The $7,000 question: Am I in love or just scared?

I realized I wasn't in love anymore while watching my partner load the dishwasher. Not because of how she loaded it—though she does put bowls on the bottom rack like a sociopath—but because I felt nothing. No irritation, no fondness, no anything. Just the hollow recognition that I'd been watching this same scene play out for three years, and I'd probably watch it for three more unless something changed.

The something that needed to change was me leaving. I knew this with the same certainty I knew my own name. But I also knew I wouldn't do it, not that night, not that month, probably not that year. Because leaving meant admitting I'd wasted three years. Leaving meant moving back in with roommates. Leaving meant downloading dating apps again and having the same dead-end conversations about whether hot dogs are sandwiches.

Leaving meant starting over, and starting over felt scarier than staying in a relationship that had become emotional ambient noise.

Maintenance love

We had what I started calling "maintenance love"—just enough affection to keep things running, like adding oil to a car engine. A kiss goodbye in the morning, an "I love you" at night that felt more like punctuation than declaration. We were roommates with shared bodily fluids and a Costco membership.

My partner was good on paper. Kind, stable, liked my parents. She remembered to buy oat milk when we ran out. She wasn't mean or neglectful or any of the obvious red flags we're taught to watch for. She was just... fine. And fine is the enemy of great, but it's also the enemy of bad enough to leave.

The cruelest relationships aren't the terrible ones—those are easy to leave. The cruelest are the almost-good-enough ones. The ones where you have okay sex and decent conversations and you don't fight much because you don't care enough to fight. The ones where you could probably coast for decades, aging into one of those couples who stay together for the grandkids and have separate bedrooms.

The sunk cost of shared Netflix passwords

We don't talk enough about how modern relationships are held together by logistics as much as love. The shared Netflix account, the joint phone plan that saves you forty dollars a month, the apartment neither of you could afford alone, the friend group that would implode if you split, the Instagram archive of your seemingly perfect life that would need explaining.

It's what behavioral economists call the sunk cost fallacy—the tendency to continue investing in something because of previously invested resources, even when it's no longer rational. We usually apply this to money or business, but it might be the most powerful force keeping people in relationships that expired long ago.

I did the math once. Really sat down and calculated what leaving would cost me, not emotionally but practically. First and last month's rent on a new place. The couch we'd bought together that I'd have to abandon. The Europe trip we'd already booked. The wedding in June where we were both in the wedding party. The sheer exhaustion of explaining to everyone why we'd ended something that looked fine from the outside.

It came to about $7,000 and six months of awkward conversations. That's what my freedom cost, and apparently, it was too expensive.

I know I'm privileged to even have $7,000 to calculate. For many people, the cost of leaving isn't just expensive—it's impossible. The financial entanglement becomes a prison with no key.

The comfort of predictable disappointment

There's something almost soothing about being in a relationship you know isn't working. You've already grieved the loss of what it could have been. You've accepted the Saturday nights watching separate screens in the same room. You know exactly what kind of disappointment to expect, and there's a strange comfort in that predictability.

A study on relationship persistence found something counterintuitive: people often stay in unsatisfying relationships not because they think things will improve, but because the certainty of known unhappiness feels safer than the uncertainty of potential happiness. We're so risk-averse that we'll choose guaranteed mediocrity over possible joy.

My friend Katie once told me that staying in her dead relationship felt like wearing a coat that didn't fit anymore. "It's too small and the zipper's broken," she said, "but at least I know exactly how uncomfortable it's going to be."

She stayed another two years after saying that.

The fear taxonomy

When I finally started being honest with myself, I realized my fear of leaving wasn't just one fear but an entire ecosystem of terrors.

The fear of being alone, which wasn't really about being alone but about what being alone might reveal about me. The fear of admitting failure, especially after all those anniversary posts I'd written about "growing together." The fear of hurting someone who wasn't bad, just wrong for me.

The fear that this was as good as it gets, that I was the problem, that I'd leave and discover every relationship feels like this after the dopamine wears off.

But mostly, the fear of starting over. Of being back on dating apps. Of having to explain my baggage to someone new. Of learning someone else's coffee order and childhood trauma and the specific way they need to be comforted when they're sad.

A study on relationship decisions revealed that fear of being single is one of the strongest predictors of staying in unsatisfying relationships. We've created a culture where being alone is seen as failure, where "how are you still single?" is a question that implies something's wrong with you.

The moment of clarity that changes nothing

Three months ago, at a dinner party, someone asked us how we met. We told the story we'd told a hundred times—the mutual friend, the terrible karaoke, the three-hour first date. But as I listened to us recite our origin story like actors in a long-running play, I realized we were describing two people who didn't exist anymore.

The couple in that story was curious about each other, excited by the differences, eager to merge their separate lives into something shared. The couple at the dinner party was performing nostalgia for an audience, trying to remind ourselves why we were still together by telling the story of why we got together.

That night, I knew with absolute clarity that I needed to leave. I also knew I wouldn't, not yet. Because knowing something and doing something are separated by an ocean of fear, and I wasn't ready to swim.

The shift

I wrote most of this essay six months ago, trapped in that paralysis between knowing and doing. I thought I'd be in that relationship forever, slowly fossilizing into someone I didn't recognize.

Then, last month, something shifted. Not dramatically—there was no final straw, no big fight, no revelation. I just woke up one morning and the fear of staying finally outweighed the fear of leaving. The thought of another year of maintenance love felt heavier than the thought of starting over.

My neighbor down the hall had just left her girlfriend of five years. She's 35, starting over, sleeping on her sister's couch while she figures things out. I ran into her in the lobby as she was loading boxes into a U-Haul.

"I wasted so much time being afraid of this," she said, gesturing at her life in cardboard boxes. "But you know what? Starting over isn't starting from nothing. It's starting from experience."

Something about the way she said it—tired but not defeated, scared but not sorry—made the impossible feel possible.

Final thoughts

I left three weeks ago. I'm writing this from a sublet that smells like someone else's life, surrounded by boxes I haven't unpacked yet because I'm not sure where I'm going next. My savings account is $7,000 lighter. The group chat is weird. The wedding in June will be awkward.

But for the first time in three years, I feel like I'm living my actual life instead of performing it. The fear of starting over was real, but it was nothing compared to the slow suffocation of staying in a relationship that had become a comfortable prison.

Maybe love isn't just about finding someone you want to be with. Maybe it's also about being brave enough to leave when the love is gone, even if the convenience remains. Maybe the greatest act of self-love is admitting you deserve more than almost-good-enough, even if it means loading your life into boxes and beginning again.

Starting over isn't starting from nothing. It's starting from the knowledge that you chose possibility over predictability, that you chose the uncertain future over the certain slow death. That you chose yourself, finally, after years of choosing fear.

The dishwasher in my sublet is broken. I wash everything by hand now. It feels like a metaphor for something, but I'm too tired and too free to figure out what.