It’s a situation as old as time: the spark is gone, you’re emotionally drained, and just know the relationship has passed its expiration date.
In an ideal world, you’d sit down with your partner, talk it out, and would end things neatly and respectfully. But illness, money problems, or as in the case for Reddit user Disastrous-Split-518, an in-law’s wedding can make everything way more difficult.
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Recently, she made a post on the subreddit ‘AITAH‘ describing her predicament and asking for advice, reigniting the debate around the question if there’s ever a good time to break up.
Leaving your partner is already hard
Image credits: Tiago Bandeira (not the actual photo)
But this woman has also made promises to her in-laws that are making things even worse
Image credits: Kampus Production (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Aksel Fristrup (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Thomas William (not the actual photo)
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image credits: Disastrous-Split-518
As her post went viral, the woman joined the discussion in its comment section
Long, committed relationships are rarely easy to get out of
Interestingly, we have research that helps us understand what happens to people who feel they must stay in a relationship even though they’re unhappy.
In 2014, Kansas State University family studies researcher Amber Vennum and her colleagues investigated patterns of “cycling” among cohabiting and married couples. (Among couples not in a committed relationship, the process is referred to as churning, but for people already committed, the less dramatic term cycling is used to convey the same sense of going in and out of the same relationship.)
image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
Using a nationally representative sample of over 300 cohabiting and over 750 married couples, the team asked them to report, from memory, the times when they ended and renewed their relationship with the same person.
An unexpectedly high one-third and one-fifth of couples in each group of couples experienced at least one of these cycles. Furthermore, it turns out that the more frequently a couple cycles at one point in time, the greater the chances are that they will cycle again in the future.
So coming back to the topic of our story, cycling couples were more likely to have children who required child care, to have joint investments such as a home, and to have already gotten married rather than just cohabiting.
Researchers found that it was the presence of the “additional load,” rather than dedication to the relationship itself that predicted whether a couple would get back together after a breakup. These constraints build up over time: the longer you are in a relationship, the more costly it is to extricate yourself. There’s a term from economics that could be applied here, it’s sunk costs. Once you’ve invested in your relationship, you’ve already put so much into it that it becomes difficult to get out.
So the fact that the author of this Reddit post has been committed to Ryan for so long suggests that there had to be something that would have made her exit burdensome.
But the woman released an update, saying that she pulled through
Image credits: Blue Bird (not the actual photo)
Image credits: MART PRODUCTION (not the actual photo)
image credits: Disastrous-Split-518
There were a lot of sunk costs involved here
Source: boredpanda.com