Book summary “Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay”: summary

Introduction

You are trapped in a relationship that is neither good enough to keep nor bad enough to leave. This ambivalence drains your energy, steals your focus, and leaves you stuck in endless circles of indecision. You try to solve the problem by making pro and con lists, acting like a lawyer building a case, but the scale always balances out. One day you feel ready to pack your bags, and the next day a single good moment convinces you to stay. This exhausting cycle goes on for months or even years because traditional relationship advice tells you to try harder, communicate more, or simply wait it out.

Mira Kirshenbaum argues that ambivalence is not a mystery to endure, but a symptom that requires a diagnosis. In Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, the author presents a revolutionary approach based on years of clinical experience with couples. Instead of treating your relationship like a legal trial where you weigh evidence back and forth, you must treat it like a medical examination. You need to look for specific diagnostic indicators that reveal the true health of your partnership.

The book provides a series of clear, objective criteria to help you determine if your relationship is salvageable. You will examine the core components of emotional safety, mutual respect, communication patterns, and fundamental compatibility. The method moves you past your confusion by asking precise questions that cut through the emotional noise. You will find answers to the painful questions keeping you awake at night:

• Is this relationship fundamentally broken or just going through a rough patch?
• Are your partner's flaws workable issues or permanent dealbreakers?
• Can you actually get what you need from this person, or are you holding onto false hope?
• What is the single test that reveals whether you should stay or walk away today?

1. The Road to Ambivalence

Relationship ambivalence traps you in a persistent internal conflict that drains your emotional energy and wastes precious years.

Relationship ambivalence occurs when your main focus shifts from simply being in a relationship to constantly trying to figure out whether to stay in it or leave. Unlike normal doubts or occasional speculations, relationship ambivalence consumes your attention. It creates emotional distance and robs you of joy and freedom. Out of 140 million Americans currently in a relationship, a full one-fifth or 28 million people find themselves completely unable to decide whether to remain or depart.

The Ambivalence Trap

Remaining stuck in ambivalence for years causes severe emotional damage and wastes precious time, whether the relationship ultimately deserved to be saved or ended. Living in limbo breeds negativity, erodes self-esteem, strains family dynamics, and prevents you from finding genuine happiness or moving on to better lives.

Kate, the author's mother, stayed in an unhappy second marriage for 40 years, waiting for milestones to give her a sign while her energy was constantly drained by ambivalence. At one point, Kate rated her marriage a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale.

Ambivalence in the heart inevitably creates emotional and physical distance in the relationship, which only worsens the ambivalence. You naturally spend less time together, talk less about important things, adopt a cool and formal routine, and get caught up in an intense internal affair with your own doubts. The instinctive method of piling up pros and cons on a mental balance scale fails because relationship elements cannot be neatly weighed against each other. Treating the decision like a legal trial or a balance scale only leads to deeper confusion, as shifting emotions, changing circumstances, and uncertain futures make the accumulated evidence constantly move.

Carol found herself unable to decide because her partner Tom was sometimes wonderful and loving, but at other times nasty and critical.

Why Friends Fail to Help

Relying on friends for advice on whether to stay or leave rarely brings clarity. Friends either unanimously push you to leave based solely on one-sided complaints without knowing the full relationship, or they inexplicably pressure you to stay out of their own personal investments.

2. The Diagnostic Procedure

You must stop balancing pros and cons like a lawyer and instead make a clear diagnosis like a doctor looking for a smoking gun.

To escape this ambivalence trap, you need a diagnostic procedure. This works like an optometrist clicking lenses back and forth to determine which view is clearer.

The Best Times Were Never Good

About 10 percent of people in relationship ambivalence realize upon reflection that their best times were tainted, empty, or dysfunctional from the start. If a relationship was never truly good even during its best moments, the prognosis for the relationship is poor.

Jennifer, an oncologist turned psychiatrist, realized after 8 years of marriage that her relationship with Don was merely a good-on-paper match without any genuine emotional core. She had doubted her own intelligence and worried she suffered from psychological damage because she could not easily resolve her 6-year marital dilemma.

Life and Death Decisions

Repeated acts of physical violence within a relationship indicate that the relationship must be ended unless specific intensive treatment is undertaken. While a single isolated incident might be addressed, abuse that happens more than once will escalate over time.

This violence will continue unless the abusive partner commits to and maintains participation in a specialized batterer treatment program for at least 1 year. Some individuals remain in violent environments because the partner is sweet afterward or holds a trusted profession.

