When do you know it’s time to call it quits on my marriage?

Have you spent months in couples counselling, years in therapy, and tossed and turned for

countless nights wondering what to do?

If so, then know that you can be a world-class CEO and make tremendously important decisions all day at work - and still struggle to find an answer to this question. Many CEOs I support come to me after asking this question for a year, some for a decade.

In fact, the people I work with can make a fifty million dollar decision in an afternoon, but put them in front of their own marriage and they'll stay stuck on the same question for months, sometimes years, like going through several therapists.

It’s incredibly frustrating.

The real reason people get stuck in this dizzying cycle is because you likely haven’t done these 5 things. 

I know because I’ve supported hundreds of high-level CEOs through this process - and I’ve been there myself. I've also spent years studying these dynamics, through peer-reviewed research in masculinity at Oxford, Gottman Method training, and a career inside behavioral science. 

The pattern is the same time and time again.

The people who eventually get the answers they’re seeking all do these five things. 

Whilst the people who stay stuck for years are almost always missing at least one of them.

1. Take radical responsibility for the dynamic in your marriage

This might sound banal to you. It’s really not. Not when you let yourself sink into what this actually means. 

I like to tell my clients, imagine you are 100% responsible for the dynamic at play here. The full 100%. 

What changes?

Because every marriage runs on patterns, and we all have them. 

I find attachment research useful as it gives us a directive, non-clinical lens for spotting them, like for example, the tendency to pursue when your partner withdraws, or the tendency to withdraw when the conversation gets vulnerable, or the tendency to over-function (which is itself, a form of avoiding vulnerability). We all do these. Most of these are our blind spots and we aren’t even aware that we’re doing them

These are present-day patterns, learned strategies that once worked and now don't, and your job before you leave your partner is to own yours 100% and fully address them. 

They are entirely yours to see clearly and shift, regardless of which way this decision goes. 

The risk if you skip this step is that you don't get a clean decision. You keep the pattern, and then later, get the same pattern, in your next relationship, just with a different person. This is why you end up repeating dynamics over and over again. You have to own your patterns and clear them if you want different outcomes. 

And I mean, really own them. Warts and all, the pieces that you’d rather not look at, nor tend to, because it’s hard. Everything.

2. Clear the emotional charge.

John Gottman's decades of marital research identified a state his lab calls flooding, a place where the body's physiological overwhelm response during conflict. This is your heart rate spiking past the point where clear thought is even possible. 

This explains something every one of my clients recognize - 

Which is that you can’t make a clear decision from inside a flooded nervous system. 

You have to be cool, calm, and collected to see your situation clearly, not heated in the moment.

In a similar vein, resentment will destroy your relationship. If you’ve had flooded moments, and tons of resentment built up over the years - even if it’s been subtle and non-dramatic - it will color how you feel about your partner. It also colors the decision itself. It’s toxic.

So if you make any decisions from this place, with resentment fuelling you, or adrenaline, or anger, or any emotion for that matter - you’re simply not going to see your relationship clearly, and the odds of you making a mistakes are high.

You have to clear the emotional charge before you make a life-altering decision like this.

3. Know what you need, not just what you want.

Most people can tell you exactly what they want. 

Most top CEOs know what they desire.

Almost no one can tell you what they actually need. 

Need in a deep-down, authentic, vulnerable, ‘I don’t dare reveal that I need this because it’s too scary, and what if I don’t get it?’ way. 

This is especially true for top performers, who spent a career reading every room they walked into and delivering exactly what that room, and its people, required of them. 

That skill has served you well in your career - it built your empire. It also trained you to stop noticing your own needs, suppress them, and instead focus on others - which is a learned strategy that serves a boardroom brilliantly but sadly, serves a marriage terribly. 

It also serves you and your long term happiness terribly. 

You can’t be happy in a marriage if you don't know what you need to be happy within it. You can’t solve for a variable you've never been able to identify. To this end, the first work is almost always translating "what I want" into "what I actually need," because they’re two very different things - and then being clear on that.

4. Leave no stone unturned.

This leads us to point 4. Leave no stone unturned.

I generally recommend trying everything before you make any big decisions, because you owe yourself a life you never have to relitigate. Or regret. Or feel ‘bad’ over.

There's a well documented phenomenon in cognitive psychology called the Zeigarnik effect:

unfinished business occupies far more mental space than business that's been closed out, resolved, completed. 

That’s why an unsent email nags at you longer than one you sent badly. 

In a similar vein, a marriage decision that you try to make without unturning all the stones won’t feel resolved. It will just go quiet for a while before it comes up again, usually at 2am, when you can’t sleep, keeping you up again. The men and women I work with don't want to leave a marriage and wonder, a year later, whether there was a version of the work they never tried. 

They want to walk away, or walk back in, and never look over their shoulder again. That kind of certainty only exists on the other side of the stones you can often be tempted to skip.

So what does this look like? Well, you do steps 1 to 3. Then you do step 5 (up next). You learn strategies to be your best self. 

5. Show up as the best version of yourself, in relationship.

Gottman's research draws a clean line between what he calls the masters and the disasters of long-term relationships, and the difference is always skill: the ability to repair after conflict instead of letting it fester, the ability to state a boundary without either collapsing it or weaponizing it, the ability to stay in a hard conversation instead of managing it from a safe distance, amongst others. 

Nobody is born fluent in these. No one learns these at university, or at school. 

Meanwhile, you trained for the boardroom deliberately, and over time, with practice, mentorship, and accountability. That’s how you got successful. This is no different.

You have to put your best foot forward to really be able to see the relationship clearly and discern from there, what do I want to do?

Because the question is rarely do I "stay or go" in the simplest of senses. 

That's the question everyone else is asking, and it’s too simple. Because the answer will vary based on your state, the day, your mood and all manner of variables. The real question is whether you can look at your marriage with a clear head, a settled nervous system, and a decision you're not still making six months from now. 

Once you can see it that clearly, stay or go becomes obvious.

If you're in the middle of this decision, my inbox is confidential and read only by me. 

You just have to be ready to get answers, and I’ll be here for you.