How do you know when it’s time to stop trying in a relationship? I get asked this question a lot. How do you know if you’re giving up too soon? How do you know if a relationship still deserves more effort? How do you know if you’ll regret leaving?
These questions show up after you’ve already tried. After the conversations, the compromises, the therapy, the books, and the waiting. What makes this decision especially hard is that, by the time you’re asking it, you’re often not just confused. You’re likely self-gaslighting. While this isn’t a clinical diagnosis, it’s a pattern I see all the time. It’s when you talk yourself out of your own experience in order to avoid discomfort, loss, or a hard truth.
Today, you’ll learn why this decision feels so hard even when you’ve been unhappy for a long time, what psychological and biological forces keep you stuck, and how to assess what you actually need in a relationship so you can decide what to do next without panic, self-blame, or regret.
13-minute read
Why This Decision Is So Hard, Even When You’ve Been Thinking About It Forever
Most people assume indecision means they don’t know enough or haven’t thought about something enough. That’s almost never true. What’s usually happening is that several psychological forces are pulling you in opposite directions at the same time, and you confuse effort with effectiveness.
You likely stay stuck because you equate trying harder with doing the right thing. Effort feels virtuous. It feels loyal. It feels like love. So you keep adjusting how you communicate. You work on your tone. You pick your battles. You try to be more patient, more understanding, more regulated. You read another book or suggest another round of therapy. And when nothing fundamentally changes, you assume the problem is that you still haven’t tried enough or that there’s some “right way” out there you’re just missing.
But effort alone doesn’t tell you whether a relationship is healthy or sustainable. If you’re constantly exerting energy just to keep the relationship from falling apart, that’s not progress. That’s endurance. A relationship worth saving doesn’t require you to chronically override yourself just to keep it functioning.
And what do I mean when I say that you override yourself? It means repeatedly ignoring or pushing down your own internal signals in order to preserve the relationship. Something doesn’t feel right in your body, but you talk yourself out of it. You feel hurt, disappointed, or uneasy, but immediately minimize it. Your gut gives you information, and your brain rushes in to explain it away.
This often shows up most clearly after the hard moments. The argument happens, the boundary gets crossed, you feel dismissed, disrespected, or alone. And then the good times return.
When it’s good, it’s really good or at least good enough. There’s connection, affection, laughter, and relief. You think, this is why I stay. And because those moments feel so grounding, you move past what didn’t sit right before. You stop bringing it up. You stop asking yourself hard questions. You tell yourself it wasn’t that bad.
That’s overriding yourself.
You’re not responding to the full picture of the relationship. You’re responding to the emotional relief of the good moments and discounting the information that shows up during the hard ones. Over time, this creates confusion because the relationship feels amazing sometimes and painful sometimes. Instead of using the painful moments as data, you treat them as noise you should get over. And that’s often where self-gaslighting begins.
There are four main mistakes I see when it comes to making critical decisions in your relationship:
1. You mistake hope for progress
Hope is one of the strongest forces keeping people stuck. You focus on what the relationship could be instead of what it actually is. You replay the good moments. You remember how it used to feel. You tell yourself that if one specific thing changed, everything would be better.
You might think, if they really understood how much this hurts me, things would shift, or once this stressful season passes, we’ll be okay again. Meanwhile, the same patterns repeat.
Hope becomes a problem when it replaces evidence. Progress shows up as consistent behavioral change over time, not potential or promises. Hope without movement doesn’t move a relationship forward. It just delays clarity.
2. You normalize what isn’t working for you
Over time, many people quietly lower their expectations without realizing it. You tell yourself no relationship is perfect. You say long-term relationships are supposed to be hard. You compare your situation to worse ones and use that comparison to invalidate your own experience. You compare this relationship to your last one and say, “Well, this is an improvement over that one,” but that’s like saying slightly moldy bread is better to eat than really moldy bread. Sure, it’s better, but do you want to eat moldy bread at all?! Really?!
You might feel lonely, dismissed, or emotionally unsupported, then immediately think, at least they don’t cheat, or at least they’re a good parent, or other people have it worse. There’s a difference between accepting normal imperfections and dismissing chronic dissatisfaction. Feeling anxious, unseen, or emotionally alone on a regular basis isn’t a personality flaw. It’s information.
3. You’re more afraid of being wrong than being unhappy
This shows up especially in thoughtful, self-aware people. You don’t want to overreact. You don’t want to hurt someone unnecessarily. You don’t want to look back and realize you didn’t try hard enough. So, you keep reassessing instead of deciding.
You think, what if I leave and realize this was fixable, or what if this is just a phase and I blow everything up. That fear keeps you in analysis mode, revisiting the same questions without moving forward. Indecision can feel safer than choosing, but it has a cost. It keeps you in a relationship that already feels uncertain and draining. Not deciding is still a decision.
