“How long should I stay?” is a question that I get sometimes in individual therapy clients and a little less frequently in couple therapy too. As a therapist, I can’t answer for the client but I do have ways of helping my clients answer the question for themselves.

This discernment tool is not designed for people who are in a relationship where there is domestic violence. When there is domestic violence deciding to when to leave includes how to leave as safely as possible. For those in my area looking for help with leaving a relationship with domestic violence I highly recommend the services of Next Door Solutions. Before clicking, make sure that your browser history is secure from being spied upon by your abuser. If you are coming to this blog from outside of the South San Francisco Bay area, I recommend contacting The National Domestic Violence Helpline. Yes, both resources will assist male victims of domestic violence.

But WAIT! Why would you help a client figure out when to leave?

Some relationship issues are tough to resolve. People can find it hard to wait for change to take place. They often face difficulties figuring out whether to keep waiting and sacrificing their happiness or to set more firm boundaries about the importance of getting their needs met. Going through a discernment like this can help them decide to stay with full effort without being afraid that it will last forever. Pretending they aren’t going through the discernment or telling them not to have those thoughts won’t stop them and won’t help.

I’m Staying Today. When Will I Choose Again?

My strategy is very simple. Instead of trying to figure out how long you should stay, you decide to stay today and set a concrete date at which to evaluate that decision again. To me, it doesn’t make a difference if that is tomorrow, next week, or a year from now. Most of my clients pick 3-6 months from now. Until the next discernment window stop yourself any time that you are thinking about leaving the relationship. Remind yourself that you’ve decided to stay and reevaluate that question on a specific date.

Once the discernment date arrives take time away from the relationship and by yourself to look back at the past period and ask yourself the following questions. Are things are changing for the better? Are you feeling more satisfied? Are the concerns resolved? How are you contributing to positive changes? Could you be any clearer about what changes you need from your partner? Are you sharing what you need without criticism? Do you have the energy left to push the decision to leave out another period of time? Are you done checking in with yourself because you are feeling confident about the relationship?

If necessary you set another date and time at which you will consider the question again.

Sometimes people object to this idea. They will say that doing a process like this they fear they’ll get 5 years from now and see that they have inched in 3 months increments into their future. I think it is great for them to know that is a risk. To avoid that risk, you only need to figure what you want to do at each periodic evaluation to avoid that possibility from coming about. Avoid blaming your partner for you not making a concrete decision sooner. Maybe you tell yourself, “I have been in this discernment for the past X months total .” Maybe you write out a dialogue between your selves like this:

• Me Today: Three months ago you were worried about just kicking the can down the road.
• Me Past: Yes, I was. I was afraid that when I got to be you, that I’d be bitter or angry that I’ve stayed in the relationship instead of leaving. How is it going?
• Me Today: Well, I wouldn’t say I’m bitter and angry but I do share your concerns about the future and how it will feel if I make the same commitment you did again today.
• Me Future: One thing you could do for me to make my discernment job easier is to get clearer about exactly what you need to see to feel like it would be worth going on again. That way I could be more firm and decide to leave rather than kicking the can down the road again.

I don’t’ recommend telling your partner that you have decided to stay “for now”, that you are in a discrete discernment period, or when that discernment period ends. I do recommend telling your partner exactly what your needs are, exactly what about the relationship isn’t meeting those needs, exactly what changes would meet your needs, and that without those needs being met you don’t know if the relationship will last.

The Outcomes

Sometimes, when a client has used this tool, they set the time in the future and then decide to break up before the discernment period arrives. In those cases, the clear decision to wait is clarifying enough that they realize they can’t wait. I do invite them to concretely review their questions for discernment that they set up when they committed to staying for X amount of time more. However, much more often what I see is that clients come in at the end of their discernment and they are glad they were clear about the challenges and then waited because things are getting better.

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In my last blog entry, I talked about how to use your vision for your future, as shaped by the reality of a prospective partner, to decide whether you want to continue a relationship. In this entry, I will take a more present-moment-oriented approach to the issue of discernment in relationships. If you’d like, you can open and print this .pdf flow-chart and follow along as you read: Relationship Discernment Tool.

1. Identify Relationship Needs

At the meta-level, one way of thinking about relationships and why we choose to be in them is that we choose relationships that meet our needs and help us to feel good about ourselves and our lives. I think attending to needs is helpful because our assessment of whether our needs are getting met helps determine our relationship satisfaction or the lack thereof.

In order to engage in this form of relationship discernment, you need to start with an awareness of your relationship needs. I often refer my clients to the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) Needs List, but make sure you focus on the top needs that must be met in a relationship. If you have been having strong feelings in the relationship, good or bad, it may help to know that emotions indicate whether our needs are getting met or not. When you think about moments of strong emotion in this relationship, make sure you have whatever needs were or were not being met on your needs list.

If your relationship is in distress or if you have been going through a rough patch recently, you may have unconsciously listed more of the needs that are not getting met. The way human attention works, we can more easily remember sad things when we are sad and happy things when we are happy, so if you want to be fair as you enter a discernment about your relationship, you may want to walk away, watch a comedy or do something fun, and come back and see if you may have left out any important needs of yours that are getting met.

Consider one need at a time and use the flow chart to ask yourself questions about that need.

2. Is This Relationship Meeting This Need?

If the relationship is meeting your needs, great! Stop here. But most likely, because as mentioned previously, we can’t order perfect partners in a catalog, there are at least some needs that are only partially met or not being met. Go back to the top and start over with a new need.

