Over the past year, I’ve spoken to thirty people in what they describe as unhappy marriages. Some for ten years. Some for twenty or thirty. A few have since left. Most of them were not. I assumed I knew what they were going to tell me before I started.
I thought the answers would fall into familiar categories: they were afraid of being alone, they couldn’t afford to leave, or they wished they hadn’t, but they were still in love. These are the explanations we get when trying to understand a seemingly simple situation.
What I found was more complicated than all that. And in his own quiet way, more people.
In many different marriages, the answer I heard most often, in different versions, was one I didn’t expect: they stayed because of what breaking up would do to the other person.
Not “I’m afraid to go.” Not “I can’t manage financially.” Something closer to: “I know what it will do to them.”
Research supports this in a way that will change the way you think about the whole question. Samantha Joela relationship psychologist who studies how people make decisions about romantic relationships, published a A 2018 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology specifically looks at stay or leave decisions. Her finding: “The more addicts believed their partners were having an affair, the more likely they were to divorce.”
See what actually happens there. The deciding factor was not whether one was happy or not. It was not whether love would remain. It was their understanding of the other person’s need.
Joel put it bluntly: “When people realized that their partner was very committed to the relationship, they were less likely to initiate a breakup. In general, we don’t want to hurt our partners, and we care about what they want.”
This is not a weakness. This is not love in any romantic sense that most would recognize. It’s something that lives somewhere between loyalty and guilt, between protectiveness and altruism—concern for another’s well-being outweighs the desire to stay.
Several people I spoke to described it without words. One woman, twenty-two years old in a marriage she had known silently for years, told me that she approached the conversation many times in her mind. “Every time I got closer,” he said, “I wondered what it was going to do to him. He was going to fall apart. And I didn’t know if I could live with knowing that I was the cause.”
He stayed. Not out of fear. Not from the love he once felt. But because he could not bring himself to dissolve it.
The second thing I noticed: most of the people I interviewed recoiled at the word “unhappy” at some point.
Not because their marriage was good. But because marriages are not equally bad.
“Unhappy” implies something stable – a state you are clearly and consistently in. What they described was more like air. Some weeks were really bearable. Some months felt close to good. And then something would change and the familiar heaviness would return.
This fluctuation is not random. Lindsay Weisner, Psy.D.A psychologist in private practice describes a mechanism in Psychology Today using a concept from behavioral psychology: intermediate reinforcement. Contingent rewards are more powerful than consistent ones to keep the behavior going. Apply this to a relationship: when good days are random and unplanned, they are more attractive than steady ones. You stop because you never know when the next good lane will come and you don’t want to leave right away before it does.
Samantha Joel’s 2021 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology confirmed with the data. In two diurnal studies, people who felt uncertain about their relationship—while simultaneously holding reasons for both staying and leaving—showed greater day-to-day fluctuations in commitment. They were sure they would stay for good days. In the hard ones, they were equally sure they had to go. Marriage does not remain a thing. He keeps changing his form, and so does his decision.
Several people have told me many times that they have decided to leave. And then a good weekend came, or their partner said something that reminded them that they were together before, and the decision quietly disappeared. Not because the main problems have changed. Because there was a day.
The third finding was the one that stayed with me the longest.
Many of the people I spoke to described marriage less as a relationship they were in, and more as a structure around which they built their lives. After twenty or thirty years, they did not face the prospect of leaving just one person. They faced the prospect of destroying an entire shared world.
Friends were mutual. Routines are designed for two people. Financial decisions, holiday traditions, the organization of the week, the neighborhood – all these were shaped by the possibility of two people living this life together. Walking away from the marriage meant all of that fell apart.
Several people described the same quiet fear in different words: not “who will I be with”, but “who will I be”. Marriage, even an unhappy one, had become a container for their sense of self. They weren’t sure what would happen without him. This is not a simple calculation.
I’m not a relationship counselor, and I want to be clear about that – nothing in this post should be taken as advice on staying in or leaving any relationship. That decision is yours, and if you’re seriously looking into it, a therapist who works with couples or individuals in transition is worth more than any article.
I can say that I came away from these conversations believing that the story we tell about unhappy marriages—that people stay away from fear, money, or a love they can’t shake—isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s incomplete. The people I spoke to often stayed for reasons they didn’t have clean names for. Care that turns into something quieter. They built hope on a beautiful day that they will never forget. An identity so intertwined with the life they shared that starting over felt like starting without a self.
None of these answers are simple. But they were honest.
