Coping with Uncertainty: Leaving or Staying
One of the most stressful times in a relationship is when you are uncertain whether the relationship should continue or come to an end. When you are unsure if you should stay or go. You feel trapped between two impulses, one that tells you I want to stay and the other that tells you I need to leave.
The pain of being in this relational limbo at times feels so unbearable that it becomes easy to assume that the feeling of uncertainty is a symptom of the problem when really it is an opportunity that exists within the turmoil. It provides an opportunity for the kind of reflection that eventually will lead to a resolution.
One has to accept the fact that certainty is hardly available in these situations—you will rarely feel it and it is wasteful to sit around waiting for the moment that you do before you make a decision. The question is what should you do if you find yourself in such a situation, and the answer is that you should focus not on achieving full clarity or insight, but rather you should focus on making a meaningful choice while accepting that some aspects of your decision, such as the person’s response or future implications, cannot be predicted.
Why Uncertainty in Relationships Can Be So Consuming
Fear is one of the main reasons why we tend to struggle with uncertainty and deciding what to do in relationships. It is a core component of what makes uncertainty difficult to bear, and it reveals itself most clearly when you are contemplating whether or not you are about to make the “wrong” decision. The presence of fear makes it feel like your relationship, maybe even your entire existence, is on the verge of collapsing, and you fear that once it does, once you make a decision that turns out to be the wrong one, you won’t be able to recover from it.
Connected to fear is hesitancy. The hesitation to encounter the grief you know is also waiting for you. Grief over the loss of the relationship and the loss of the future you imagined. It is difficult for people to understand the shock that comes with the decision to leave a relationship. It is a choice that is rarely made without some degree of ambivalence.
It breeds anxiety in multiple ways. Anxiety about being alone again, about being criticized and judged. Anxiety about hurting the person you love, and the fear of not finding another person to share that kind of connection with. All these thoughts and considerations can consume you if you let them, which is probably why the mind has a tendency to defend itself from them by seeking certainty and reassurance rather than wallowing in ambiguity. Still, it is important to be honest with oneself and recognize when there are doubts stirring inside of you.
The Dilemma & Unhealthy Ways of Coping With It
The crux of the dilemma is that you cannot know with any real certainty what the future holds. You cannot know in advance what will come of your decision to leave or stay. Gather as much information as possible, engage in all the reflection you want, learn how to communicate, and none of it will change that fact. Inevitably, the path forward remains an uncertain one.
Whether leaving or staying, neither choice guarantees freedom from pain or regret. This being the case, your responsibility is to recognize that not choosing is also a decision, one that almost certainly prolongs pain and leads to regret. Out of all these options, it is certainly the worst.
It’s possible to expand on these unhealthy ways of coping with uncertainty, the first of which is constantly seeking reassurance.This behavior manifests as surveying friends and family and even strangers to try and build consensus and ascertain whether you should leave or stay. Endlessly seeking reassurance from others doesn’t work because you are seeking an answer that only you can provide. Whatever temporary relief is gained by going this route is quickly followed by more anxiety and doubt.
Even if you don’t outsource your decision to someone else it can be just as detrimental if you get caught up in over-intellectualizing. This behavior looks like constantly replaying past conversations in your head and fabricating new insights from them. Or it can look like creating the proverbial pros and cons list and modifying it over and over again without getting any closer to a solution. The problem with this strategy is that more thinking does not necessarily lead to more clarity.
The next unhealthy way of coping is through avoidance and emotional numbing. Rather than sit with the feelings of uncertainty you try to get around them. A common approach is to stay perpetually busy so you don’t even have to confront the question. For example, you throw yourself into work, yours or someone else’s, in order to avoid the issue.
The most drastic forms of avoidance lead to excess and excess becomes emotional numbing. You lose yourself in something in order to escape your discomfort. You become reckless and act on impulse, which has the peculiar benefit of temporarily eliminating the anxiety that comes with being uncertain. When you act on impulse there is nothing to be uncertain about because there is nothing to deliberate on—everything is decided instantly and by instinct alone.
The behaviors that momentarily cleanse you of uncertainty tend to implode. The classic example is the person who abruptly ends a relationship without consideration of the consequences to themselves or others. They do so only to alleviate themselves of discomfort, and tend to regret their decision not long afterwards.
The last unhealthy strategy to discuss is the tactic of looking for the “perfect” sign in order to act. Waiting for a dramatic event or some kind of unmistakable feeling before you make a decision is based on the faulty assumption that the answer to a problem must be clear and self-evident.
I’ve seen people convince themselves that they can’t act on what they feel—that they just need their partner to yell, insult, name call, or cheat on them one more time and then they’ll know it’s the right time to leave. But of course when all of this does happen, they find another reason to delay their decision. They receive confirmation but go on to squander it.
Healthy Ways of Coping with Uncertainty
Even though these responses to relationship uncertainty are common, there are still healthier more courageous ways of navigating these circumstances should you ever find yourself in them.
The key shift is to not think in terms of trying to disspell uncertainty, but considering how to make space for it instead. Acknowledging uncertainty of a situation and taking the stance I don’t know yet is an honest and legitimate psychological position. It is okay to not yet have an answer to the question of whether to leave or stay in a relationship and to take your time with discovering what that answer is. Until you do, you have to practice tolerating your discomfort without trying to make it disappear. As dangerous as uncertainty can feel, there is nothing legitimately threatening about it in most instances.
The path towards knowing isn’t defined by certainty but it is guided by your values. Those values should be positive ones that are centered on honesty, intimacy, integrity, commitment, compassion, and growth. These are the kinds of values that lead you to ask yourself, what kind of partner do I want to be? What kind of relationship do I want to build? What kind of life do I want to create? Let your values inform your decisions instead of allowing your fears to make them for you.
Once you do that you can look past hypotheticals and examine your relationship for what it actually is. How does it actually feel to be with this person? Can you be yourself with them? Is there space to repair after conflict? Are you becoming the person you want to be by virtue of being in this relationship? Reflect on what it actually feels like to be in the inner circle of your relationship.
Earlier I mentioned the mistake of constantly seeking reassurance from others and polling them for their opinion, but there is a difference between doing this and seeking another perspective in order to clarify your own. When it comes to solving your problems, other people's answers are useless, but their perspectives are helpful because they allow you to see your own more clearly.
It is wise to take your time and reflect before making a major decision rather than acting on impulse, and it is also wise to seek out trusted opinions from family, friends, a therapist, if they have experience in what you’re dealing with. Ultimately no one else can tell you which life to choose for yourself, but it helps to have support as you try to move closer to it.
The last helpful strategy, which is the most courageous and mature one is the practice of acceptance. What this means is that you accept, from the very beginning, that grief will accompany any choice you make, even if it is the right one. A painful decision isn’t necessarily a wrong decision. The choice to leave can involve grief, but the choice to stay can torment you just as easily through the specter of the life you never got to live. Both reactions are acceptable, and neither is necessarily a sign that you made the wrong decision.
The Paradox
In the end you may have to make a choice without the comfort of certainty and that’s okay. Maturity doesn’t always require clarity, full confidence, or the absence of doubt. Sometimes it requires making a choice to act even while acknowledging you cannot know for sure what the outcome will be. You are not trying to preserve the perfect future. You are trying to make a conscious choice and take responsibility for the live you are living.
Uncertainty is a part of life and it is possible to feel uncomfortable without it meaning you are pathological. Clarity might come through reflection or it might come through action and lived experience. Since it’s impossible to know beforehand which choice, if any, will guarantee happiness, a better goal is to make the choice you can honestly live with.