The math of "leaving in five years"

Indefinite separation — the marriage where one or both spouses have agreed, with varying degrees of explicitness, to leave 'eventually' — is a category researchers have started naming. The work of Karney and Bradbury at UCLA on marital trajectories suggests that couples who self-describe as 'unhappy but staying for the kids' predict their own divorce dates badly: about half of them divorce within two years, about a quarter never divorce, and the rest divorce on a schedule that has almost no relationship to the children's ages. What is happening in the indefinite-separation marriage is that one partner is using 'eventually' as a pressure valve. The pressure valve releases enough of the tension to make the marriage tolerable, which makes the leaving less urgent, which means the 'eventually' never arrives. The marriage stays, in equilibrium, at a setpoint of low-grade misery, which is a more stable configuration than people imagine. If you are in one of these marriages: the five-year plan is mostly a fiction. You will either leave in the next eighteen months, or you will not leave at all. Choose deliberately. The undecided version, kept too long, becomes the decision by accident. The kids, by the way, do not benefit from the indefinite version. The Hetherington longitudinal data on children of divorce found that high-conflict-but-intact marriages produce worse adult outcomes than divorce. The kids are not protected by your staying. They are protected by your conflict resolution. If you cannot deliver one, leave for both your sakes. Let me deepen the analysis, because the five-year fiction is more harmful than it appears. The fiction works, in the short term, as a self-soothing mechanism. The spouse who is contemplating leaving tells themselves that they are not actually trapped in the marriage. They have a plan. The plan involves leaving eventually. The plan is specifically constructed to permit current inaction while preserving the sense of agency. The sense of agency is the thing the plan delivers. The actual leaving is indefinitely deferred, but the feeling of being capable of leaving is preserved. The feeling makes the current marriage tolerable. This is, in operational terms, a stable equilibrium. The marriage is bad enough to produce the desire to leave but good enough that the leaving can be deferred. The spouse contemplating leaving has, in the indefinite-separation arrangement, the best of both worlds: they retain the practical benefits of the marriage — household stability, financial arrangements, the co-parenting infrastructure, the social presentation of being married — while psychologically maintaining the option of exit. The option is the comfort. The comfort makes the staying possible. What the equilibrium obscures is that it is, across years, dissolving the actual relationship. The spouse who is mentally halfway out has stopped investing in the marriage's long-term future. The investments — the household repairs that would benefit a twenty-year ownership, the career decisions that would benefit both spouses, the financial planning that assumes joint life — are all calibrated, subconsciously, against the possibility of leaving. The calibration produces a marriage that is running on minimum maintenance. The minimum maintenance is, over years, sufficient to keep the marriage operational but insufficient to produce the kind of marriage that either spouse, in their honest moments, would describe as good. The other spouse, in many indefinite-separation marriages, is aware of the equilibrium. They may not know the specifics of the leaving plan, but they sense that the marriage has been running on reduced investment. The sensing produces a particular kind of ongoing low-grade anxiety. The other spouse stops feeling secure in the marriage's permanence. The insecurity expresses itself in small behaviors — increased monitoring of the first spouse's moods, increased anxiety around the first spouse's travel, increased performance of satisfaction during couple moments — that the other spouse may not even be aware they are doing. The anxiety is itself producing additional deterioration of the marriage's quality, which the first spouse, observing, interprets as further evidence that the marriage is failing. The marriage is failing. The failing is produced, circularly, by the indefinite-separation arrangement itself. The Karney and Bradbury data is useful because it shows that the indefinite-separation marriages follow predictable trajectories. About half actually dissolve in the short term. The dissolution happens because the equilibrium becomes intolerable, usually for the spouse who has been doing the more investment. The intolerability produces the decision to leave, often abruptly, after years of apparent stability. The decision looks, from outside, like a sudden rupture. The decision is actually the long arrival of an outcome that had been in progress for years. About a quarter of the marriages never dissolve. The five-year plan remains a plan indefinitely. The marriage continues at the low-grade-misery setpoint for the rest of the spouses' lives. This is, in many ways, the worst outcome. The marriage was not good enough to be worth preserving deliberately. The marriage was good enough that the discomfort of leaving was always larger than the discomfort of staying. The spouses, in their seventies, report a specific kind of regret that is different from divorce regret. The regret is about the decades spent at the setpoint, and the specific absence of the alternative lives that were available if either spouse had chosen deliberately earlier. The remaining quarter divorce on schedules that have nothing to do with the children's ages. The explanation for the leaving, when it arrives, usually includes a specific triggering event — an affair, a death, a career change, an illness — that has given the leaving spouse social permission to act on a decision that had been in place for years. The triggering event is not the actual cause. The actual cause was the long equilibrium and the decision to leave that had been deferred across years. What the data supports, for spouses currently in an indefinite-separation arrangement, is the explicit naming of the arrangement. Not necessarily the immediate leaving. The naming. The five-year plan, named out loud, becomes either a real plan with a real timeline or it becomes visible as the fiction it has been. Both outcomes are useful. Both are better than the unspoken version that continues to dissolve the marriage from inside. The naming is the hard part. The naming requires the first spouse to stop using the vague version as self-soothing and to produce, in language, the actual decision. 'I am leaving by December.' Or 'I am staying, and the leaving plan I have been rehearsing is fiction.' Either sentence, said to the partner, produces movement. The movement is what the indefinite version has been preventing.