Should you stay in your relationship?

For better or for worse. 

These sacred words, uttered by so many couples, symbolizes the shared commitment that they expect each other to hold up no matter what happens in life. 

A blog reader recently wrote to me expressing shame and guilt for choosing to stay with her partner, who she said was a “porn addict”. 

Betrayed partners of infidelity express shame when they choose to stay with their partner who cheated on them. “Why don’t I just leave?”

Like these folks, you might choose to maintain your commitment as opposed to leaving the relationship. Like our recent blog reader, you may also feel riddled with guilt, shame, and embarrassment for your choice to stay. 

Let’s explore why you choose to stay committed and how you can stay without beating yourself up.

Why You Choose to Stay in Your Relationship

It’s difficult to feel conflicted about whether or not to leave your relationship. Love is both simple and complicated. 

As a relationship counselor, marriage counselor, and sex therapist, I help many partners work through the ambivalence of staying or going. When I’m doing this with both partners, it’s called discernment counseling.

When you love someone, whether the problem is a sexless marriage, relationship dissatisfaction, infidelity or anything else, the answer to stay or go may not always feel crystal clear. 

In the most ideal situation, you might choose to stay because your partner actively participates to make your relationship better. Perhaps, you’re working through the hurt and pain their actions have caused you. As you do this, you may also see  their genuine effort to work on it with you. 

This can provide you with hope and a vision for a future together. 

If you choose to stay and your partner doesn’t actively work with you to resolve your relationship struggles, consider working with a professional relationship therapist. Working with a seasoned professional can either help you find ways to make that relationship better or work toward dissolution. 

If you want to stay but develop hard feelings about your choice to stay, like guilt, shame, and/or embarrassment, rather than turning away from those emotions, can you tune into them?

Invite Your Emotions In

Our emotional responses can provide a wealth of information for us if we allow ourselves to tune in, pay attention and feel. 

Rather than beating yourself up through shame, guilt or embarrassment, ask yourself:

• Who makes me feel shame? Guilty? Embarrassed? (think about family/friends)

If family and friends put pressure on you to leave, you may want to draw stricter boundaries with them. Friends and family often mean well but it’s not their place to influence the direction of any adult’s intimate relationship.

On the flip side, the concern of your family and/or friends may be informative. If you repeatedly turn to friends and family to de-escalate a situation or to cry on their shoulder, this may be a sign to seriously examine your choice to stay. 

• Am I expressing these feelings to my partner?

If you’ve been hurt by your partner’s actions, we always recommend that you share your feelings with them, including your ambivalence, shame, guilt and/or humiliation. It may be hard for them to hear but partners need to know what you feel. 

Expressing your feelings can often help release them, especially if you have an attentive partner who wants to support your healing.

• How is my partner supporting me through these feelings?

In marriage counseling and couples therapy, I often help partners that have violated the relationship contract learn how to become healers of their relationship. Sometimes, both partners need to become healers.  

They can do this by being an attentive listener, apologizing and demonstrating trust-worthy, dependable behaviors.

This process usually works best when both partners actively participate in the healing process and when guided by a couples therapist. 

• Are these feelings familiar? Have I felt them before in previous relationships?

As relationship counselor, I often see repeated patterns in my client’s relationship history. Often these patterns can go all the way back to childhood. 

If you feel riddled with guilt, shame or embarrassment, chances are you’ve felt these feelings deeply before. You may have felt them in previous relationships or in the house that you grew up in. 

Sometimes, these emotional states feel so familiar that we can feel lost without them. We like to call this our “comfortable chaos”. Shame, guilt and/or humiliation can become part of our identities. It’s not conscious but it takes consciousness to break the pattern. 

• Are these feelings telling me something that I need to face?

It’s easy to compartmentalize, ignore or deny difficult feelings or problems in a relationship. Especially if you’re considering separation but also view separation as a failure.

But if you want clarity around ambivalence or if you want to live without shame, guilt or embarrassment, you must tune in instead of tuning out. 

In therapy, I break these processes down for you even more. Often, these difficult feelings are embedded in a deeper story that requires unpacking.

How to Move Forward

You may be able to use the questions above to help you dig deeper into your experiences and emotional life with your partner. 

Journaling your responses can be a way to explore the topic further. Of course, I always recommend communicating with your partner and working through the issues together. 

If you choose to stay, make that a choice free of shame, guilt or humiliation. If you hold onto those feelings, become curious about the purpose they serve.

• Do they exist to make sure your partner stays punished? Or to control your partner’s actions by making them feel bad about themselves? 
• Do they reflect a deeper story about you? Your history? Your relationship patterns?
• Do they exist because it’s truly time to leave the relationship? Does your gut tell you to leave when your heart tells you to stay? In those situations, gut wisdom is often correct. 

If you have difficulty figuring this out, turning to a relationship counselor, marriage counselor, couples counselor or sex therapist can feel like a lifeline.