193: What Do You Owe a Relationship Before You Can Decide to Leave It?

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy.  I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach, and if you are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgments.  A lot of the so-called advice that’s out there for people who are cheating is little more than thinly veiled judgment, but that is NOT what I provide.  I give you guidance and support that respects the fullness of your humanity, and the complexity of your situation, no matter what you’re doing.  And, I teach you tools and perspectives that help make dealing with your infidelity situation a whole lot simpler.  When you’re ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s work together.  We can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can purchase my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

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Okay.  Today we are going to talk about what you owe – or might owe – a relationship before you can decide to leave that relationship.  I’ve touched on this topic in past episodes, but it’s a topic that I want to devote more attention to, because it comes up a LOT in my work with clients.

Often – not always, but often – this question of what we owe a relationship before we can decide to leave it will come up with a client who is married, or is in a committed, long-term relationship, and is involved with someone else.  Sometimes the client is pretty darn sure that they want to leave their committed relationship, but they think they owe themselves, or their partner, or their relationship something before they can decide to leave their relationship, and actually proceed with leaving that relationship. 

However, people’s ideas about what exactly they owe their relationship, or themselves, or their partner before they can decide to leave their relationship are often pretty vague.  Sometimes people say, I have no idea what I owe my partner before I can decide to leave, but I’m pretty sure I owe them SOMETHING.

Other people’s sense of what they might owe is slightly more defined.  For example, some people think they have to make absolutely sure their committed relationship isn’t salvageable before they decide to leave.  Sometimes people say they think they have to see if it’s possible to make their relationship better before they can decide to leave.  Sometimes people say that they have to give their relationship their all before they can decide that it’s not working for them.  These kinds of ideas might be a little more specific than thinking, “I just owe my partner something, but I have no idea what,” but they’re still pretty ambiguous.

My opinion is that in theory, it can, or might, be helpful to say, okay, before I decide to leave my committed relationship, I want to do certain things.  I think that it can be fine, and even helpful, to believe you owe your relationship or yourself or your partner something before you can make the decision to leave.  You don’t HAVE to think you owe anyone anything before you decide to leave – that is NOT my point here.  You have the right to leave a relationship anytime you want, for any reasons you want.  You don’t HAVE to do anything before you decide to leave a relationship.  But the idea that owe your relationship something might be useful, insofar as it might help you make decisions about your relationships, and live your life in a way that you feel good about.

However!  In order for the idea that you owe your relationship something before you can decide to leave it to be useful, you have to get really specific about what exactly you owe it.  Or what you owe yourself or your partner.  And you have to get really clear about what exactly you are going to do in the service of what you think you owe, and then you have to actually do those things, and then you have to have some way of evaluating the results of your efforts. 

So for instance, let’s say you think you owe it to your relationship to try to make it better before you can decide to leave.  That’s a fair starting point, but we need to get a lot more precise.  What exactly does it mean to make your relationship better?  What aspects of your relationship do you want to be different?  What are you willing to do in the service of making your relationship better in the ways you want it to be?  And assuming you actually do those things, how will you measure improvement, or how will you assess the results of your efforts?  How will you determine whether your relationship is getting better, and if it is, by how much?  If your relationship were to get better, how much better would it need to get in order for you to consider staying in the relationship?  You have to get super specific about all of this stuff.

My observation is that a lot of people have a hard time thinking specifically about what they might owe their relationship before they can decide to leave.  A lot of people are pretty attached to the idea that they owe their relationship SOMETHING, but when it comes to getting specific about what that something is, or what those multiple somethings are, they want to avoid the topic and run for the hills.

And I think that’s fair enough, for a number of reasons, including these three.  For one thing, the idea that we can’t “just decide to leave” a committed relationship is pretty prevalent.  The idea that we have to try to make a marriage work before we can decide to get a divorce is definitely out there.  In fact, a more extreme version of this idea holds that we have to do “everything we can” to make a marriage work before we can decide to leave the marriage – and this idea is not uncommon!  So we may have just absorbed the idea that we obviously, non-negotiably owe our relationship something, or maybe a LOT of things, before we can leave it – but we probably haven’t encountered much, if any, guidance on the specifics on what exactly that might entail.  This, of course, is one of the great ironies at play here, and this highly prescriptive yet non-specific advice can leave us pretty confused.

