Should I Stay or Leave My Marriage? Why You Can't Seem to Make a Decision

Why It's So Hard to Know What to Do When Your Marriage Isn't Working

IIf you've been asking yourself Should I stay or leave my marriage?, chances are you've been asking it for a while now. Months. Maybe years.

And if you're like most people I work with, it's not an occasional question. It's a running loop in your head. You wake up thinking about it. You replay old fights. You analyze conversations. You picture what divorce would actually look like. You Google How do I know if my marriage is over? at 2am when you can’t sleep. You decide. Then you undecide. Or you just live in the loop.

Monday you're sure you're done. Tuesday you have a good day together and think, maybe this isn't so bad, maybe we can fix it. Then you have the same fight you've had a hundred times and think, I cannot do this anymore. Then you picture telling your kids and think, I can't do that to them. You picture ten more years of this and feel trapped. You picture leaving and feel terrified.

Round and round you go until eventually you start asking a different question: why can't I just decide?

Here's what I've come to believe after sitting every day with people in exactly this spot: you can't decide the big question because you haven't answered the smaller ones yet. What's actually happening in your marriage? What have you really tried? What could still change? What can't you know, no matter how long you think about it? Getting unstuck isn't about talking yourself into staying or finally getting the courage to leave. It's about getting clearer information so that whichever way you go, you're going there with your eyes open.

Why Can't I Decide Whether to Stay or Leave?

Here's a bomb I drop on a lot of clients: thinking about your marriage constantly doesn't mean you're deciding anything.

Those are two completely different activities. When things are bad, leaving feels obvious. When things are okay, staying feels obvious. When you picture your kids' faces, staying feels like the only option. When you picture yourself having this same fight five years from now, leaving does. Your thoughts spin, but nothing gets decided. That's part of why this kind of indecision feels so crazy-making. You're trying to make one of the biggest decisions of your life from inside the emotional storm thinking about the decision itself is creating.

How Do I Stop Going Back and Forth About Divorce?

You have to get out of the swirl long enough to actually look at what you know, what you don't know, and what you might still be able to find out. I call this getting into your Deciding Mind.

Deciding Mind isn't some serene, all-knowing version of you who suddenly has the answer. That person doesn't exist. Deciding Mind is just you — calm enough to think straight. Calm enough to look honestly at what you already know, learn what you can, and accept that some things you simply can't know yet. Good decisions don't get made in the middle of a storm, and they definitely don’t come from waiting until things are so bad you have no choice left.

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and author or Thinking Fast and Slow, described two ways we think: one fast and intuitive, one slow and deliberate. The problem is that when you're scared, hurt, or desperate for the feeling to stop, slowing down is a lot easier said than done. That's what Deciding Mind is for. It's the shift out of pure reaction and into deliberate thinking. It doesn't mean ignoring your feelings — your feelings hold real information about your marriage. They deserve a seat at the table. They just don't get to run the meeting.

Once you're in Deciding Mind, the question changes. Instead of how do I make this uncomfortable feeling stop, it becomes what is this feeling telling me, and what do I actually know? That's a completely different kind of thinking. The goal is not to talk yourself into staying, or to give yourself permission to leave. It's to understand your marriage and your options clearly enough to make a decision you can actually stand behind — either way.

What If I Don't Have Enough Information to Know Whether to Get Divorced?

This is where people get stuck for years. You keep gathering evidence because part of you believes you'll eventually find the one piece that makes everything obvious. Maybe your spouse will do something so terrible you'll finally know. Maybe things will get better and you'll finally know. Maybe your therapist will just tell you what to do. Maybe the right book or podcast or Instagram reel will have the answer. Maybe you'll just wake up one day and know.

So we keep gathering, but the problem is we’re not exactly neutral in our evidence collecting. If you're angry today, your brain will hand you an impressive file of every hurtful, selfish thing your spouse has ever done — see, this is never going to change. Then you have a good weekend and suddenly a different file opens — see, maybe this isn't so bad after all. Neither is wrong. That's the hard part, you actually have real evidence on both sides.

