I Stayed for Everyone Except Me

About a year after I moved to Washington to be with her, I packed a bag and headed for the airport. I was homesick. I didn't know anybody out there. I was going home.

Then I turned around.

This was before the wedding. Before the house, before my daughter. And what turned me around wasn't her. It was this:

Going home means you couldn't handle it.

So I stayed. Then I married her. Then I stayed close to another decade.

I kept going for the kids. For the church. For the family, and for the idea of a family. When my daughter was born, I stayed for her. Then for the kids again, because it always came back to the kids.

Never for me. Never ever.

I wanted out for years. And every reason I had to stay was a good one. I never once checked whether any of it was working.

Fine. I'll stay.

I didn't have a word for any of that back then. The question didn't show up until years later, and when it did, it wasn't even about my marriage. It was about a promotion I didn't get. (That story is in chapter 6 of the book.)

Three words. Is. It. Working.

It's the sixth framework in Fix Your Thinking, Fix Your Life (all fourteen are here), and these days it's the first question I ask about anything big.

Good reasons will keep you anywhere

Here's the thing about the questions I was asking. What about the kids? What would people say? What kind of guy bails on his family? Every one of them had an answer, and every answer said stay.

You can stay in almost anything if the question is "is it right?" or "is it fair?" or "what am I supposed to do?"

"Is it working?" is just math. Either the math works or it doesn't, and mine hadn't worked in years. You can't bullshit results.

Looking back? Nobody in that house was happy. Me included. And the kids felt every bit of it.

The kids were in the house too

"For the kids" was the big one. The reason I could say out loud without feeling like a coward.

Sit with that one for a second. I was staying so my kids wouldn't grow up in a broken home, and they were growing up in a house full of tension anyway. They were LIVING in it.

I'm not telling anybody to leave. Just look at what your kids are actually living in before you use them as the reason.

They were LIVING in it.

Your own bad call is the hardest one to walk away from

Barry Staw, an organizational psychologist, published a study in 1976 he titled, I swear, "Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy." He had 240 business students play an executive deciding where to put research money. Some of them had personally picked a division that then went downhill.

Those people put more money back into it than anybody else in the study. An average of $13.07 million, out of a possible $20 million. They were going to make that bad call work if it killed them.

Now, a team that tried to repeat the study in 2021, with 365 people, didn't find the effect. So I'm not hanging anything on it.

But I recognized myself in it. I'd moved across the country for this. I couldn't stand the idea of everybody knowing I couldn't make it work. Same voice from the airport.

So I kept bending myself into whatever shape the marriage needed.

A coin got people unstuck

Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist behind Freakonomics, built a website for people stuck on a decision. They typed in what they were deciding, and a coin decided for them. Heads meant make the change. Tails meant stay.

Over 20,000 flips. People who got heads were about 25 percentage points more likely to actually make the change. And on the big ones, quitting a job or ending a relationship, the people who made the change were happier six months later.

Levitt's own words: "winners never quit and quitters never win" may actually be "extremely poor advice."

Yeah, these were people who found the site and signed up. Not exactly a random sample. But they were stuck, and the thing that finally moved them was a coin.

A fucking coin.

This isn't permission to quit

I can already hear somebody using this to walk out after one bad week.

Don't. Every job and every marriage has bad weeks. I'm talking about years. Same fight, same knot in your stomach, nothing moving.

And some things you can't walk away from. A co-parent. A diagnosis. Family. The question doesn't let you off the hook there. It just stops asking whether and starts asking how. (What I did with the one I couldn't leave is in the chapter.)

How to catch it

At work, you defend it with the future

Mine was "keep killing it and the promotion will come." So I kept killing it. For years. (You already know I didn't get it.) If your plan is "it'll pay off eventually," ask how long you've been saying eventually.

In your relationship, you're not on your own list

Write down every reason you're staying. Kids, family, money, what your mother will say. Now look for yourself on that list. If you're not on it anywhere... yeah. I wasn't on mine for about ten years.

With yourself, you call it the next step

"It's what everyone does." "It's the next step." That's how I bought a house in my twenties that I couldn't afford. I told myself it would all figure itself out.

It did not figure itself the fuck out.

Where to start

You don't have to do anything about it yet. Just look at it.

This is the exercise from the end of chapter 6:

The reasons I stayed weren't stupid. I loved my daughter more than I'd ever loved anyone. I believed marriage was supposed to be forever.

It ended anyway.

Never for me. Never ever.

So who are you staying for? Is your name anywhere on that list?

Write the two columns tonight. Be honest about the second one.

Is it working?