The second big reason why I think it’s fair that we often think we owe a relationship something before we can decide to leave but have no idea what exactly we owe it is that it can sound really noble to think we should try to make a relationship work before we decide it’s over.  And many of us want to do the noble thing!  Many of us do not want to be seen as person who leaves a committed relationship on a whim!  So we can easily get the sense that we, obviously, have to do something before we can leave a relationship without seeming like the bad person.  But as soon as we start to consider the specifics of what we owe the relationship, we may realize that we don’t actually want to do any of those things, and we may start feeling a lot less noble pretty quickly.  And then we may find ourselves stuck between what seems like a rock and a hard place.  On the one hand, we don’t want to be the “bad person” who leaves their committed relationship without trying a million things to make it better first.  But on the other hand, we don’t want to do any of the things we might do to try to make our relationship better.  And a lot of people try to avoid this predicament by simply not specifying what they might actually try to do before they can decide to leave their relationship. 

The third reason why I think it’s totally fair that many people get stuck on the idea that they owe their committed relationship something before they can decide to leave it is that staying in this vague idea that you owe your relationship something, but you don’t know what, helps you justify not doing much of anything to resolve your infidelity situation.  A lot of people don’t do this intentionally, or consciously – they don’t say to themselves, “I know how I’m going to keep myself stuck in limbo!  I know how I’m going to enable myself to avoid making decisions and taking action!  I’m going to tell myself that I owe my relationship something before I can decide to leave, but I’m not going get specific about what exactly that something is.  That’ll do the trick!”  Right?  I’m not saying folks are going around telling themselves this.  But when we are looking for ways to avoid considering scary things, or looking for ways to avoid making decisions, thinking that we owe our relationship something but we don’t know exactly what is a VERY effective way to keep yourself stuck.

So, if you have been telling yourself that owe your relationship something before you can decide to leave, but you have not yet specified what that something is, I think that’s totally understandable.

And, quite simply, if you think you owe your committed relationship something before you decide to leave it, you have to get specific about what that is.  Unless you want to stay in limbo forever.

But before we talk more about getting specific, I do want to suggest that you might not owe your committed relationship anything before you can decide to leave.  If you want to leave your committed relationship, that might the end of the matter.  You might not need to do anything other than make your decision and act on it.  It is legitimate to simply say, “I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore,” and not try to do anything to improve the relationship before you leave the relationship.  I know that sounds like heresy in a world that often thinks that something has gone terribly wrong if a marriage doesn’t last forever, and often thinks that someone who leaves a committed relationship is a real jerk.  But what if it ISN’T a terrible thing if a marriage doesn’t last forever?  And what if being the person who decides to leave a marriage does not mean you are a total jerk, or anything like that?  Trust me, I know this kind of thinking is common.  I am well aware that many people think you are a total jerk if you leave your marriage, and that if a committed relationship ends in anything other than the natural death of one or both parties, something has gone horribly wrong.  But even though this thinking may be common, you still get to question it. 

So along those lines, I encourage you to seriously consider the possibility that you might NOT owe yourself or your partner or your relationship anything before you can decide to leave.  I want you to consider that you can just decide to leave, whenever you want to.  That might sound cold, but deciding to leave can be done with love.  Exiting a relationship can be done with care and compassion.  Clarity and efficiency don’t have to be cruel.  In fact, clarity and efficiency might be the very opposite of cruelty.

Now, even though you could decide you don’t owe your relationship anything before you decide to leave, it’s also totally legitimate to decide that you WANT to do something, or some things, before you decide to leave your committed relationship.  You may decide that it’s not exactly that you OWE anyone anything, it’s that you WANT to do certain things before you end a relationship. 

