11. Discomfort isn’t danger

The case for staying, even when everything says you shouldn’t

1. Why staying gets dismissed too quickly

I came across an article titled "9 Reasons People Choose the Stability of an Unhappy Marriage Instead of Getting Divorced." It offered the usual list: fear of change, financial pressures, guilt, uncertainty. But what stood out wasn’t the content. It was the tone. A quiet resignation, as if staying in a difficult marriage could only ever be seen as weakness or failure.

So I left a comment.

"It’s interesting how quickly people equate leaving with strength and staying with weakness, without asking why someone might choose to stay. Not all ‘unhappy’ marriages are toxic or irreparable. Some are just in a painful chapter. And some people stay because they value family stability, long-term growth, or the quiet strength of keeping their word. Self-respect can mean leaving. But it can also mean doing the hard, thankless work of staying, especially when children are involved. Divorce doesn’t just affect the couple. It reshapes a child’s sense of home, identity, and emotional security... forever. That doesn’t mean staying is always right. But dismissing those who try to hold the line as stupid or weak ignores the full cost of walking away."

Over 750 people reacted. Most with praise. Some with defensiveness. It touched a nerve. Because this subject isn’t neutral. Marriage. Divorce. Self-worth. These aren’t intellectual exercises. They’re gut-deep.

The intensity of the response made something clear:

We need to talk more honestly about what it really means to stay — and what it really costs to leave.

2. Leaving isn’t always brave

We’ve made it binary. Stay and lose yourself. Leave and find freedom. That’s not truth. That’s branding.

Some marriages aren’t over. They’re just stuck. Heavy with years. Silent with pain. They don’t need to be escaped. They need to be repaired.

Leaving gets marketed as bold. Empowered. Progressive. But a lot of the time, it’s a polished form of flight.

Staying is harder. You have to face yourself. You have to reckon with who you’ve become and how you got here. That takes more grit than starting over.

We pad every sentence with disclaimers. “Of course, sometimes divorce is necessary.” We say it so often it’s become a tick, a way to avoid the guilt of walking away before trying.

We’ve turned endurance into shame. And walking out into virtue.

That’s not clarity. That’s cultural cowardice.

3. Stop calling fear ‘self-respect’

Self-respect gets used like a shield. Say it, and no one argues. But a lot of what passes for self-respect is fear wearing a mask.

Real self-respect isn’t loud. It doesn’t posture. It holds steady when everything else is falling apart. It owns the wreckage and stays in the room long enough to do something about it.

We’ve confused self-respect with self-preservation. But protecting your image isn’t the same as protecting your integrity.

Self-respect might mean walking. But it might also mean staying. Staying and rebuilding. Staying and finally taking responsibility. Staying because the promise still matters, even if the feelings don’t come easy.

Especially when there are children. You can’t claim self-respect if it means abandoning theirs. They don’t need a parent who’s reinventing. They need one who’s reliable.

The cultural script says if you’re unhappy, you owe it to yourself to go. But if you’re a parent, you owe something else too. You owe your children an honest attempt at repair. At stability. At love that doesn’t cut and run.

That’s what real self-respect looks like.

4. Your kids are paying for your choices

Children are collateral damage. We don’t like saying that - we like hearing it even less, but it’s the truth. They don't bounce back. They learn to survive in the wreckage. They become fluent in pretending they’re fine.

Children whose parents divorce are often called resilient. But this so-called resilience typically means they’ve learned to quietly carry emotional pain so the adults around them don’t have to confront it. A substantial and growing body of evidence clearly shows that divorce leaves lasting emotional marks on children, often well into adulthood. While it’s true some divorces reduce toxic conflict, rarely, if ever, are children left unharmed.

If you genuinely believe children are unaffected by divorce, I challenge you to produce robust evidence supporting that position, because both research and experience strongly indicate otherwise.

Divorce doesn’t just change their living arrangements. It rewires their emotional blueprint. It teaches them that love ends. That family breaks. That security is fragile. Even if you co-parent well. Even if no one yells. Even if you try your best. The damage is quiet, but it’s deep.

They start to question everything. If home can split, what else can? What’s real? What’s reliable?

They don’t want two houses. They want to believe in one family. One team. Even if it struggles. Even if it fights. Even if it’s not easy.