Actions, Not Words

A person has already decided to leave a relationship if they have made concrete commitments to pursue a lifestyle or course of action that excludes their partner. Stuck stayers often fail to recognize that their actual behaviors demonstrate a finalized decision to exit long before they verbally pull the trigger.

Ruth volunteered for an organization preparing her for long-term international refugee assignments, effectively building a bridge to a future without her partner Spike. This action occurred 18 months after she had internally decided to leave her husband, despite her 10-year marriage.

The Permission to Leave

Some people remain stuck simply because they lack the emotional permission to acknowledge that their relationship is over. Overwhelming guilt, fear of social shame, or the desire to avoid feeling like a failure can cause individuals to carry a dead relationship.

Michael, a prominent couples therapist, broke down in tears of relief when asked if he would feel absolved if an omniscient being permitted him to leave his dead relationship.

3. Fitting Love Into the Equation

Diagnostic guidelines establish whether a satisfaction-producing core remains beneath your daily conflicts and power struggles.

Negative guidelines overrule positive guidelines because severe dealbreakers outweigh a large amount of positive attributes. Think of evaluating a house. An ideal layout makes a house hard to leave, but it cannot counteract severe structural problems like a destroyed foundation.

Staying Alive

People in ambiguous relationships often look for signs of life. Superficial orgasms and children do not count as proof of connection. A true sign of life requires an activity that both partners anticipate with pleasure and that fosters a lasting glow of closeness.

Jack, a corporate consultant, felt emotionally estranged from his wife Laura. After struggling to find a connection, he realized that making special meals together on Saturday afternoons acted as a tension-free zone where they truly felt close.

Guideline #5 is especially critical for dead or devitalized or roommate marriages where the main complaint is the absence of anything genuinely good rather than active conflict. Even couples in terrible shape can often identify a small pleasurable connection.

The Nasty-Stupid-Crazy-Ugly-Stinky Factor

A fundamental precondition for love is passing the basic animal compatibility test where the partner is not viewed as repulsive or despicable. Before deep connection or chemistry can exist, you must find your partner reasonably nice, intelligent, sane, attractive, and pleasant-smelling. When a thoughtful, dead-certain no is given to this question, it indicates basic discord.

Linda stayed with an extremely wealthy man despite finding him loathsome, tolerating him only for his money until his net worth dipped below 5 million dollars, which was the threshold where she finally decided her husband was no longer rich enough to put up with.

Power People

Power dynamics remain a hidden secret in relationships because power is perceived as antithetical to love, and feeling powerless or powerful triggers deep personal shame. Rosemary went along with her domineering restaurant-owner husband Vinnie, feeling she had to tolerate his control because he had money and commanded her accounting business. Power people are out of control with the need to be in control. They bombard you with difficulties whenever you try to get a need met.

Power people employ specific manipulation tactics:

• offensive defenses
• power judo
• snow jobs
• the endless campaign
• dirty fighting
• con jobs

The Right Not to Be Humiliated

A persistent feeling of humiliation or invisibility caused by a partner's dominance is a clear sign that a relationship should be ended. Power people often make their partners feel like nobodies, generating constant rage or depression. A mild-mannered man dominated by his wife's powerful personality experienced recurring thoughts of bludgeoning her to death after their interactions.

Instead of pushing people out, humiliation often draws them deeper into ambivalence through the humiliation trap. You develop a sick desire to outsmart, dominate, or undermine the person who hurt you.

4. Confused About Communication

Couples often blame relationship strain on personality or gender gulfs. Humans possess a natural talent for bridging these differences through communication. Differences are the very reason communication exists, not a sign of a dead relationship.

Normal communication breakdowns do not doom a relationship, but chronic lying and off-the-table-itis will suffocate it entirely.

Unclear words and gestures can drive you crazy and lead to pointless arguments without clear direction. These patterns are extremely common and can be successfully resolved over time in healthy relationships.

Mary, a school nurse, sees her husband James sitting silently in his truck after work and immediately grows suspicious, leading to a volatile argument simply because she asks if he got his paycheck.

Off-the-Table-Itis

The true destroyer of communication is the consistent blocking of important topics by a partner. Off-the-table-itis damages the bridge-building function of dialogue. It occurs when a partner repeatedly shuts down, changes the subject, or makes it psychologically unsafe to bring up vital concerns.

A partner might respond to a discussion about a lack of love or physical intimacy by vehemently stating they hate talking about it. They may constantly shift the conversation to distracting sidetracks.

