Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

Start with the peak, not the pit. The very first diagnostic asks you to recall the best period of the relationship and honestly assess whether things were genuinely good then. About ten percent of ambivalent people realize the answer is no: even at its height there was distance, constant fighting, or emptiness. Jennifer, married eight years, suddenly saw she and her husband were a "good on paper" couple who shared tastes but never truly enjoyed each other. She wept for years spent deciding about a relationship that never really existed.

You can fix what broke, rarely what never worked. Kirshenbaum's guideline: if the peak was not good, the prognosis is poor and most people who leave feel relief. The satisfaction-producing core simply was never there.

Diagnostics are asymmetric. This is the structural engine of the whole book. A guideline pointing to leave overrules any number of guidelines pointing to stay. Kirshenbaum uses a house analogy: a stunning view cannot offset a foundation eaten by termites or a home wedged between a slaughterhouse and a floodplain. Terrible things hold veto power over good things.

Deal-breakers are definite. Repeated physical violence (more than one incident) is the clearest example: it will escalate, so you must leave regardless of love or the partner's charm, unless he sustains a year in a treatment program. The same logic governs every exit sign. You need only one. If you answer a question in a way that produced a leave guideline, you have your truth; the positives no longer matter.

Meet the power person. Some partners are not merely strong-willed; they cannot tolerate you getting any need met because your need feels like an assault on their control. Rosemary, an accountant, wanted to go straight home to change for a client meeting; her husband Vinnie insisted on a pointless detour to his restaurant, because letting her "win" was intolerable to him. Power people deploy guilt trips, endless campaigns, snow jobs of confusion, and intimidation.

Humiliation is the barometer. When a partner's dominance leaves you feeling invisible or worthless most of the time, measured by how often your thoughts turn to rage or despair around them, the relationship has turned toxic. Try the fairness test: appeal to fairness without blaming. A power person cannot respond to it.

Not all bad communication kills. Kirshenbaum debunks two overhyped villains. "Alien communication" (gender or cultural differences) and "crazy communication" (confused, cross-purpose exchanges, like her couple who erupted over "Did you get the check?") are annoying but fixable. Communication's job is bridging difference, so difference alone is not fatal.

Two things are. First, off-the-table-itis: a partner who consistently blocks you from raising what matters, whether by anger, subject-changing, or velvet-gloved delay, so you feel permanently shut up. It cannot be fixed because it forbids discussing the very problem. Second, chronic lying: not one big lie, which relationships survive, but reaching the point where you assume your partner is lying whenever they speak. As with the wife who caught pubic lice her husband blamed on a toilet seat, that gut certainty means the marriage itself has become a lie.

Love can be a ghost. Kirshenbaum treats love as a feeling that must rest on accurate perception of a real person, not a trump card. Her sharpest question strips love away: setting aside anger, do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to like you? Ann, a devout Quaker, insisted she loved her husband and called him her best friend, yet when pressed she admitted, "I like what he likes. But I don't like him."

No like, no love. People who dislike their partner overall are consistently happier leaving. A "critical incident" often crystallizes it, like watching a spouse greedily devour every free sample at a food fair. Beware the time trap: disliking can turn into liking early on, but liking that curdles into disliking almost never reverses.

Mutual shutdown drains the account. Relationships die through a reflex Kirshenbaum names mutual shutdown: one person pulls back after a hurt, the other retaliates by giving even less, and the emotional bank account empties dollar by escalating dollar until nothing remains. It starts small, a rebuffed hug, a disappointing gift, and both partners wait forever for the other to move first.

The unconditional-gift test. Are you still willing to give your partner something warm, a compliment, a shoulder rub, a conceded point, with no expectation of return? Barbara, exhausted after twenty years in her husband's failing business, first said she was running on empty. But after a two-week break she found she still had love to give, gave it, and he responded, reversing the shutdown. If a real yes survives, love is real. If you will only give when guaranteed a return, the well is dry.

Hope is the trap. When a single problem (drinking, selfishness, weight, depression) makes you want to leave, Kirshenbaum runs it through four gates. Can your partner acknowledge it? Bob, a philosophy professor, could out-argue any accusation of selfishness, so it never registered; that blindness means the problem only worsens. Is he willing to change? Peggy, who had gained significant weight, said all the right words ("in my own time, my own way") while her body demonstrated pure unwillingness for years.

Willingness must be shown, not stated. Demand a specific, observable, time-bound action, and write it down. This defeats the Waiting Trap, where each year invested makes you feel you must wait another, the way you keep waiting for a delayed bus. Finally, can he let it go or actually change? Ability, even in odd forms, is genuinely good news.

Bottom lines are found, not invented. A bottom line is a deal-breaker whose violation means you genuinely cannot stay, distinct from a mere annoyance you can bicker about forever. Kirshenbaum warns you cannot fake having none: the woman who claimed she could forgive literally anything was deceiving herself. Charlotte came home to find her husband in her clothes and makeup and knew instantly a line had been crossed, though neither of them had known that line existed.

Silence makes you an accomplice. If a partner crosses a real bottom line and you do nothing, you commit psychological self-mutilation, becoming complicit in your own violation, a dynamic she likens to abused children. The rules: give yourself permission to have limits, discover them, tell your partner as fact (not threat), and follow through when crossed.

Difference rarely kills. Kirshenbaum distinguishes the Darrin/Samantha factor (huge differences that barely matter, like interracial marriages that, absent bad motives, beat average odds) from the city-mouse/country-mouse factor (a small difference that ruins everything). Most gaps are really communication, negotiation, or power problems in disguise. Two differences are genuinely fatal. First, lifestyle: a passionately held, incompatible vision of how you actually live. Robert dreamed of retiring to Italy; Agnes wanted a career at home. Neither budged, and staying felt to Robert like premature death.

The married-a-Martian test. Second, deep-down alienness: when you look in your partner's eyes and find no meaningful similarity, no shared core you feel good about. A shared goal or dream (a project, a faith, a business, a way of belonging) is powerful superglue that holds couples up in the tree of love when love itself feels shaky.

Tunnel vision distorts both directions. People trapped in ambivalence obsess over the relationship and never realistically investigate life outside it. Matt divorced chasing an imagined "freedom equals leaving" fantasy, then found single life a barren strip of awkward dates, lonely weekends, and a woman who eventually nagged just like his ex-wife; his marriage had actually been too good to leave. Donna stayed for years in a gilded cage, convinced leaving meant poverty, until she discovered she could easily support herself.

Do the homework. Kirshenbaum has you list what you look forward to and fear about a new life, then interrogate each item: Is this true? Is it likely? What else is possible? Check real facts, ask divorced friends, verify that the sister's vague offer of a spare room is actually real. Options do not change your relationship's reality, but a clear view of them can transform how you feel about it.