And I encourage you to think in terms of what you might WANT to do for your relationship before you decide to leave, rather than in terms of what you owe or don’t owe your relationship before you can decide to leave.  Here’s the main reason why.  There are a lot of things in life that are very hard to do unless you genuinely and sufficiently WANT to do them.

For example, sometimes people tell me, well, my marriage is pretty good in a lot of ways, but the sex is totally unsatisfying.  I think if the sex were better, I’d want to stay married, but it just hasn’t been great for a long time.  But I feel so bad about leaving just because of the sex, so I feel like I should at least try to make it better before I go.

When people tell me anything along those lines, I tell them that if they want to, they can attempt to make changes in their sex life with their partner.  I tell them that some people do this and are delighted with what happens.  I tell them that at least in theory, it’s totally possible to have a better sex life with someone – even if you haven’t had much of a sex life with them in a long time.  And I also tell them that in order to even try to have a better sex life with their partner, they’re going to have to put in a fair amount of effort, and if they don’t WANT to make the effort, the whole endeavor will not get very far.  In fact, it probably won’t get anywhere!  And so I tell people, if you just aren’t interested in trying to have a better sex life with your spouse or your committed partner, you can save yourself a lot of time and energy by being really honest with yourself about that sooner rather than later.

It’s pretty hard to try to have better sex with someone you aren’t really interested in having sex with at all.  It’s pretty hard to put effort into trying to get excited about having sex with someone you aren’t at all interested in having sex.  It’s not impossible, but it’s a tough starting point.  On other episodes I’ve talked about the difference between wanting something and wanting to want something.  Sometimes wanting to want something can help us get to actually wanting it.  That IS possible – sometimes.  But sometimes it just isn’t.

It’s kind of like trying to train for running a marathon if you hate jogging.  Unless you have a REALLY good reason for wanting to run a marathon, you may find that you DON’T end up training for the marathon at all.  If jogging for ten minutes a day is totally unappealing to you, and you can barely summon the enthusiasm to do that, how do you expect to train for a marathon?  It simply may not happen.  Even if you think that running a marathon sounds like a really cool thing to do!

Similarly, it might sound perfectly lovely to think you owe it to your partner or to your relationship or to yourself to try to have better sex with your partner before you end your relationship with them.  There are a lot of different reasons why that could sound like something you theoretically want to do, or should want to do.  But if we don’t want to do a thing, we may be functionally unable to do it.  Even if we think we’re obligated to do it. 

If you really don’t want to have sex with your partner, you simply may not be able to try to have better sex with your partner – or any kind of sex at all with your partner.  You may be about as literally incapable of that as you can possibly be.  Or even if you aren’t LITERALLY AND COMPLETELY INCAPABLE, you may have so little interest in actually having sex with your partner that you are functionally incapable of trying to have better sex with them.  And if that’s the case, you thinking you owe it to your partner to try to have better sex with them before you end the relationship is unlikely to do anything great for either of you.  If the reality is that you just don’t want to try to have better sex with your partner, and therefore you aren’t actually doing ANYTHING to try have better sex with your partner, the outcome of all of this is probably going to be that you waste your time, and your partner’s time too.  You may be holding both of you hostage to your inability to reckon with reality as it is.

Now, if you really want to try to have a better sexual relationship with your partner, there are definitely things you can do in the service of that!  And I can help you with that!  But NOTHING I can teach you will help if you are not genuinely interested in trying to have better sex with your partner.  That doesn’t mean you have to feel intense desire for them at the outset of your efforts in order for things to work out well.  Not at all.  But you do have to be genuinely amenable to actively creating more desire for your partner.  And that is NOT the same thing as thinking you HAVE to try to have better sex with your partner before you can decide to end the relationship.

Of course, what I’m talking about isn’t just applicable to sex.  Let’s say you think the communication in your committed relationship isn’t great, and you want to see if you can make some changes in that department before you decide whether or not you’re going to leave the relationship.  Fantastic!  This can be a great thing to try to do, too.  But again, if you don’t actually WANT to do this, it just isn’t going to go very well.  Some people will tell you that good communication involves a bunch of specific practices, and I think that’s true to an extent.  But I also think that no matter what practices you employ, satisfying communication is predicated on a genuine interest in the person we’re communicating with.  So it’s really important to check in on how interested you are in having meaningful exchanges with your partner at this point.  Do you WANT to learn more about your partner?  Do you WANT to get to know them in a different way?  Do you WANT to learn about who they are, beyond what you already know about them – and beyond what you may assume to be true about them?