If holding up a mirror to the partner through direct feedback does nothing to stop this chronic tendency, the relationship suffers from a destructive problem. A relationship is fundamentally unfixable if a partner constantly prevents the discussion of important matters, and leaving is usually the happiest resolution.

Feedback as Oxygen

The ability to give and receive feedback is the essential oxygen a relationship needs to survive. Feedback allows partners to express simple likes, dislikes, and hurts. When someone blocks this feedback through anger, guilt trips, or refusals to listen, the relationship suffocates and deteriorates without any way to turn things around.

Love requires a delicate balance between interpersonal nakedness and safety, allowing partners to reveal their true selves without fear. Communication is a process of getting interpersonally naked by dropping social masks and sharing secrets. Healthy love means feeling safe while being vulnerable, but if one partner's need for safety completely restricts openness, the relationship fails.

Kiesha, a 28-year-old police officer, felt safe expressing deep personal anger only within intimacy, while her partner Dennis, a fireman, needed protection from her anger to feel safe.

To Tell the Truth

Occasional white lies are normal, but reaching a point where you expect a lie every time your partner speaks destroys the relationship beyond repair. Lying subtracts from communication by replacing reality with falsehoods. When basic trust is entirely lost and you live in chronic expectation of deceit, the relationship devolves into bitterness, paranoia, and despair.

Ronnie invested years coaching her husband Hal as he pursued a TV news career. She eventually discovered a deep-seated pattern of selfishness and betrayal culminating in him contracting pubic lice and blaming a public toilet.

5. Looking for Love in All the Right Places

Feelings of love must be based on a correct perception of reality rather than serving as mere ghosts of dead hopes. Mira Kirshenbaum explains that saying you love someone describes an internal state, but it is only meaningful if that love exists when perceiving the actual person rather than an illusion.

Your feelings of love must rest on a correct perception of reality, genuine liking, and the willingness to touch and give unconditionally.

Liking Your Partner

If you basically and overall do not like your partner, or if your partner does not like you, your love is a ghost and you will be happiest leaving. Diagnostic question 11 asks whether you genuinely like your partner as a person and whether your partner conveys the feeling that they like you outside of conflict periods. Liking is essential for love to survive in the long run.

Ann and Dave married because they shared spiritual Quaker values and called each other best friends, but Ann eventually realized she liked what Dave believed in rather than liking him as a person.

People often stay in ambivalent relationships by making excuses for their partner until a specific, vivid event highlights the partner's core negative traits and grants permission to acknowledge the dislike. A woman who was on the fence about her selfish husband finally realized she disliked him when he greedily devoured all the free samples at a country food fair.

Mutual Shutdown

Mutual shutdown occurs when initial hurts cause partners to progressively withdraw giving, acting like an emotional bank account that drains to zero. When one partner is hurt or disappointed, they pull back their effort. Instead of reacting like saints, the other partner responds with hurt and anger, giving even less, which creates a destructive feedback loop that kills the relationship.

Diagnostic question 12 tests whether you are still willing to give your partner something warm and loving unconditionally under current conditions. If you refuse to give unless guaranteed a return, the relationship lacks the foundation to reverse mutual shutdown.

Barbara spent twenty years working grueling hours in Sam's failing costume jewelry business, but after taking a physical and emotional break in Florida, she found she was able to be nice to him again and revive their connection.

Person-Specific Sexuality

Sexual problems in a relationship are typically symptoms of underlying relational issues rather than the primary disease. Deteriorating relationships naturally cause a drop in lovemaking frequency, much like being sick causes someone to stay in bed. Therefore, low sex frequency by itself is not a reason to leave unless communication is blocked or other core guidelines fail.

If either partner permanently stops wanting to touch or be touched by the other for several months without any sign of abating, the relationship is too bad to stay in. Wanting to touch acts as the braking mechanism that stops mutual shutdown and bridges partners back together.

Kirshenbaum distinguishes between two forms of attraction:

• general sexuality, which describes how you respond in most relationships;
• person-specific sexuality, which is the unique chemistry you feel specifically for your current partner.

Feeling a unique physical and sexual attraction to your partner that places them in a special category provides a strong reason to stay. A man who liked looking at attractive women felt distinctly turned on only by his partner's skin and scent, putting her in a special category.

6. Your Partner's Problems

The lifeblood of a relationship is mutual influence. Rejecting the ideology of like-it-or-lump-it means you retain the full right to demand change. Believing that you cannot ask a partner to change dooms the partnership.