And here's the harder truth: some of what you're waiting for doesn't exist yet. You don't know how you'll feel two years post-divorce. You don't know how your kids will actually respond, or whether they'd be better off with you married or not. You can’t really know what your life will look like either way, if the grass is really greener or if you’ll have regret. Those answers live in a future that hasn't happened. No amount of thinking tonight will give you them.

The decision researcher Annie Duke makes a distinction I keep coming back to: a good decision and a good outcome are not the same thing. You can make a great decision and still have it end badly. You can make a reckless one and get lucky. So the goal isn’t to guarantee the outcome — you can't. The goal is to build the best decision-making process you can with the information you actually have right now.

How Do I Know If I Should Stay Married or Get Divorced?

You probably won't ever reach 100% certainty here. What you can reach instead is clarity — understanding what's actually happening in your marriage, what you've tried, what could still change, what matters most to you, and what's genuinely unknowable. You don't need certainty. You need clarity.

Most people stuck in limbo are chasing certainty. Certainty sounds like: I know this is right. I know I won't regret it. I know my kids will be fine. I know I've tried everything. I know I'll be happier alone. I know he'll never change. But you can't know most of that. And if some part of you has quietly decided you're not allowed to move until you do, you can lose years waiting.

Clarity is different. Clarity is: what's actually happening in my marriage? What have we tried, and did it work? What's changed, what hasn't? What matters most to me? What am I no longer willing to live with? What would need to be true for me to feel differently? You can actually answer those.

You can wait for certainty for the next decade or you can try to get clarity now.

What If I've Already Tried Everything?

I hear this constantly: but I have tried. I believe you. You've probably asked for more help around the house. Complained about how little time you spend together. Told them you need more affection. Fought about the phone, the parenting, the sex, the anger, the schedule, the distance. You’ve probably had some version of the same argument for years.

But here's the question worth asking yourself: have you complained about the problems, or have you made it unmistakably clear how much they're costing you and the marriage? Those aren't the same thing. What I usually see is one spouse has grown unhappier and more disconnected over time while the other thinks, yeah, I know they're frustrated, we've been fighting about this forever. They register the complaint. They don't register that it's become something bigger — that the marriage itself might be at risk. That's why so many spouses walk into my office blindsided by the word "divorce," while the other one is shocked that they’re blindsided. Both of those things can be true at once.

That deserves way more space than I can give it here. For now, just don't let I've complained about this for years quietly turn into I already have all the information I need. You might, and you might not.

So What Do You Do Now, When You Don’t Know Whether to Stay or Leave?

At some point, thinking harder stops helping. If you’ve been going around in circles for months or years, you probably need to do something different. You may need to risk really showing your hand. I don’t mean threatening divorce in the middle of a fight (ever!). I mean being much more honest than you’ve ever been about what isn’t working, how serious it’s become, and what you need to see change.

There’s a big difference between, We’ve had this fight a hundred times and My spouse fully understands that I’m seriously questioning whether I can stay in this marriage. Show your hand with love and respect (how you say it matters) and then watch what happens. Get help if you need. How they respond is information. Are they curious or defensive? Do they take you seriously, take responsibility, make changes or continue to ignore the issue?

The point is you’re not trying to force yourself into staying or leaving, but you are trying to get really clear about what’s possible and you can only begin to do that from a place of complete honesty. However scary that may be.

Still not sure what this means for your marriage?

If you're caught between staying and leaving, you may be in what I call marital limbo — that exhausting place where you're not ready to leave, but you can't keep living the way things are. Not all limbo looks the same. There are progressive stages and what stage you’re in matters. It can give you a clue about what might still be possible.

I put together a free guide, Can My Marriage Still Be Saved? The 6 Hidden Stages of Marital Limbo (and Your Window to Change Course), to help you figure out where you actually are — and what that might mean for what comes next.

[Get the free guide →]