If you ARE interested in learning more about your partner, working on your ability to communicate with them can be fantastic thing to do.  Sometimes people are amazed by what happens when they actively cultivate interest in their partner of many years, and what happens when they engage with them differently, or communicate with them differently, when they’re operating from a place of genuine curiosity.  Sometimes genuine curiosity alone does a lot.  And yes, sometimes people want to work on specific communication skills, and those efforts can be extremely rewarding too.

And, on the other hand, it is not incumbent upon you to be deeply interested in your committed partner.  It really isn’t.  It is your prerogative to say, you know what, I am just not interested in engaging with this person as a romantic partner anymore.  I’m not interested in trying to foster that kind of a connection with them, whether through fostering my curiosity about them, or certain specific communications skills, or any other means.  I just don’t have any desire to do that.  And if that’s the case, why bother working on your communication skills?

If you think that you’ve communicated poorly with your partner, and you think that might be part of the reason why your relationship has gotten to a point where you’d prefer to leave that relationship, it can be really easy to think that you owe it to yourself and your partner and the relationship to improve your communication before you’re allowed to exit the relationship.  There can be great appeal to this sort of logic.  But you’ve got to be really scrupulous about deciding whether this logic is actually helping you or not.  Sometimes the best thing we can do for a relationship is allow both parties to move on.  Even if you believe your communication skills need work, that doesn’t mean you have to work on them within the context of your committed relationship.

So, having said all of that, if you are considering leaving a committed relationship, but you think you owe yourself or your partner or your relationship something or some things before you can decide to leave, here is what I want you to do.

First and foremost, get really specific about what you think you owe.  Sit yourself down and make a list of the things you think you owe yourself or your partner or your relationship before you can decide to leave.  Make the list specific, and make it exhaustive.  Push yourself to write down every single thing you think you owe.  Do not allow this list-making to become an endless project.  Commit to coming up with your complete list, and then being done with it.

Now, you may need some help doing this, and if you do, you’re not alone.  A lot of people find it hard to make this specific and exhaustive list, and if you do too, I can help you with this.  Let’s work together one-on-one if you’re finding this challenging.

Then, once you have identified EXACTLY what you think you owe, go through each item on your list and ask yourself whether you want to do it or not.  For the purposes of this assignment, I want you to either answer hell yes, you do want to do that thing on your list, or hell no, you don’t want to do it. 

Now.  If I’m working with a client, and they’re making a list like this, and they get to a point where they say, “Well, I think I owe my relationship this thing before I can decide to leave, but I’m not sure if I want to do it or not,” we discuss that.  So there IS some room for grey area and consideration here.  But here’s the problem: if you are working alone, without me there to bust you if you give yourself too much time in the land of the grey area, you may stay there for an awfully long time.  So if you’re doing this exercise on your own, I encourage you to push yourself to answering either hell yes, I want to do this thing that I think I owe my relationship, or hell no, I do not want to do it.  We have to make decisions at some point, people.  If we want to get anywhere different from where we are, that is.  So I encourage you to practice making decisions efficiently, by giving yourself only two ways to answer the question of, do I want to do this thing I think I owe my relationship or not.

Then, after you’ve done this, if you have decided that there are things on your list that you want to do, you now have to go and do those things!  That might sound painfully obvious, but it’s really important.  If you’ve decided you want to do certain things before you can decide to leave your relationship, start doing them.  And if you have any desire to make this complicated, it’s time for you to either bust yourself, or to schedule an appointment with me.

