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Relationships
How to Decide Whether to Commit or Walk Away
An economic theory could help you end relationship indecision.
Updated August 27, 2024 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- Don’t let past mistakes cause future pain.
- Connect with your day-to-day experience.
- Separate legitimate concerns from unrealistic expectations.
For almost a year, Liam has been crippled with uncertainty over whether to stay in his two-year relationship with Sadie. He’s relatively satisfied but vaguely feels there must be someone better for him waiting in the wings—or, more specifically, on dating apps.
“What if I break up and never find someone better?” he often asks me. Alternatively, he wonders, “What if I’m missing out on someone else? If I even glance at an app, I fall down a rabbit hole of opportunities. But we’ve moved in together now.”
Meredith has been with Jeffrey for seven years. She’s bothered that many of her friends are already married and starting families, and she both yearns for and is worried about a proposal. She’s concerned that Jeffrey isn’t right for her, but she hates the idea of being single and looking again. “We have so many memories, we have so much history,” she says. “I feel like it would be such a waste of time to give up now.”
Meredith and Liam are both caught in the sunk cost fallacy. This is a theory from behavioral economics that describes our tendency to continue investing in something not because we know it’s right, but rather because we’ve already committed significant resources to it.
Research finds that investments of time, effort, or money significantly influence people’s tendency to stay in relationships, even if they’re unhappy. Here’s how to avoid this trap.
1. Ignore the past. You’ve spent a decade together. You own a home together. You moved to Omaha so she can be near her family. When we invest in our relationships, that necessarily means not investing in something else—and that other thing could have been good. But staying in an unhappy relationship doesn’t fix that: All you’re doing is losing more time.
The question is not “How much have you invested?” The question is “What returns are you seeing?” Are you happy now? Do you look forward to seeing your partner? Is your day-to-day experience with them characterized by conflict or support? If your baseline experience with a partner is negative, why do you think it will be different in the future? If it’s positive, why do you think another relationship would be better?
2. Look toward the future. When Meredith met Jeffrey, he worked full-time for a technology firm. After he was downsized, he took up surfing and made little effort toward finding a 9-to-5 job, and it soon became clear he might never do it.
People get stuck in the sunk cost fallacy because ending things is painful and expensive: moving, renegotiating friendships, etc. They get overwhelmed by the idea of finding and starting a relationship with someone new. They compare the pain of breaking up with the comfort of staying for another day, week, or year. This is the wrong comparison. Instead, think about what your life will be like 10 or 20 years from now if you decide to stay. For Meredith, that meant imagining her future life with a man who chose surfing over pursuing a career. Suddenly, the cost of moving didn’t seem so high.
Do you see the potential for mutual growth in a positive direction, or do you see stagnancy or conflict over differing values and goals? What is the cost of staying?
3. Tell the full story. If you’ve invested time, energy, and effort into your relationship, it can be easy to present an overly positive front to friends and loved ones. You tell your friends about the nice dinner he made for your birthday but leave out the part where he took off with his buddies an hour later.
Keeping the optics positive while your spirit is low can lead to further confusion. Sharing the full story with a therapist or close friend can help you regain your perspective.
4. Examine your need to compare. “Steve’s new girlfriend is so funny,” thinks Liam. “I wish Sadie was wittier.” But later he reflects, “Sadie is much more humble, which is a great quality.”
While it’s important to know what you want out of a partner, comparing yourself and your relationship with those around you is a sure way to end up making poor choices or furthering indecision. Unfortunately, comparison is so ingrained in human behavior that we often don’t even realize we are doing it. Social media only increases unfavorable comparisons, as we see only the most airbrushed and idolized versions of other people’s lives.
Other people’s relationships have complexities and nuances that you can’t see from the outside, which makes them a terrible way to gauge your own relationship. So it’s important to recognize when you’re comparing and get curious about what it is doing for you. Is the comparison giving you important information about something you truly want from a relationship—like someone to joke around with? Or is the fixation on what others have a result of your own insecurity and desire to "keep up"?
5. Make a call. Liam lets go of his fear of future regret by decreasing his toxic comparisons. The shared values and mostly positive time spent together made him decide to stay, although he hasn’t made a serious commitment yet.
Meredith, on the other hand, decided it was time to break things off with Jeffrey. As someone who is very career-focused, she realized they had different values that would ultimately lead to either continued unhappiness or a future breakup. But she didn’t regret the time they spent together; instead, she was glad to learn from the experience.
She also avoided the most damaging aspect of the sunk cost fallacy. When people prolong unsatisfying relationships simply because they have already invested in them, they make the problem worse—by investing even more time and effort trying to turn the relationship into something it’s not. Instead, she gave herself—and Jeffrey—the time and space to make a new start.
Facebook image: NDAB Creativity/Shutterstock
