Too Poor to Leave, Too Bad to Stay?
by Mira and Charles on August 26th, 2010Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay in a time of recession
More and more people these days, and you may be one of them, find themselves in an uncomfortable dilemma. As times get tough for them economically, stress rises and there is more and more conflict with one’s partner. It’s not just that you’re more likely to fight over money when there is less of it. You’re more likely to fight over everything. Stress does that too you. So when economic times are tough, and your relationship is getting really iffy, how do you make the decision to stay or leave?
There are good solutions, but I don’t want to minimize how tough the problem can be. How do you get rid of your house when houses just aren’t selling? How do you find a job somewhere else when there don’t seem to be any jobs? What’s the rationale for setting up two households when you can barely make it in one?
So, yeah, I get it. This is always a difficult decision, but now it is made a lot more difficult. But here’s some help.
First of all, Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay turns out to have been a national and international bestseller for a reason. To my great relief, when I went through it the other day wearing my recession-tinted glasses, it stood up. It isn’t a la-di-da book for people who feel they can do whatever they want. It fully acknowledges that the decision to leave is a tough one under all circumstances. More important, it quite explicitly asks you to think carefully and realistically about your post-separation life, because that is what you are comparing to the life you are living right now with your partner. If you read TGTLTBTS now in these tough times, you can be confident that whatever direction it point you towards is the right one.
But there are some things you can try before you decide to break up. If things in your relationship took a big turn for the worse with the onset of tough economic times, then you may have a stress-vulnerable marriage: good when stress is at a minimum, bad when stress increases. So you may want to look more closely at what you can do to reduce stress. Look at all your options. Look for options you may not have considered. There may be things you can do that will make your life better and give you less stress.
But also look at how you can stress out less over the difficulties you face. Sit down with your partner and have an “It would help me if…” conversation. Each of you go back and forth saying something that the other could do to reduce your stress. For example, “It would help me worry less if you stopped spending so much on…” Or, “It would help me if you sat down with me so we could go over our budget together.”
One “It would help me if…” that almost always applies is “…you were nicer to me.” In fact, make an agreement: precisely because times are tough we will make a special effort to be nicer to each other. Then talk about what you would like the other person to do to be nicer. Smile more? Ask how you’re doing? Show some understanding of how tired you are these days?
Look, if your relationship really is too bad to stay in, you can always leave. If you can’t leave now because times are tough, you can at least try to be nicer to each other to make this time better for the two of you. And who knows? Maybe if you find a way to get through these times without hurting each other too badly, you might find that when things get better your relationship is too good to leave.
So do check out Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. And for more very low-cost ways to hang in there together when things aren’t going well and you can’t or don’t want to split up, Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad is quite literally invaluable. Of course we’re always here to give one-on-one help at The Chestnut Hill Institute.
