When You Both Want to Stay and Can't Stop Thinking About Leaving
MetaTherapy
Relationships & Couples
What the research says about holding conflicting feelings in a relationship — and why the urge to blow it all up isn't what it seems
By Dominic | MetaTherapy
If you're reading this together, something is probably hard right now.
Maybe one of you has been thinking about leaving and hasn't said it out loud yet. Maybe both of you have. Maybe neither of you wants to leave but you keep having the same fight, and after the last one something shifted — a small door opened that neither of you knows how to close.
What I want to say first, before anything else, is this: the fact that you're sitting here together — reading something, looking for language, trying to understand what's happening — is not a small thing. Couples in genuine trouble don't usually do that. Couples who have already decided don't usually do that. You're here because something in both of you is still reaching.
That reaching deserves a serious response. So let's talk about what's actually going on.
The Feeling Has a Name
What you're experiencing — loving each other and simultaneously not being sure you can keep doing this — is called relational ambivalence. It's one of the most researched phenomena in relationship psychology, and one of the least talked about honestly in real life.
Esther Perel, whose work on long-term relationships has reached more people than almost any academic research ever will, describes it plainly: relational ambivalence is the coexistence of contradictory feelings within a relationship — love and resentment, desire and disconnection, the impulse to stay and the impulse to go. Her argument, backed by decades of clinical observation, is that some degree of ambivalence is present in virtually every long-term relationship.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. Not as a consolation — everyone feels this so it doesn't matter — but as a genuine reorientation. The ambivalence you're feeling is not evidence that you chose the wrong person. It is not a verdict on the relationship. It is, in most cases, evidence that the relationship is real — that it costs something, requires something, and has run up against the limits of what you've both been doing so far.
Ambivalence is not the opposite of love. It's what love looks like when it's asking for something to change.
Why the Urge to Blow It Up Feels Like Relief
Here's something that doesn't get said enough: the impulse to end a relationship — or to do something that would end it — often has very little to do with actually wanting it to end.
What it has to do with is pain. Specifically, the pain of sustained uncertainty. When a relationship has been in distress for long enough, the mind starts looking for resolution at almost any cost — because unresolved pain is harder to live with than concluded pain. An ending, even a devastating one, at least gives you somewhere to put your feet.
Researchers who study decision-making under emotional stress call this the resolution bias — the cognitive pull toward any clear outcome over continued ambiguity. It's why couples sometimes make their worst decisions at precisely the moments they feel most sure about them. The certainty isn't clarity. It's the nervous system's way of ending the discomfort of not knowing.
This doesn't mean the urge to leave is always wrong. Sometimes it's right. But it does mean that the intensity of the urge — how much you want it to just be over — is not a reliable guide to whether leaving is actually what's needed. The wanting-it-to-stop and the this-relationship-should-end are two different things that often arrive wearing the same coat.
A note for couples in this place: If either of you is in a place right now where ending things feels like the only relief available, that's worth naming out loud to each other — not as a threat, but as information. "I'm in so much pain that I keep thinking about leaving" is a very different sentence than "I want to leave." The first one is a cry for change. The second is a decision. It matters which one is true.
The Question You're Actually Asking
Couples in distress tend to ask one of two questions. The first is: Are we happy? The second is: Could we be happier apart?
Those questions look similar. They're not.
Are we happy? is a question about your actual relationship — the one that exists, with its real texture and real history. It invites honest assessment. Could we be happier apart? is a question about an imagined alternative — a future that doesn't exist yet and may never exist in the form you're picturing. It replaces assessment with speculation, and speculation almost always loses to fantasy.
John Gottman's longitudinal research on couples — among the most rigorous in the field — identified what he called negative comparison: the habit of measuring your current partner against a hypothetical better one. His data showed consistently that couples caught in this pattern are among the most at-risk, not because comparison is irrational, but because it changes what you see. You stop looking at the person in front of you and start seeing only the gap between what you have and what you imagine. Over time, that gap becomes the relationship.
The more productive question — harder, less satisfying, but more honest — is: What would this relationship need to look like for both of us to want to be in it? That question keeps you in the room. It makes the relationship the subject, rather than the exit.
You can't assess the relationship you actually have by measuring it against the one you're imagining.
What the Research Says Actually Predicts Whether Couples Make It
In 2020, Samantha Joel and colleagues published one of the most comprehensive analyses ever conducted on relationship quality — 43 longitudinal studies, nearly 12,000 couples. The question was simple: what actually predicts whether a relationship thrives?
The answers were not what most people expect. Compatibility scores, shared interests, and even initial chemistry were weak predictors. What mattered most was this:
Felt appreciation — Not grand gestures. The daily, ordinary noticing of each other. Do you feel like your partner sees what you contribute, who you are, what it costs you to show up?
Responsiveness — When one of you reaches out — emotionally, practically, in the small moments — does the other one receive it? Or does the reaching tend to land in silence?
Partner commitment — Not the declaration, but the behavior. Does how your partner moves through the relationship signal that they're in it? That you're not the only one holding it up?