4. You stay loyal to a past version of the relationship
History is powerful. Shared memories, inside jokes, milestones, and everything you’ve been through together can keep you emotionally attached long after the relationship itself has changed.
You might find yourself thinking about how connected you once felt or how much you survived together. That history makes it harder to assess the relationship you’re actually in now. You’re not staying for the present reality. You’re staying for a memory.
Self-Gaslighting: How You Talk Yourself Out of What You Already Know
Self-gaslighting is when you consistently dismiss, minimize, or reinterpret your own experience in order to reduce discomfort or avoid a hard truth.
It often sounds like this:
- I’m probably overreacting.
- They didn’t mean it like that.
- Other people have it worse.
- Maybe I’m just bad at relationships.
- If I were more patient, this wouldn’t bother me.
Self-gaslighting is not a character flaw. It’s a coping strategy.
Something called cognitive dissonance plays a role here too. When your reality doesn’t match what you hoped for, your brain looks for ways to reduce your discomfort. Changing the story can feel easier than changing the situation. But you end up with that feeling that something “just isn’t right” even as you keep ignoring it.
Examples of cognitive dissonance are things like rationalizing a partner’s infidelity as “no big deal,” downplaying your need for independence to fit a controlling partner, or staying in a relationship despite repeated betrayals because you believe “they’ll change.” All of these examples create a clash between “I love them” and “their actions are harmful to me.”
Then, there are issues around attachment (I know, it comes up in just about every episode I do, but for good reason)! When you’re bonded to someone, your brain prioritizes preserving the bond, so minimizing problems can feel safer than separating from that person.
And let’s not forget about good old-fashioned social conditioning (especially for women, although this can be an issue for men too, of course). Many people are taught to be accommodating, understanding, and not too much. That makes it easy to turn frustration inward instead of treating it as data.
Over time, self-gaslighting erodes self-trust. You stop asking whether something is okay for you and start asking why you can’t just be okay with it.
The Biology of Staying Versus Leaving
This is where many people mistake fear for intuition. Your brain is wired to avoid loss, uncertainty, and threat, and leaving a relationship activates all three!
Loss aversion means your brain reacts more strongly to what you might lose than what you might gain. Leaving can feel like losing safety, identity, routine, and belonging, even if the relationship is unhealthy. Your nervous system also prefers familiarity. Familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar uncertainty. That’s why staying can feel calmer than leaving, even when staying is hurting you.
Another biological issue is that intermittent reinforcement strengthens attachment. When connection and affection show up unpredictably, dopamine is released in bursts, which intensifies bonding. This is why relationships that are sometimes wonderful and sometimes painful are so hard to leave!
Lastly, chronic relational stress also increases cortisol, which impairs reflective thinking and keeps you in survival mode. When you’re stressed, you’re less able to make long-term, values-based decisions.
Biology explains your pull to stay, but you need to remember that it doesn’t determine what’s best for you.
How to Assess This Relationship Without a Pros and Cons List
Many people try to decide whether to stay or leave by making a pros and cons list. I don’t recommend that, not because lists are useless, but because of how your brain uses them.
If I asked you to write up a list with the pros and cons of your relationship, you might write forty pros and maybe two cons. Because the pros list looks so long, your brain starts minimizing the cons. You tell yourself there are only two issues. You point to the long list of positives as proof that the relationship must be worth saving.
But if even one of those cons is a deal breaker, the math doesn’t matter.
A relationship doesn’t work like a vote. Forty good things don’t cancel out two things that make you feel unsafe, disrespected, chronically lonely, or like you’re slowly losing yourself. The pros list ends up talking you into something while your brain quietly explains away the very information you need to listen to.
So instead of listing, I want you to assess.
This week’s download, the Relationship Clarity Worksheet, walks you through this exact process step by step so you’re not trying to do it all in your head and accidentally self-gaslight yourself back into confusion.
Here’s the process.
A Four-Step Process for Getting Clarity
To make this concrete, I’m going to use a client example. Her name and some details are changed to protect anonymity, but the story itself is all too real. We’re going to call her Maya. Maya had been with her partner for three years. Her pros list was long and convincing. He was funny, smart, and he loved her family. They traveled well together, and he had a good job. On paper, it looked great.
But there were two things she could not shake. During conflict, he became sarcastic and dismissive. And when things were hard, she felt like she was on her own. Now, being two single people, these things were easier to downplay or overlook, but they were looking to get engaged, and she was seeing a future with marriage and children. So, as a long-term thing, these two things mattered more than everything else.
So, I took Maya through the steps.