“Happy parents make happy kids” is a slogan adults use to avoid guilt. Kids don’t need euphoric parents. They need stable ones. Predictable ones. Parents who model repair, not replacement.

Leave if you must. But stop calling it harmless. Stop pretending children just adjust. They absorb it. They internalise it. And one day, they repeat it.

If you are in this situation, stop kidding yourself. Your choices have hurt your children, perhaps permanently. That might be a hard thing to face, but it’s harder still for them to carry.

If you want your children to believe in love, show them what love does when it’s hard.

5. Staying can be the higher ground

We live in a world obsessed with clarity. Choose this or that. Be this or that. But real life, especially when it comes to marriage, parenthood, and long-term commitment, doesn’t play by those rules. It unfolds in layers. In seasons. In contradictions.

And if there’s one thing this debate makes clear, it’s that the most meaningful choices often live in the tension between competing truths.

Yes, you matter. Yes, your happiness matters. But so do your children. So does your word. So does the example you set about what love means when it stops being easy.

There’s a kind of integrity that doesn’t get much airtime. It’s the integrity of staying when you could leave. Of staying not because you’re stuck, but because you’ve chosen the long view. Because you believe that repair matters. That promises carry weight. That growth often begins the moment the fantasy ends.

And then there’s something else, more uncomfortable: Sometimes, the act of leaving isn’t about ending the relationship, it’s a test of it.

Not always consciously, but emotionally. A way of saying: “Will you fight for me?” “Do I really matter?” “Can you finally see how much I’m struggling?”

But the test is flawed. Because it rarely comes with an explanation. And the partner who’s being tested often takes the leaving at face value. They respect the decision. Or they freeze. Or they shut down, thinking it’s over, when it wasn’t meant to be.

And the one who left waits, only to find silence. No chase. No proof. No redemption.

That silence becomes the death knell. And too often, it’s only later, when the dust has settled and the children are split between houses, that the regret kicks in. Divorce regret is highest among the very people who initiate it. That tells us something. Many didn’t want a door slammed shut, they wanted it kicked open with effort, with recognition, with love.

In the early days of relationships, people say things like “I’d do anything for you.” But how many really mean it? How many still mean it when things are hard, when they’re hurting, when nothing is romantic anymore?

It calls to mind Meat Loaf’s lyric: “I would do anything for love… but I won’t do that.” That line’s been laughed at for years. But behind it is a cultural truth, we say we want commitment, but we keep caveats in our back pocket. And when tested, many relationships fail not because the love was gone, but because the test wasn’t recognised for what it was.

We need to stop pretending this is simple. It’s not. And pretending it is - pretending that the only noble path is liberation from discomfort, does a disservice to those who are quietly holding the line. Who are doing the slow, steady, complex work of becoming better partners, better parents, better people.

Staying isn’t a sign that you’ve failed to grow. Sometimes it’s the clearest proof that you have.

6. We don’t throw families in the bin

We live in a culture that celebrates reinvention. Change careers. Change bodies. Change partners. Reinvention sells. It promises freedom. It flatters the ego.

But somewhere along the way, reinvention got confused with disposability.

If it doesn’t make you happy, ditch it. If it feels hard, move on. If it doesn’t serve you anymore, let it go. That’s the mantra. Packaged and sold under the banners of growth and healing.

We do it with tech. With clothes. With friendships. With marriage.

But not everything broken needs to be thrown out. Some things are meant to be repaired. Upcycled. Reimagined. That’s the deeper art. Not just creating something new, but salvaging something once loved.

We’ve woken up to this with the environment. Single-use plastics, fast fashion, non-recyclable waste, they’re no longer cool. They’re a problem.

Maybe it’s time to apply that same scrutiny closer to home.

If we’re willing to fight for sustainability in what we consume, why are we so quick to discard the most meaningful parts of our lives? Why are we treating families like landfill?

Some things can’t be replaced. Not really. You can rearrange the structure. You can decorate the pain. But the hole remains. The cost sits quietly in the background, collecting interest.

Recycling a family takes more effort than replacing it. But the reward is deeper. More rooted. More real and longer lasting. It’s not the easy choice. But maybe it’s the only one that makes sense when you stop buying the lie that newer always means better.