For years, I thought I had a contradiction in my personality.
In some relationships, I would stay far too long.
I would overlook red flags. I would excuse behavior that hurt me. I would ignore my own needs. I would bend until I barely recognized myself. Sometimes I would even sacrifice my own self-respect trying to preserve a relationship that wasn’t healthy for me.
All because I couldn’t tolerate the ending.
It was that simple.
Ending a relationship, no matter how much peace it might bring, felt like failure.
But then there was the other side of me.
The side that would sometimes run.
Even in my marriage, there were moments when I felt an overwhelming urge to pull away when I felt disconnected, hurt, or emotionally unsafe.
“I can’t stay,” I would tell myself.
And that confused me because I love my husband.
How could someone go to extraordinary lengths to maintain some relationships while wanting to escape others?
How could I spend years enduring unhealthy dynamics in one area of my life and then feel tempted to walk away from another relationship without fully understanding why?
And truthfully, the relationship I sometimes wanted to run from was the healthiest one of them all.
Those behaviors seemed completely opposite.
One version of me would break my own heart trying to prevent an ending.
The other would start looking for the exit, even though truly leaving my marriage would have broken my heart too.
For years, I thought those were two separate problems.
Eventually, I realized they were different birds from the same nest.
Fear of abandonment.
That realization changed everything.
I had spent years looking at the people involved. I analyzed their behavior, their intentions, their actions, and their impact on my life.
What I wasn’t looking at was myself.
Why was I reacting this way?
Why did endings feel so unbearable?
Why did distance feel so threatening?
Why did I sometimes sacrifice my own peace to keep a connection alive?
I remember one of my closest friendships ending in 2021.
Walking away from that friendship felt devastating, but I knew I had to do it.
Then, in 2023, my marriage was hurting deeply, and I remember feeling ready to email a divorce attorney.
Looking back, one question stands out:
How could ending a friendship feel harder than the possibility of ending my own marriage?
At the time, I thought the answer was the people involved.
I thought one relationship must have mattered more than the other.
But that wasn’t true.
The friendship wasn’t more important than my husband.
If anything, I often held Robert to a higher standard because I loved him more deeply and because his opinion carried more weight than anyone else’s.
There were even times when I would tell myself:
“If I’m willing to tolerate this behavior from other people, then why can’t I tolerate it from Robert?”
But that wasn’t really the issue.
The issue wasn’t the relationship.
The issue was the silence.
When friendships struggled, there were usually still conversations.
Arguments.
Explanations.
Attempts.
Sometimes those conversations were painful, but they still carried something important:
Hope.
Words meant there was still engagement.
Words meant there was still movement.
Words meant there was still a chance to repair what was broken.
With Robert, it wasn’t the conflict that made me want to give up.
It was the silence.
The silence felt louder than any argument.
My friends could be talking and still not understand me.
Meanwhile, my husband often understood me better than anyone else in the world, but when he became quiet, it felt as though he had already left emotionally.
And because I thought the person was the answer, I completely missed what was actually happening.
I wasn’t responding to the quality of the relationship.
I was responding to my fear of abandonment.
But the answer started much earlier than my friendship in 2021 or my marriage 18 years ago.
While reading psychology books and spending years in counseling, I came across a concept that stopped me in my tracks.
When children are forced to remain in relationships that are unhealthy, they often learn to survive by focusing on the good in the person or relationship.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
A child can’t always leave.
A child often can’t change the situation.
A child is dependent on the very people who may be hurting them.
So what is left?
Endure.
Adapt.
Find the positive.
Look for reasons to stay.
Learn to survive the reality you have.
You cannot safely protest a dynamic when your survival depends on maintaining it.
So what happens?
The unhealthy dynamic stays in place because the child has no power to change it.
Over time, that survival strategy becomes a habit.
Even deeper, if speaking up threatens the relationship, a child can become conditioned to believe that abandonment threatens safety itself.
The lesson becomes simple:
If people leave, I’m not safe.
Children become very good at making associations.
A bell rings.
The cheese appears.
Eventually the bell means cheese.