You have a right to demand change, but you must recognize when a partner's unwillingness or personal bottom line violations make staying impossible.

Beyond Denial

If a partner remains completely blind to a critical problem, that issue will worsen over time. Partners often use elaborate justifications and intellectualizations to stay blind to harmful behavior. This draws you into the quicksand of denial and endless false hope.

Mandy's husband Bob, a philosophy professor, refused to acknowledge his extreme selfishness or cooperate with schedules. He hid behind elaborate philosophical justifications instead of facing reality.

The Waiting Trap

Many partners state a superficial willingness to change while actively fighting against actual progress. People often use phrases about wanting to change in their own time and way to hide fundamental unwillingness. Falling into the waiting trap keeps you stuck for decades.

Sally stayed married to an alcoholic husband for thirty-two years because she fell into the waiting trap, hoping he would change. Her husband made her life miserable for twenty of those years.

Real willingness requires concrete actions:

• joining support groups;
• taking specific jobs;
• entering therapy;
• agreeing to a written time frame.

If a partner refuses to change, you can alternatively let go of being bothered by the problem. True letting go means treating a major annoyance like a helium-filled balloon and releasing it completely. John moved from Texas and was infuriated that his wife Beth never did housework or cooking. Once he decided to let go of his expectations about homemaking, the issue disappeared.

Drawing the Bottom Line

Some partners acknowledge problems and want to change but need specific forms of motivation, instruction, or therapy. Julia spent fifteen years stuck in ambivalence with her husband Oscar. Oscar was a brilliant scientist who could only change his domineering conversational habits when given strict mathematical formulas.

You must discover your personal bottom lines, communicate them clearly as facts, and act on them when violated. Failing to act when a personal bottom line is crossed results in psychological self-mutilation. Charlotte discovered her bottom line was crossed when she came home and found her husband dressed in her clothes and makeup, a boundary neither knew existed beforehand.

7. Differences That Make a Difference

Most relationship differences are harmless. You can argue about small habits and still build a happy life together. Differences concerning the fundamental lifestyle and the inner framework of daily life can make a relationship unbearable.

Unbridgeable lifestyle conflicts and deep alienness will destroy a relationship regardless of your initial compatibility.

Mira Kirshenbaum calls the core framework giving life shape and substance the armature of a lifestyle. When this armature is incompatible, partners often choose the lifestyle over the relationship.

Robert wanted to retire early to a villa in Northern Italy. His wife Agnes wanted to build an independent career in the city, creating an unbridgeable lifestyle conflict.

Who You Love and How You Live

Some huge differences do not harm a relationship, while seemingly small differences can completely ruin it.

The Darrin/Samantha factor from the show Bewitched demonstrates that massive apparent differences can coexist with a happy relationship. Conversely, the city mouse/country mouse factor shows that a seemingly small disagreement about where to live can be utterly unbridgeable.

I Married a Martian

Relationships can fail if there is no deep-down basic similarity. You may fool yourself because you share superficial tastes, but without a meaningful shared core, you remain like two strangers from different planets. This is the I-married-a-Martian factor.

A couple who both enjoyed taking walks in the woods realized this similarity was superficial. It was akin to both liking pepperoni pizza, with no deeper connection.

Tunnel Vision

When trying to decide whether to stay or leave, you often suffer from tunnel vision, misjudging your actual options outside the relationship. Ambivalence traps you inside a narrow view where you idealize freedom or catastrophize about poverty.

Matt left his wife expecting the freedom of single life. He found loneliness, bad dates, and difficulty connecting, and realized his reality with Wendy was far better than the illusion.

Fear of poverty can trap you in a bad relationship just like false hopes of freedom can drive you out. You may endure a miserable relationship out of fear that leaving guarantees destitution, failing to realize that independent self-support is entirely realistic.

Donna stayed in a cold relationship for years because she feared leaving meant desperate poverty. Helping a young person find housing made her realize she could easily support herself.

Evaluating the decision to leave requires checking whether hopes and fears about the outside world are actually true and probable. You must test your assumptions against reality by checking specifics regarding housing, finances, dating prospects, and support from friends or relatives.

A patient repeatedly considered leaving because of her sister's vague offer of a place in San Francisco. Upon checking, she discovered her sister actually did not want her to stay.

While children are affected by divorce, they should not be the sole determinant of whether a relationship is too bad to stay in. The negative impact of divorce must be weighed against the toxic psychological environment of staying in a severely broken family atmosphere.

