Over the past year, I spoke with thirty people who had stayed in marriages they described as unhappy. Some for ten years. Some for twenty or thirty. A few had since left. Most had not. Before I started, I assumed I knew what they would tell me.
I thought the answers would sort themselves into familiar categories: they were afraid of being alone, they couldn’t afford to leave, or they were still in love even when they wished they weren’t. These are the explanations we reach for when trying to make sense of a situation that looks, from the outside, like a straightforward one.
What I found was more complicated than any of that. And, in its own quiet way, more human.
The answer I heard most often, in different versions across very different marriages, was one I didn’t expect: they were staying because of what leaving would do to the other person.
Not “I’m afraid to go.” Not “I can’t manage financially.” Something closer to: “I know what this would do to them.”
Research backs this up in a way that shifts how you think about the whole question. Samantha Joel, a relationship psychologist who has studied how people make decisions about romantic relationships, published a 2018 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looking specifically at stay-or-leave decisions. Her finding: “The more dependent people believed their partner was on the relationship, the less likely they were to initiate a breakup.”
Look at what is actually happening there. The deciding factor wasn’t whether the person was happy. It wasn’t whether love remained. It was their perception of the other person’s need.
Joel put it directly: “When people perceived that the partner was highly committed to the relationship, they were less likely to initiate a break up. Generally, we don’t want to hurt our partners and we care about what they want.”
This is not weakness. It is also not love in any romantic sense most people would recognize. It is something that lives somewhere between loyalty and guilt, between protectiveness and self-sacrifice — a care for another person’s wellbeing that outlasts the desire to stay.
Several people I spoke with described exactly this, without having words for it. One woman, twenty-two years into a marriage she had quietly known for years wasn’t working, told me she had approached the conversation many times in her head. “Every time I got close,” she said, “I thought about what it would do to him. He would fall apart. And I didn’t know if I could live with knowing I was the reason.”
She stayed. Not out of fear. Not out of love in the way she once felt it. But because she could not bring herself to be the cause of his unraveling.
The second thing I noticed: most of the people I interviewed pushed back, at some point, on the word “unhappy.”
Not because their marriages were good. But because the marriages weren’t uniformly bad, either.
“Unhappy” implies something fixed — a state you’re in, clearly and consistently. What they described was more like weather. Some weeks were genuinely tolerable. Some months felt close to okay. And then something would shift and the familiar heaviness would return.
This fluctuation is not incidental. Lindsay Weisner, Psy.D., a psychologist in private practice, describes the mechanism in Psychology Today using a concept from behavioral psychology: intermittent reinforcement. Unpredictable rewards are more powerful than consistent ones in keeping a behavior going. Apply that to a relationship: when good days are occasional and unscheduled, they become more compelling than steady ones. You hold on because you never quite know when the next good stretch is coming, and you don’t want to leave right before it arrives.
Samantha Joel’s 2021 research in the European Journal of Social Psychology confirmed this with data. In two diary studies, people who felt ambivalent about their relationships — holding both reasons to stay and reasons to leave at the same time — showed greater day-to-day fluctuation in commitment. On good days, they felt certain they should remain. On difficult ones, they were equally certain they should go. The marriage doesn’t stay one thing. It keeps changing shape, and so does the decision.
Several people told me they had made the decision to leave multiple times. And then a good weekend arrived, or their partner said something that reminded them of who they used to be together, and the decision quietly unmade itself. Not because the underlying problems had changed. Because the day had.
The third finding was the one that stayed with me longest.
Many of the people I spoke with described the marriage less as a relationship they were in and more as a structure they had built their life around. After twenty or thirty years, they weren’t just facing the prospect of leaving a person. They were facing the prospect of dismantling an entire shared world.
The friends were mutual. The routines were built for two. The financial decisions, the holiday traditions, the way the week was organized, the neighborhood — all of it had been shaped by the assumption that there were two people living this life together. Walking away from the marriage meant all of that would need to come apart.
Several people described, in different words, the same quiet fear: not “who will I be with,” but “who will I be.” The marriage, even the unhappy one, had become the container for their sense of self. Without it, they weren’t sure what remained. That is not a simple calculation.
I am not a relationship counselor, and I want to be upfront about that — nothing in this piece should be taken as advice about whether to stay in or leave any relationship. That decision belongs to you, and if you are navigating it seriously, a therapist who works with couples or individuals in transitions is worth far more than any article.
What I can say is what I came away from these conversations believing: the story we tell about unhappy marriages — that people stay out of fear, money, or a love they can’t shake — is not wrong exactly, but it is incomplete. The people I spoke with were staying for reasons they often didn’t have clean names for. Care that had transformed into something quieter. Hope built on a good day they couldn’t forget. An identity so entwined with the life they shared that starting over felt like starting without a self.
None of those answers are simple. But they were the honest ones.