Now, if you tell yourself that you’re going to do the things on your list that you’ve decided you wanted to do, but you aren’t doing them, there are two possibilities I want you to consider.  It may be that you just need to give yourself a generous kick in the ass.  Sometimes we don’t do things because we just don’t feel like summoning the effort it takes to do them – but that doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t want to do the thing at all.  Even when we love to exercise, there may be days when we just don’t want to get out the door and go to the gym.  Sometimes we need to summon a LOT of motivation in order to get a thing done – even when we truly want to do it. 

But sometimes not doing things is an indication that we just don’t want to do them.  Or, put differently, sometimes not getting things done is an indication that we’re functionally unable to get those things done.

So if you give yourself a list of specific things you’re going to do before you can decide if you’re going to leave your relationship and you find that you are not doing those things, day in and day out, and maybe week after week, you have to be willing to bust yourself.  Maybe you need to get serious about putting the effort into doing the things you want to do.  Or maybe it’s time to cut the shit and allow yourself to say, “Okay, maybe I don’t actually want to do those things.  Not enough to actually do them.”

Some people get to this point and they say, “Well, it just isn’t fair to my partner if I leave my relationship without even trying to make it better.”  And I’m sympathetic to this way of thinking.  But if when push comes to shove, you simply cannot bring yourself to do the things you’ve said you wanted to do, how exactly is it fair to your partner to continue to “try” to do something that you either don’t want to do or cannot seem to bring yourself to do? 

Now this brings me to a very interesting point.  Sometimes people tell me they want to do certain things before they leave their relationship not because they want to try to change or improve their relationship with their committed partner, but because they want to make it look like they did everything they could to attempt to salvage the relationship before they left.  They’re sure they want out of their relationship, but they want to carefully manage how other people perceive their departure from their relationship.  And one of the most common things that people do in this kind of situation is go to couple’s counseling with their partner.  They think that if they go to couple’s counseling with their partner, it will look like they either did their best to see if the relationship could work before they decided to leave, or they think that it will look like they made a very well-considered decision to leave the relationship, and they think that that will be a win all around.

This isn’t the only example of what people do in an attempt to make it look like they tried to save a relationship before they decide to leave, but it’s a common one.  What often lies beneath this tactic, is a fear of what other people are going to think about them if they decide to leave their marriage, and a desire to leave their marriage in a way that other people won’t think poorly of, or at least, won’t think too poorly of.

And again, I’m sympathetic to this kind of thinking!  I’m sympathetic to wanting to avoid the hell of other people’s opinions!  Sometimes people have pretty nasty opinions of other people, and sometimes they feel free to share those opinions!  And when we’re on the receiving end of this, it can be pretty unpleasant.  So I completely understand the desire to avoid being seen as the jerk who decided to just up and leave their committed relationship, without doing eight million things to try to make the relationship work, first.  Or something along those lines.

But there are at least a few problems with this!  For starters, doing anything in an attempt to guarantee a certain response from other people is dubious business.  We just can’t engineer other people’s responses to our behavior, and we cannot predict other people’s responses to our behavior with total certainty.  Going to couple’s counseling with your partner before you tell them that you want to end your relationship with them does NOT guarantee that they will like your decision to leave any better than they would have if you had not gone to couple’s counseling with them.  And going to couple’s counseling with your partner is not guaranteed to shape what other people think about you leaving your marriage.  It might!  I’m not ruling that out!  But it also might not. 

Now, some people know all of this, but they still want to go to couple’s counseling anyway.  They know they can’t guarantee what other people will think of them leaving their relationship, but they’re pretty convinced that going to couple’s counseling first will serve as a good insurance policy against the outcomes they don’t want to experience.  And you have every right to make this decision, too, if you want to!  You can totally go through the charade of going to couple’s counseling if you think that’s going to be a win for you!  Even if your firm intention is to leave your relationship, you can go to couple’s counseling because you think you owe it to your partner to do so, or because you think it’s going to look better, or something like that.  It is totally your prerogative to do that.

However, when I said charade a moment ago, I meant it.  Going to couple’s counseling when you don’t really want to go and you don’t have any intentions of telling your partner or your therapist the full truth of what’s going on with you during your counseling sessions is probably going to require at least little bit of acting on your part.  Do you really want to bother with all of that?  You might not!  Especially when you have no way of knowing if your charade will pay off in the way you hope it will.  Going to couple’s counseling may not achieve your desired results, and it might even backfire. 

