Divorce Ambivalence: Why “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Is Its Own Stage

Divorce ambivalence is the most common place a struggling marriage actually lives, and almost nobody talks about it honestly. The conversation we have culturally is binary: you are either working on it or you are leaving. Books, friends, and even a lot of therapists want you to pick a lane. But the person lying awake at 2 a.m., mentally drafting a goodbye speech and then imagining their spouse’s face when they hear it and feeling sick — that person is not stalling. They are in a distinct psychological state with its own logic, and treating it as mere indecision is how people end up making the biggest choice of their lives badly.

Divorce ambivalence is a stage, not a character flaw

The data on this is more striking than most people realize. When William Doherty and colleagues surveyed 2,484 divorcing parents — people already inside the legal process — roughly a quarter said they still believed their marriage could be saved, and about 30% described themselves as actively of two minds: sometimes divorce seemed right, sometimes it didn’t. These were not people idly wondering. They had filed.

A joint University of Alberta and Brigham Young study found that around half of people who were thinking about divorce had meaningfully shifted their feelings when researchers checked back a year later. And in Hetherington and Kelly’s long-running work, a majority of divorced couples had at least one partner voicing regret about the decision within a year.

None of this is an argument that you should stay. It is an argument that the feeling of not knowing is statistically normal, temporally unstable, and therefore a terrible thing to act on impulsively — in either direction. The person who bolts to end the ambivalence and the person who frantically over-functions to end it are making the same mistake. They are both trying to escape an uncomfortable state rather than use it.

Ambivalence rarely looks dramatic. Mostly it looks like two people politely occupying the same room. Photo: Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash.

The mixed-agenda marriage: one leaning out, one leaning in

Doherty’s most useful contribution isn’t a statistic, it’s a shape. He noticed that a huge share of couples arriving at therapy are not both there for the same reason. One partner is “leaning out” — emotionally halfway to the door, quietly researching apartments, running the numbers. The other is “leaning in” — desperate, mobilized, willing to do anything. He called these mixed-agenda couples, and he found they respond differently to conventional couples therapy than couples who share a goal. Their divorce risk is higher, and standard therapy can actually accelerate the ending.

Here’s why, and it’s the part almost no one explains. Ordinary couples therapy asks both people to be vulnerable, to open up old wounds, to lower defenses. That is a reasonable ask of two people who have both decided to try. It is an unreasonable ask of someone who has one foot out — they experience it as being pressured back into a marriage they were painfully working up the courage to leave. Meanwhile the leaning-in partner reads every session as evidence of a comeback, invests more hope, and is devastated again each week. The therapy becomes a machine that manufactures asymmetry.

So Doherty built something else: discernment counseling. One to five sessions. Its explicit goal is not to fix the marriage. It’s to help each person get clarity and confidence about a direction, with a full understanding of their own contribution to the trouble. There are only three doors at the end — stay as you are for now, move toward divorce, or commit to a defined six-month, all-in effort at repair with divorce off the table for that window. Notably, most of the work happens in individual conversations, precisely because the leaning-out partner cannot speak freely with the leaning-in partner watching for hope.

Why the six-month container is the clever part

The third door is the one that quietly does the heavy lifting. “Should we divorce?” is an unanswerable question when asked from inside a marriage that neither person is fully in. Of course the marriage looks bad — you are evaluating a half-abandoned version of it. The six-month commitment changes the question to something answerable: if we both actually tried, with full effort, would this be a marriage I want? You cannot know that from the sidelines. You can only know it by getting on the field for a bounded period, with a clear exit at the end that nobody has to feel ashamed of taking.

That bounded exit is what makes real effort psychologically possible. Ambivalent people withhold effort because unlimited effort feels like a trap. Give them a fence around it and many of them will finally run.

The ambivalence you should listen to, and the kind you shouldn’t

Not all not-knowing is the same. It’s worth learning to tell the difference between three quite different things that all feel identical at 2 a.m.

Fear-driven ambivalence is when you know, and you are terrified of the cost. The tell: your reasons for staying are almost entirely about consequences — the kids, the money, the house, what your mother will say — and almost none are about your spouse. This is not indecision. This is a decision you haven’t funded yet. It usually needs practical planning and courage, not more soul-searching.

Grief-driven ambivalence is when what you miss is the marriage you had, or hoped for, and you’re trying to decide whether it is recoverable. The tell: you oscillate on a timescale of memories. A good weekend swings you toward staying; a bad Tuesday swings you out. This one genuinely benefits from a structured effort — it’s the ambivalence the six-month container was built for. If you go this route, it helps to know what repair actually looks like in practice; our piece on repairing after a fight is a reasonable place to start, as is the work on rebuilding trust.

Depletion-driven ambivalence is when you cannot tell whether you want to leave your marriage or leave your life. The tell: the fantasy isn’t of a new partner, it’s of a quiet room and nobody needing anything. If you’re carrying the bulk of the household’s mental load, exhaustion can do an extremely convincing impression of falling out of love. This is worth ruling out before you decide anything, because it’s fixable and its symptoms are counterfeit.

Sorting fear from grief from exhaustion is most of the work. Photo: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash.

What to do while you don’t know

The instinct is to gather more evidence. Most people gather it badly — they keep a mental ledger of grievances, which guarantees they’ll find plenty, because a resentful mind is an excellent prosecutor. If you’re going to run an experiment on your marriage, at least run a fair one.

Three things that make the not-knowing period more useful rather than just longer:

Stop auditioning the divorce. Half-leaving — the emotional distance, the separate bedtimes, the phone in the bathroom — is not a neutral observation post. It changes the thing you’re observing. You are measuring the temperature of a marriage you have stopped heating.

Get your own contribution on paper. This is the single hardest and most valuable move. Not “what he does,” but: what do I do when I’m hurt, and what does it cost the person on the other end? People who leave without answering this tend to meet the same problem again, in a new house, with a new person.

Decide how you’ll decide. Set a horizon and a method rather than waiting for a feeling of certainty that, for most people, never arrives. Certainty is not the entry ticket to a good decision. Clarity is — and clarity is something you build, not something that visits.

Ambivalence is information, but only if you interrogate it

The cruelest thing about this stage is that it is genuinely painful and simultaneously produces nothing on its own. It sits there. The couples who come out of it well are not the ones who got a sign; they’re the ones who took the question seriously enough to give it structure — a real timeline, honest self-examination, and often a third party who wasn’t invested in a particular outcome.

If you are here: you are not weak, and you are not being unfair to your spouse by not knowing yet. You are in the most under-discussed and most consequential stage of a marriage’s life. The only real failure available to you is to let the ambivalence make the decision by attrition — to drift for five years until the marriage dies of neglect and you get to call that fate. For more on what happens on either side of this fork, our Separation & Divorce and Marriage sections go deeper.

A note: this article is about ordinary marital difficulty and the ambivalence it produces. It does not apply to relationships involving abuse, coercive control, or fear for your safety — in those situations, ambivalence is not something to sit with and structure, and reaching out to a domestic violence helpline or a professional who specialises in abuse is the right next step. Nothing here is a substitute for individual advice from a qualified therapist or lawyer.