3. Can I Accept That?

The answers to this question are much more complex than “Yes” and “No,” and I will get into those in a moment. Before I do, though, I’d like to point to some other questions that will help you select among the answers to this question that follow:

• If my relationship is not meeting the need entirely, why is it at least meeting that need in some ways?
• If the relationship is not meeting the need now, has it done so in the past?
• Are there some extenuating circumstances that currently prevent the relationship from meeting my needs?
• Am I preventing this relationship from meeting my needs?
• Am I confusing unavoidable life pain (e.g., illness) as a signal that the relationship isn’t meeting my needs (e.g., this is a bad relationship)?

Answers to these questions and others may help you accept that the relationship is not currently meeting your needs.

4. Yes. Great!

If you can accept that the relationship is not meeting this need, that’s great. Monitor yourself to make sure that you really do have as much Zen-like detachment from your emotional needs as you believe you have, or the unmet need may turn into resentment and become fuel for passive-aggressive behavior (more about that below). If you really can accept that this relationship won’t meet this particular need, I hope that it is meeting other needs.

5. No. And I am resigned to that and will withdraw over time.

While I don’t advocate this decision, I like to include it on my list. It is an option that people can take. Often, when people in long-term relationships (here I am referring to relationships that are about a decade old or longer) come into therapy, and they report that the presenting problems have been present for many years, one or the other has probably made the choice to be resigned for a significant portion of the relationship. This option often fuels emotional, physical, and sexual distance and may lead to passive-aggressive behavior. You may make this choice, but therapy with me will not help you to improve your relationship if this is the choice you have made.

6. No. But I can meet this need with other relationships.

You wanted your partner to meet your need for a shared hobby, and now you are going to try to get a hobby buddy to meet that need instead. If you are monogamous, you may want to make sure that if you are attracted to your hobby buddy, the intimacy of the shared hobby won’t become a source of romantic or sexual attraction. However, this is overall a mature and viable option. It requires recognizing that no one person can meet all of our needs. We let our partner off the hook, we expand our community of friends, and we get our needs filled and keep ourselves vibrant and alive. You may also at least want your partner to know some of the basic vocabulary and significant events in your hobby, even if you have a hobby buddy. Check in periodically to make sure that this unmet need is now being met with other relationships.

7. No, But I will try to adapt so that I can accept this in the future.

Sometimes, we know that it is more mature and helpful for our relationship for us to let go of an emotional need or any expectation. Unfortunately, knowing that and doing it are two separate things (more on the difference between knowing and doing in this blog entry about Relationship Skills). So, it is acceptable and mature to acknowledge that despite your thoughts or your values, you actually don’t think you are going to be able to just let this go but you want to become able to. Maybe you talk about this with supportive friends, in individual therapy, meditate, or read books to help you develop the emotional self-soothing and realistic expectations that will help you develop the capacity. If I’m your therapist for individual or couples therapy, I can help with that.

8. No. Advocate for RELATIONSHIP change. Be willing to take risks.

Okay, so there’s a gap here. You really believe that you need your partner to meet this need, and you want to give them the chance to meet the relationship. You are willing to stay in the relationship for the time being while you give your partner and your relationship time to adapt in a way that will meet your needs. This is a real challenge because it means finding compassion for your partner while at least one of your relationship buckets is not being filled. As a therapist, I have a lot of respect for this decision, as a person who has been married for 17 years, I know how hard it can be to stand in this place. I try to help my clients who choose this path to turn up the volume of the emotional communication about why this need is so important and how it might be met. At the same time, I help them turn up that volume in a skillful way that is less likely to trigger conflicts, doesn’t require their partner to become someone or something they are not, and which also prevents the potential that this choice will lead to unmet needs that will become fuel for resentments.

This choice also means taking a risk. While the stance itself is a choice that you make to maintain the relationship, as you turn up the volume about your unmet need, you will likely be creating distress in your partner. That distress is the fuel for change and can be done compassionately, but it is still distress. So, as you have conversations about the unmet need, as you point out to your partner that the need is unmet and exactly how it feels, you may risk that even if you use skillful means, they will create conflicts or decide that they won’t maintain the relationship because of how you have been telling them about your unmet need. This is the risk that you take when you decide to try to change. So, while this can be a reasonable choice, it is important that you acknowledge the limitations and risks inherent in this option.

9. No. So this RELATIONSHIP is over.

In the end, if you find that you cannot let this need go, that it cannot be met or cannot be met enough by outside relationships, if you will not or cannot adapt enough to accept that your need is not being met, if you can’t advocate for change, have tried advocating for change but have spent all of your patience without enough encouraging progress, AND/OR you find that this need is so central to your relationship needs that it must be met and it doesn’t matter if the relationship meets other needs, then you may decide that you can let go of this relationship. If you’ve tried those things, maybe you can leave now confident that you considered all of the options and tried all that you were capable of to save the relationship.

Conclusion

Though presented in a sequential format that can encourage dichotomous thinking, I want to be clear that these options are not mutually exclusive. For example, it is perfectly possible that you decide to meet a part of the need outside of the relationship while you advocate for change, but find that you are emotionally withdrawing even though that wasn’t an option you want to choose. Take a look at both the options you have consciously chosen, but also those that seem to emerge from the nature of the interactions with your partner.w

I hope that this tool helps you consider whether you want to continue or not. And if it doesn’t, or if you need help enacting those choices more skillfully, therapy with me might help.

See also my previous blog post:
Do I Want to be in This Relationship: Part I

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