Sometimes people go to couple’s counseling in the hopes of checking off a box of things they think they ought to do before they can leave their relationship, but couple’s counseling ends up opening a Pandora’s box, or maybe even a few different Pandora’s boxes.  For instance, if you go to couple’s counseling, your partner may believe that you are seriously trying to work on your relationship – and they may want you to do all sorts of things in the service of that!  Is that a situation you want to put yourself in?  On top of that, your couple’s therapist may try to steer your sessions in directions that you really don’t want to go in, and you may not be able to push back on their agenda without tipping your hand. 

So although you certainly CAN go to couple’s therapy with your partner before you end the relationship if you think that is a box that simply must be checked off, be aware that sometimes checking off a box is not as simple as we think it’s going to be.  Sometimes attempting to check off a particular box ends up making things more complicated rather than less complicated.  If we do not want to do anything before we leave a relationship, the simplest course of action might be to let our partner know what we’ve decided, and then act on our decision.

Okay – let’s talk briefly about one last thing.  If you decide that you WANT to do certain things to see if your relationship improves before you decide to leave, and you do those things, you may find that the things you do end up working!  You may find that when you engage in your relationship differently, things get better!  You may find that you’re actually pretty happy in your committed relationship!

Sometimes, people experience this to be a wonderful thing in a really uncomplicated way.  And if that happens for you, that’s wonderful.

And some people experience this to be a really wonderful thing, and also a really confusing thing.  If you were pretty sure that you were going to leave your marriage for your affair partner, and you told yourself you wanted to do just a few things before you officially decided to leave your marriage, and then you did those things earnestly, and then you found yourself really happy in your marriage, you may feel like you have a dilemma on your hands.  Do you want to stay married?  If your marriage now seems as awesome as your relationship with your affair partner, now what?

Similarly, it’s also possible that things get better in your committed relationship, but you aren’t sure if it’s enough.  You may know that you are happier in your marriage.  You may be amazed by the improvements that were possible within your committed relationship.  You may think that things are better in your marriage than they’ve been in a long time.  But you aren’t sure if that means you want to stay married.     

The way we can make these kinds of questions or challenges easier to deal with is by having a clear sense of what we want – and what we don’t want.  This is a big topic in and of itself, so for today I’m just going to say this.

If you seriously want to see what’s possible within your committed relationship before you decide to leave, you want to be aware of the possibility that your efforts will go well, and your relationship will get better.  But if this happens, you’ll still have decisions to make.  You’ll probably be making decisions from an entirely different landscape, but you’ll still have to make choices about what you want to do about your relationships.  Sometimes people think that if they do the things they want to do before they feel like they can decide to leave their relationship, the ultimate decisions will sort of make themselves.  That may not happen!  But choosing between two great options is a pretty good problem to have.    

All right!  It is time to wrap this up for today.  Thank you all so much for listening.  Again, if you have benefitted from listening to this podcast, I would greatly appreciate it if you would share your appreciation of my work by rating and reviewing the podcast on iTunes, or sending me a blurb about how this podcast has been helpful to you.  You can send your comments to [email protected], or you can go to the contact page of my website and fill out the contact form.  I’ll share your comments on social media and various other places, but I will of course share them ANONYMOUSLY.  I’d appreciate it if you would give me initials that I can attribute your comments to – but those can either be your real initials, or initials you’ve made up.  Please add those initials to your comments.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your comments about how my work has helped you.  I know we’re all busy, and I know that even when we want to share appreciation for something that has helped us, it takes time to do that.  So thank you in advance for taking the time to put some words together on my behalf.  Or for just going to iTunes and giving the show a five-star rating.  That only takes a minute.

And of course, if you want my help resolving your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s get to work.  If you want to work with me one-on-one, you can schedule an introductory coaching session with me through my website, and if you want to purchase my self-guided course, you can do that on my website too.  Mariemurphyphd.com.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.