Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Dear Books,
After 22 years of marriage, I'm not sure if this is what I want anymore. Yet at the same time, I'm afraid to be alone. I don't feel like I'm a priority for my spouse, which hurts me every time he chooses his own interests over me and our marriage. I can't even begin to imagine what unraveling this love we've built and planned for would entail. How do I know if I should stay or end it?
—————
Dear Unsure,
When I was unhappy in my first marriage, I booked a trip to chase tornadoes. This was like booking a trip to go whale watching, only instead of paying someone to take me close to majestic marine mammals, I paid someone to drive me very close to bad storms.
Looking back, I think I did this because there was a tornado brewing in my heart, and I had no idea what to do with it. The marriage wasn’t working, but I didn’t know how I would ever get divorced. The atmospheric conditions of my life were colliding, and I think I believed that if I found a physical tornado, maybe it would make facing the storm of my relationship easier.
I’m telling you this because I want you to hear the absurd lengths that I went to in order to figure out what I wanted. I climbed into a van with strangers and stayed at roadside motels and ate crappy food and placed myself near lightning and funnel clouds for a week straight to try to hear my own heart.
I didn’t realize there were better tools—heck, any tools—to answer two fundamental questions: how do I feel, and what do I want?
These are your questions, too, Unsure. How do you feel? What do you want?
And the best way to answer those fundamental questions is to do what Byron Katie calls “the work.” That’s why I’m recommending to you her book, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life.
“The work” is how we ask ourselves four simple questions that can be applied to any specific problem—in your case, issues surrounding your marriage—to see the whole matter through an entirely different light.
The questions are:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
There’s also the option to do a “turnaround,” or to find the opposite of a specific thought and to see if it’s true or truer than the original thought.
This ultra-simple process works because “it’s not the problem that causes our suffering,” Byron Katie writes, “it’s our thinking about the problem.”
I would encourage you to get comfortable with these four questions and apply them to some of your beliefs about your marriage and what’s next:
I’m afraid to be alone.
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
My spouse chooses his own interests over me.
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
I can’t begin to unravel this love.
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Byron Katie has an introduction for the work on her website, and I would also recommend you watch her YouTube videos. Watching her do this work with an actual human, in real time, is profound. You grasp what it’s about very quickly.
At its core, “the work” is designed to lessen our suffering and give us deep clarity into what is true for us. You are searching for truth, Unsure, and Byron Katie is the best medicine I know for finding it.
I’m holding you close in my heart as you find what’s right for you.
Much love,
Lara
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