8. Respect, Wounds, and Healing

Most couples experience low-level disrespect due to familiarity and unmet expectations, which they can comfortably manage. However, a relationship becomes too bad to stay in when a partner uses words and actions to relentlessly convince you that you are a nut, jerk, loser, or idiot regarding traits vital to your self-esteem and daily competence.

Toxic disrespect and unhealed betrayals break a relationship down, whereas true respect delivers practical support and recovery.

Leila's husband Ben constantly assaulted her with daily putdowns telling her she was an idiotic nut and too dumb to handle things, until she eventually internalized the belief and began acting crazy and stupid. An ongoing atmosphere of disrespect can destroy a relationship even if the partner's words do not cause you to believe their insults, because chronic avoidance and psychological distance render the relationship unlivable.

Hank endured a continuous barrage of verbal abuse from his partner; although he managed to avoid believing the insults, he recognized he was using every possible avoidance mechanism to limit contact and interactions.

Respect That Deliver

A relationship can become exceptionally good to leave or stay in when a partner provides concrete, substantial support for the things you are trying to achieve that matter deeply to you. General compliments are insufficient; true respect that delivers involves practical, tangible actions that ease your struggles and show genuine interest in your personal ambitions and professional goals.

Sasha's boyfriend Willie constantly criticized her finance profession, but when Sasha took on a demanding role to become a portfolio manager, Willie adapted by cooking meals for her irregular hours and patiently listening to her work details.

To maintain respect for your partner, they must function as a valuable personal resource in your life, providing something specific and meaningful that you genuinely appreciate and would miss if they were gone. Fran complained constantly about her husband Jerry, yet she respected his dedication as a sculptor; however, once she realized she would lose nothing she actually valued having in her own daily life as a husband or ex-husband, she knew she had to leave.

The Wounds That Time Can't Heal

Past relationship betrayals and crimes can be psychologically survived if there is a measurable, continuous lessening of pain, anger, and grievance over time according to a structured healing timetable. Evaluating whether an affair or severe betrayal is a relationship buster requires looking for natural signs of recovery, ranging from slight cooling off within the first month to consistent periods of normalcy after one year and clear structural healing within five years.

An unnamed woman gave her husband's savings away to her abusive father despite knowing how crucial that money was for her husband to escape a hated job, triggering a severe lingering betrayal that lasted for years.

A relationship can survive severe injuries that would otherwise destroy it if both partners demonstrate a genuine capacity for forgiveness and sincere remorse. True forgiveness requires the injured person to release their emotional investment in holding onto bitterness, a historical pattern of being able to forgive past mistakes, and the offending partner performing concrete acts of atonement and emotional restitution.

9. Negotiating Needs and Intimacy

A relationship fails when reasonable needs lead to endless painful struggles, destructive intimacy, or a complete absence of fun.

The Ability to Negotiate Solutions

The true test of getting needs met is not whether conflict exists, but whether reasonable needs can be met without a painful and unrewarding struggle. Diagnostic question #30 asks if you can reach satisfactory solutions together.

A unilateral move destroys relationships by allowing one partner to act independently without prior discussion, which consumes shared resources and prevents the other's needs from being met.

A partner surprises the other by buying a new car without prior discussion, spending money that was intended for shared needs.

Negotiating needs becomes an ordeal rather than a minor hassle due to specific behaviors:

• emotional deprivation blocks listening;
• dirty fighters overwhelm with weaponized past grievances;
• critics attack you for having needs;
• past disasters create paralyzing fear of conflict.

A consistent pattern of broken agreements destroys trust and turns a relationship from a safe home into a place of betrayal, even when individual broken promises seem minor. Politeness in a distressed relationship can actually be despair wearing a mask, indicating that partners have completely stopped trying to resolve their unmet needs.

Getting the Big Need Met

An unfulfilled life can result from sacrificing a single, crucially important personal need that a partner stands in the way of satisfying. Guideline #31 requires you to evaluate whether you are suppressing a fundamental desire.

Bernie stayed with Sandy for 7 years while suppressing his dream of quitting his sales job to become an independent inventor because she feared financial instability. He eventually left to follow his dream. Ten years later, Bernie still had not made much money and built up debt, but he found peace.

When You Get Close, You Get Hurt

Intimacy becomes toxic when a partner uses closeness not for connection, but as an opportunity to subject you to relentless anger, judgment, and criticism. Diagnostic question #32 measures whether you experience mutually appreciative escalating nakedness or psychological danger.