Step one: Identify your top three to five relationship non-negotiables
This step is not about what you want your partner to do differently. It’s about what you need in order to feel emotionally safe, respected, and solid in a relationship.
Maya initially said she needed respect, teamwork, and emotional safety. Then we made those specific. Respect meant no sarcasm or mocking during conflict. Teamwork meant that when something was hard, he leaned in with her instead of pulling away. Emotional safety meant she could bring up an issue without being punished for it.
If you’re doing this for yourself, ask what must be true for you to feel good in a relationship.
Step two: Rate consistency, not potential
Most people rate their relationship based on potential. They treat the best version of their partner as the standard. That’s not the standard. The standard is consistency.
With Maya, we looked at how often her non-negotiables showed up, especially under stress. Respect was present when things were calm, but disappeared during conflict. Teamwork showed up when problems were small, but vanished when she needed real support. Patterns matter more than promises.
Step three: Name what cannot be tolerated
There are things that are hard but workable, and things that are fundamentally unsafe. For Maya, sarcasm and mocking during conflict weren’t just communication issues. They were emotionally aggressive. Once she named that clearly, she stopped minimizing it.
This step isn’t about building a case against your partner. It’s about your bottom line. If something repeatedly crosses your line of safety or respect, the pros list becomes irrelevant.
Step four: Ask the long-term question
Once Maya saw the patterns clearly, she still wanted certainty. Most people do. What you can answer is this: If nothing changed, could you live in this relationship long-term without betraying yourself?
For Maya, the answer came quickly. She said she would become smaller and quieter if this continued. She already was. Clarity often sounds calm, not dramatic. When it shows up, your job is not to argue with it. Your job is to respect it.
If You Have Kids Together
Having children together doesn’t change the core question of whether a relationship is workable. It changes the responsibility and the pacing, not the truth.
This is where a lot of people get stuck. Parents often tell themselves they should stay for the kids, that any two-parent household is better than divorce, or that as long as they don’t fight in front of their children, everything is fine. That’s usually self-gaslighting in disguise.
Kids don’t just absorb what you say. They absorb emotional tone, chronic tension, resentment, withdrawal, and the way you and your partner handle conflict and repair. A home can be quiet and still feel unsafe. A relationship can look stable from the outside and still teach unhealthy lessons about love, self-respect, and emotional availability.
When you have kids, the question isn’t “Can I tolerate this?” It’s “What am I modeling?”
You’re modeling what partnership looks like. You’re modeling how people treat each other under stress. You’re modeling whether love requires self-silencing, walking on eggshells, or enduring unhappiness.
There’s an important distinction to make here. Working through discomfort in a relationship that is basically respectful and emotionally safe can be healthy for kids to witness. Normalizing chronic unhappiness, emotional distance, contempt, or repeated boundary violations is not. That doesn’t protect children. It instructs them.
Staying doesn’t automatically protect kids. Leaving doesn’t automatically harm them. What protects children is having caregivers who are emotionally regulated, honest with themselves, and capable of modeling respect, repair, and self-trust. Sometimes that happens together. Sometimes it happens apart.
This doesn’t mean you rush a decision or ignore the impact on your children. It means you stop pretending that staying in a relationship that requires ongoing self-abandonment is a neutral choice. It isn’t. It teaches something, whether you intend it to or not.
Wrap Up
At some point, the work isn’t about figuring out whether you should stay or leave. It’s about stopping the internal arguments that keep you stuck. When you’re honest about what you need and whether it’s actually happening, the decision tends to make itself. You may not like it right away, but you’ll recognize it. That’s the moment you stop talking yourself out of your own experience and start trusting it again.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- Relationship Clarity Worksheet
- Self-Gaslighting Inventory
- Journaling Prompts to Uncover Self-Gaslighting Beliefs
- Is This Hard or is This Harmful Worksheet
- Values-Based Closure Letter
- The Biology of Staying vs Leaving Worksheet
Buy the bundle now for $10 and get all the above. OR join Abby’s One Love Collective for only $8/month, and get a Therapy-to-Go Bundle for each episode, plus ad-free episodes of the podcast, live Q&A’s with Dr. Abby, and access to an amazing community that’s all about real growth.
Download the Relationship Clarity Worksheet
If you want help doing this without spiraling, download this week’s Relationship Clarity Worksheet. It walks you through identifying your non-negotiables, rating consistency, naming non-tolerables, and answering the long-term question in a grounded way. You don’t need more thinking. You need a better way to assess.
Research for How to Know When It’s Time to Stop Trying in a Relationship
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Join Abby’s One Love Collective
How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Personal Relationships
Is Your Relationship Worth Saving?
A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development by John Bowlby
