When you’re left by the person you should have walked away from

Do you stay too long?

Hi there,

Love is our oxygen. No one wants to lose it. But that fear can lead us to staying too long in a relationship we should leave — and paradoxically, set us up to lose love anyway.

I’m talking about that feeling of knowing you should have left someone — but they were the one who ended things. It’s a specific kind of painful ending: It means grieving the relationship, healing from the abandonment, and reckoning with the fact that you stayed with someone who couldn’t give you what you needed and who frankly didn’t deserve you.

When we don’t feel worthy and fear abandonment in relationships, someone walking away from us reinforces core beliefs — beliefs like no one ever stays or men always leave or I always mess it up. The ending confirms those beliefs — and you take it as evidence that your fate is to be abandoned.

But I want to challenge you: The pattern many of us who feel abandoned easily need to break is staying too long with someone we should have left.

Here’s what I mean.