In much the same way, children learn emotional associations.
Confrontation means abandonment.
Abandonment means danger.
And even when you become an adult and logically know your safety no longer depends on another person, those old associations can still become your default settings.
When I read that, I immediately grabbed a pen and paper.
Because suddenly my behavior made sense.
I wasn’t overlooking red flags because I couldn’t see them.
I was overlooking them because I had spent years practicing endurance.
I had learned to find the good.
I had learned to understand.
I had learned to empathize.
I had learned to forgive.
What I had not learned was that sometimes the healthiest response is to leave.
But that still didn’t explain why I sometimes wanted to run.
Then another piece fell into place.
The answer was hidden in what abandonment looked like to me.
Growing up, silence was rarely neutral.
Silence meant something was wrong.
Silence was often followed by withdrawal.
Silence was what happened when a relationship was breaking down.
In my experience, silence meant someone had stopped fighting for the relationship.
Silence meant I didn’t matter.
So when I got married, I brought that understanding with me.
The problem was that Robert brought a completely different understanding.
In my family, conflict was loud.
People argued.
People cried.
People fought things out.
It wasn’t always healthy, but one thing was certain:
Engagement meant the relationship was still alive.
Silence was what happened when people gave up.
In Robert’s family, it was almost the opposite.
Silence wasn’t surrender.
Silence wasn’t abandonment.
Silence was a way to prevent escalation.
Silence was a way to calm down.
Silence was a way to avoid saying things you couldn’t take back.
To them, creating space was often the healthier choice.
To me, it felt terrifying.
Of course, neither system was perfect.
My family’s version of conflict often escalated too quickly. Sometimes emotions drove the conversation more than wisdom.
But the strength of that system was that problems were usually out in the open.
People knew where they stood.
Robert’s family had a different strength.
They were less likely to escalate. More measured. More restrained.
But every strength has a shadow side.
The risk wasn’t yelling.
The risk was that silence could become permanent.
The risk was that problems could remain unresolved because no one wanted to make anyone uncomfortable enough to address them.
One family risked too much confrontation.
The other risked too little.
One feared escalation.
The other feared disconnection.
And somewhere in the middle is probably where healthy conflict lives.
What looked like safety to Robert looked like abandonment to me.
What looked like connection to me sometimes felt like escalation to him.
Neither of us arrived at those conclusions by accident.
We learned them.
We learned them in the homes that raised us.
So when conflict entered our marriage, we weren’t just dealing with each other.
We were dealing with years of conditioning that told us what conflict meant.
When Robert became quiet, my nervous system wasn’t hearing:
“I need a little time.”
It was hearing:
“You don’t matter.”
And when I pushed harder for connection, reassurance, or repair, Robert wasn’t necessarily hearing:
“I love you and I’m scared.”
Sometimes he was hearing escalation.
Two people.
Two coping mechanisms.
Two definitions of safety.
And both of them made perfect sense in the environments where they were formed.
That’s when I realized something important.
The same fear that made me cling could also make me run.
Because if abandonment is the thing you fear most, there are two ways to protect yourself.
You can hold on too tightly.
Or you can leave before someone else has the chance to.
Different strategies.
Same fear.
Different birds.
Same nest.
That single realization solved a lot of problems in my life.
It also gave me a map.
Understanding that changed everything.
It helped me see that I wasn’t reacting to the present moment as much as I was reacting to old fears.
It helped me recognize that engagement does not always mean a relationship is healthy.
And silence does not always mean a relationship is over.
Especially in my marriage.
Most importantly, it helped me understand something I wish I had learned much earlier:
Some relationships are worth saving.
Some are not.
And I am no longer responsible for maintaining relationships that hurt me.
The child version of me didn’t have a choice.
The adult version of me does.
Today, I still deeply value relationships.
I still believe in forgiveness.
I still believe in empathy.
But I no longer believe that every relationship must be preserved at any cost.
Sometimes walking away is wisdom.
Sometimes distance is healthy.
And sometimes what feels like abandonment isn’t abandonment at all.
Maybe it’s freedom.