Theresa admired Paul for his psychiatric work with the poor, where he donated 10 percent of money tithed to charities Paul worked for on contract. Once they grew close, Paul systematically criticized her faults. He managed her diet, money, and thoughts, treating her vulnerability as an opening to inflict pain.

Strongly opposing and incompatible definitions of intimacy between partners make true closeness impossible and often lead to justified separations. Terri and Flo, a lesbian therapist couple, split up because Terri believed intimacy meant revealing deep dark secrets and crying together. Flo believed intimacy meant wordless joint activities like walking through a new city or gardening.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

The complete and permanent loss of the possibility of having fun together signals that a relationship has turned a corner where leaving brings more happiness than staying. Diagnostic question #34 establishes that while everyday boredom is normal, a total absence of shared laughter drains the core glue of intimacy.

10. The Last Step and Conclusion

Sharing a major life goal or dream acts as superglue that holds a couple together when love itself feels shaky. Having a joint project or vision gives a couple a sense of meaning and purpose that transcends everyday difficulties, arguments, and relationship ambivalence.

• Couples build a noteworthy state garden.
• Partners run a stock market portfolio together.
• Spouses build a computer software company.
• Individuals share a political career.

Diagnostic question #35 establishes guideline #35 to evaluate this core connection.

A Reason to Be Together

If you would still feel ambivalent about staying even if all existing relationship problems were magically solved, the relationship is too bad to stay in. Diagnostic question #36 presents this final test. It strips away surface conflicts to reveal a deep, underlying discomfort with the partner or the relationship itself.

Applying the final magic wand test gives you absolute clarity, allowing you to either leave with confidence or recommit to fixing your partnership.

A single clear negative sign pointing toward leaving is sufficient to make a final decision, regardless of what other positive signs might indicate. Diagnostics work by identifying deal-breakers. If any specific question yields a guideline stating that most people in that situation were happy they left, the exit is indicated.

The Last Step

Feeling deep sadness after realizing a relationship must end does not mean the decision to leave is wrong. Sadness is a natural emotional response to loss rather than new information about whether the relationship should continue. It should not pull you back into relationship ambivalence.

External resources and literature can guide you through the emotional, legal, and practical realities of separating from a partner. Recommended books include Coming Apart by Daphne Rose Kingma from 1987, The Good Divorce by Constance Ahrons from 1994, Our Turn by Christopher Hayes, Deborah Anderson, and Melinda Blau from 1993, and Uncoupling by Diane Vaughan from 1986.

Home at Last

Discovering that a relationship is too good to leave eliminates ambivalence and frees up energy to fix and improve the partnership. Energy previously wasted on wondering whether to stay can be redirected into being smart and loving, addressing past problems, and utilizing relationship guides or therapy.

Couples who choose to stay can leverage specialized books and therapy to solve problems and strengthen their bond. Practical literature helps you move away from analysis paralysis and toward actionable solutions for relationship improvement. Recommended books include Divorce Busting by Michele Weiner-Davis from 1992, Intimate Partners by Maggie Scarf from 1987, Lifemates by Harold Bloomfield and Sira Vittese with Robert Kory from 1991, and Love Is a Verb by Bill O'Hanlon and Pat Hudson from 1995.

10 Key Ideas

1. Relationship ambivalence traps you in a persistent internal conflict that drains your emotional energy and wastes precious years.
2. A person has already decided to leave a relationship if they have made concrete commitments to pursue a lifestyle or course of action that excludes their partner.
3. Before deep connection or chemistry can exist, you must find your partner reasonably nice, intelligent, sane, attractive, and pleasant-smelling.
4. A persistent feeling of humiliation or invisibility caused by a partner's dominance is a clear sign that a relationship should be ended.
5. A relationship is fundamentally unfixable if a partner constantly prevents the discussion of important matters, and leaving is usually the happiest resolution.
6. If you basically and overall do not like your partner, or if your partner does not like you, your love is a ghost and you will be happiest leaving.
7. If either partner permanently stops wanting to touch or be touched by the other for several months without any sign of abating, the relationship is too bad to stay in.
8. You have a right to demand change, but you must recognize when a partner's unwillingness or personal bottom line violations make staying impossible.
9. You must discover your personal bottom lines, communicate them clearly as facts, and act on them when violated.
10. If you would still feel ambivalent about staying even if all existing relationship problems were magically solved, the relationship is too bad to stay in.