With most of the traditional reasons that kept couples from separating in the past – like society, religion, and the belief that staying together was the right thing to do for a couple’s children – becoming largely insignificant, it seems that people today are less hesitant than ever to break up. Is leaving your relationship the right thing for you, though?

Consider These Things Before Leaving Your Relationship

The School Of Life, a global organization dedicated to developing emotional intelligence through psychology, philosophy, and culture, recently released a truly inspirational video addressing the question of whether one should leave a relationship or not.

Of course, there is no passe-partout that will work for every relationship, but the questions posed by The School Of Life are useful keys that might unlock our true desires and help us make a rational decision that we won’t regret. So, before we step out of our relationship, we need to ask ourselves these questions and answer them in the most sincere way possible.

The Questions To Ask Yourself Before Leaving Your Relationship

1. How much of our unhappiness can be tightly attributed to this particular partner – and how much might it, as we risk discovering 5 years and multiple upheavals later, turn out to be simply an inherent feature of any attempt to live in close proximity to another human?
2. Though it is, of course, always essentially their fault; what tiny proportion of the difficulties might we nevertheless be contributing to the discord? In what modest way might we be a little hard to be around?
3. Consider the annoying traits in all previous partners we’ve had and people we’ve known that our current partners happen not to have. What do we manage not to fight about?
4. Probe at new infatuations and crushes: by getting to know them better.
5. Observe closely how many sexually available and intelligent people the single types around us, especially those hooked up to new dating apps, manage to encounter day-to-day.
6. Try to have another conversation with your partner in which you do not accuse them of mendacity and instead simply explain, calmly, how you actually feel and how sad you are about quite a few things.
7. Reflect on how you would really feel as a child if, henceforth, you were going to have two tiny bedrooms, two new step-parents and possibly a few more new half siblings? Compare with the scratchy reality of the current set-up.
8. Question how normal it is for any couple to have great sex after 22 months together.
9. Are you ready to face the risk of perhaps achieving no more than exchanging a familiar kind of unhappiness for a new and more complex variety? Do you really want to choose hope over experience?

Don’t rush into giving answers to these questions. Take your time, and be as brutally honest as you can. You don’t have to apologize to anyone, it is YOUR life and it should be YOUR decision to leave or stay. If things can be salvaged, give yourself and your partner the benefit of the doubt and another chance. If, however, all the answers to the aforementioned questions are pointing to the exit, maybe leaving your relationships is the only thing left to do.