Low destructive conflict — Not the absence of conflict. Conflict is normal and often necessary. But conflict that relies on contempt, stonewalling, or using what you know about each other as a weapon — that's the corrosive kind.
Feeling known — This one deserves its own paragraph.
A 2023 study found that feeling truly known by your partner — the sense that they understand who you actually are, not just who you present — predicted relationship satisfaction more reliably than almost any other variable tested. More, even, than feeling like you know them deeply.
We go into relationships, at a fundamental level, hoping to be received. When that's missing — when you feel like your partner sees a version of you but not you — something essential is missing. And when it's present, even in a relationship that's struggling, there's something to work with.
Read that list again, both of you, and hold it honestly — not as a scorecard, but as a real question about where you are. Which of those things exist between you, even imperfectly? Which ones have eroded? Which ones have never quite been built?
A note for couples in this place: The presence of even two or three of these factors, combined with genuine willingness from both partners, is often enough to rebuild from. The research is clear: it's not the state of the relationship that predicts the outcome. It's the capacity and willingness to work on it.
The Split That Keeps You Stuck
There's a pattern I see in couples navigating ambivalence that deserves its own name. Esther Perel calls it splitting the ambivalence — and once you see it, you'll recognize it immediately.
It works like this: one partner carries all the doubt. The other carries all the certainty. The doubting partner keeps asking whether this relationship is right. The certain partner keeps insisting it is. And over time the positions harden — until the doubting partner feels like the only one doing the emotional work, and the certain partner feels like they're constantly on trial.
What's actually happening is that the ambivalence belongs to the relationship — to both of you — but it's concentrated in one person. Which lets the other one off the hook from examining their own uncertainty. The certain partner often has doubts of their own; they're just expressing them differently — through withdrawal, through busyness, through the very certainty that functions more as a wall than as an invitation.
When the split is named — when the partner who has been performing certainty can say I've been scared too, I just didn't know how to say it — something in the room changes. The conversation stops being about whether to stay and starts being about what staying would actually require. That's a conversation couples can work with. The split one usually isn't.
The ambivalence belongs to both of you. When only one person carries it, neither of you can move.
Holding the Discomfort Without Letting It Decide
There is a version of sitting with uncertainty that is genuinely useful — that gives a relationship time and space to find its way through a hard season. Therapist and author Alexandra Solomon writes that patience in a relationship is not passivity. It's a form of active, intentional presence.
But there is another version. And it's worth being honest about the difference.
Holding the discomfort means staying fully in the relationship while the hard work of repair happens — investing, showing up, being present even when it's uncomfortable. It means treating the uncertainty as information rather than as an exit strategy.
Hiding in the discomfort means using the uncertainty as a reason to never fully commit. Staying in the relationship while keeping one foot out the door. Being present in body but absent in investment. This isn't a neutral position — it has real costs for both people. The partner on the receiving end of that half-presence usually knows. They can feel the withheld commitment, even when they can't name it.
The research on what clinicians call ambivalent attachment in couples consistently shows that the state of sustained uncertainty — not the conflict, not the distance, but the indeterminate zone itself — is associated with lower wellbeing for both partners over time. The in-between is not a resting place. It has a weight.
This is not an argument for forcing a resolution you're not ready for. It's an argument for being honest with each other about where you actually are — and for not letting the ambivalence become the default setting.
A note for couples in this place: A useful question to ask each other, not to answer immediately but to sit with: Am I in this relationship, or am I hovering above it waiting to see what happens? And what would it actually look like to land?
What This Moment Is Actually Asking
If you've read this far together, here's what I think is true: you haven't given up. You're looking for a way to understand what's happening between you that's more honest than the story either of you has been telling alone.
That's the beginning of something.
The research doesn't tell you whether to stay or go. No research does — that's not a data question, it's a human one. What the research tells you is what the relationship needs in order to have a real chance. And what it needs, more than compatibility scores or better communication techniques or even fewer arguments, is two people who are willing to be fully in it at the same time.
Not perfectly. Not without doubt. But present — both feet on the floor, choosing this rather than hovering above it.
Here are the questions worth sitting with together — not to answer right now, but to let them do their work:
Do I feel known by this person — and do I let them know me?
When I imagine leaving, am I running toward something real — or away from the discomfort of staying?
Is the ambivalence pointing toward something that needs repair — or toward a genuine incompatibility?
Which of us is carrying more of the doubt right now — and is that actually fair to either of us?
What would it look like to choose this relationship — fully, not as a holding pattern — and what would that require?
Those questions won't resolve everything. But they're a better conversation than the one that's been happening in your heads separately.
And that conversation — the honest one, together — is where things can actually change.
This post is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. If you're navigating this together and want support, couples therapy is a good next step — not because the relationship is broken, but because some conversations go better with someone in the room.
Referenced: Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity); John Gottman (longitudinal couples research); Samantha Joel et al. (PNAS, 2020); Alexandra Solomon (Loving Bravely); research on ambivalence and wellbeing in romantic relationships.
