When you are not sure you want to stay

What you are actually unsure about

1. If you had to say the problem in one sentence, what is it?
2. Is that a problem with us, or with what is happening around us?
3. When did it start, and what was happening then?
4. What would you want if that thing were fixed?
5. What has changed in you, separately from us?
6. What do you miss?
7. What would you lose that you have not let yourself think about?

Question two is the most important in the list. Exhaustion, grief, a hard year and a new baby all produce a feeling that is very hard to distinguish from wanting to leave, and the distinction matters enormously.

What has and has not been tried

1. Does your partner know you feel this way?
2. What have you asked for, specifically, in words?
3. What have you hinted at and not asked for?
4. What did you do the last time you tried to fix this?
5. What did they do?
6. What has changed since you last raised it, if anything?
7. Have you ever both put real effort in at the same time?

Question fourteen is a common finding. Many relationships that end had two people trying hard, alternately, never simultaneously, each concluding that the other was not trying.

Question nine is the one people find uncomfortable, because hinting feels like asking from the inside and is completely different from the outside.

Honestly

1. What are you afraid of about staying?
2. What are you afraid of about leaving?
3. Which of those fears is about the relationship, and which is about your life?
4. What are you telling yourself that you are not sure is true?
5. What would you tell a friend describing this to you?
6. What is the thing you have not said to anyone?

Question nineteen is the standard one and it works. People apply far more clarity and far more kindness to other people's situations than to their own.

Question seventeen separates two things that get merged. Fear about money, housing, children and being alone is real and it is a different question from whether the relationship is right, and mixing them produces a decision nobody can defend.

If you talk to them

1. What do you actually want them to hear?
2. What do you want to happen after you say it?
3. What are you not going to say, and why?
4. What would you need from them to want to try?
5. What would tell you it was not going to change?
6. How long would you give it, and what would we look at then?

Questions twenty-four and twenty-five are the ones worth answering before the conversation, because in the conversation both people improvise, and improvised answers to these are ones nobody can hold to.

Question twenty-six turns an open situation into a defined one. A period with a review date is a completely different thing from an indefinite state of being unsure, for both people.

What this page cannot do

It cannot tell you whether to stay. It cannot assess your relationship, and neither can any app, including ours.

What tends to help: naming the specific thing rather than the general feeling, saying it out loud to your partner, asking for something concrete, and involving a professional earlier than feels necessary.

What tends not to help: deciding alone over months, hinting, waiting for certainty that does not arrive, and reading lists like this one instead of having the conversation.

Having the same argument over and over. · When one of you is in therapy. · Why couples drift apart without anything going wrong. · The mental load.

Nearvo is not therapy and does not assess a relationship. It asks one question a day for ordinary evenings, and this is not an ordinary evening. The right tool here is a person.

Questions and answers