term relationship, too.
Maybe this is the real work of change: neither “fixing” another person, nor transforming ourselves overnight from frogs to princes, but investing in relationships that call forth the people we’re trying to become.
We’re mid-journey here. I don’t know where this story will go or whether it will all turn out as I hope. But I’m more interested in raw honesty than polish. I want the unvarnished truth. Something real. Because actual change is slow, complex, and messy. It’s human. It’s a practice, built from a series of small, everyday choices.
I’ll end with a quote from one of my favorite books of the year:
The work of healing—of knowing what we feel, what we believe in, and of being able to have our actions align with our values—is about a combination of acceptance and transformation, and it is not linear. … Sometimes I get frustrated when, despite the level of insight I’ve gained about my patterns of feeling and relating, I find myself doing the same old shit. … [But] we cannot expect to become totally different people by doing emotional work. We will still have the same wounds we got from the conditions we grew up under, the same familiar coping mechanisms we developed to get by. … Personal transformation work is similar to changing any habit—it’s about shifting autopilot behaviors through intentional practice. … With practice, new habits become second nature, available to us most of the time. It is not instantaneous, but change is possible.
—Dean Spade, Love in a F*cked-Up World10
My friend’s name has been changed.
This dynamic is commonly called demand-withdraw and it’s described in this scholarly paper: Christensen, A. (1987). Detection of conflict patterns in couples. In K. Hahlweg & M.J. Goldstein (Eds.), Understanding major mental disorders: The contribution of family interaction research (pp. 250–265). New York: Family Process Press.
Gottman, J., & Silver, N. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Harmony. [What a perfect publisher name, right?]
This idea was pioneered by humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers in his work on person-centered therapy in the 1940s, and further developed by researcher and clinician Marsha Linehan with dialectical behavioral therapy in the 1990s. You can learn more about this balance between change and acceptance here: https://mindfulnessmuse.com/dialectical-behavior-therapy/how-to-find-balance-between-change-and-acceptance.
Book review of Adult Braces coming soon!
Albaraccín, D., & Wyer, R. S. (2000). The cognitive impact of past behavior: Influences on beliefs, attitudes, and future behavioral decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(1), 5-22. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.79.1.5
The pursuer-distancer dynamic was initially described in this scholarly paper: Fogarty, T.F. (1979). The distancer and the pursuer. The Family, 7, 11–16. Dean Spade also connected it to fears of abandonment vs. enmeshment in Love in a F*cked-Up World (2025).
Lerner, H. (1989). The dance of intimacy. Harper & Row.
Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Random House.
Wood, W. & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417
Spade, D. (2025). Love in a f*cked-up world. Algonquin Books. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/dean-spade-love-in-a-f-cked-up-world
