3 Reasons People Stay In Unhappy Relationships
Research shows that fear, attachment patterns, and self-doubt often override alignment, making it hard to walk away.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | December 21, 2025
When we see people who stay "too long" in a relationship, the focus almost always lands on the moment when they finally leave. To the couple personally, the mystery of "what triggered it," "what broke," "what tipped the scales," becomes the matter of interest. It's also seen as the moment of ultimate truth.
But the real story lies in the quiet years leading to the end of the relationship cycle. The years when the relationship wasn't thriving, but the partners convinced themselves it was "fine." When their instincts said "this isn't it," but their "better sense" decided, "maybe it's safer to stay."
People don't stay in unfulfilling relationships because they lack rationality or the ability to reason; they stay because they are human. The reason we feel pulled to stay past the point of growth reveals deep truths about attachment, fear, identity and the stories we tell ourselves to cope.
Here are three research-backed reasons people stay in their relationships longer than they should.
1. You Stay Because You Equate Familiarity With Safety
The hardest part to come to terms with here is that the nervous system doesn't categorize things as "healthy" and "unhealthy." It only categorizes them as "known" or "unknown." If an emotional pattern resembles what you learned early in life, your body reads it as safety, even when your mind knows it's anything but.
Neurobiological models indicate that early experiences of caregiving are stored as "attachment schema" and function somewhat like predictive maps for relationships. These neural circuits override your automatic thought processes, making you believe despite evidence that "this is how closeness works." They dominate even if the relationship pattern is inconsistent, distant or overwhelming. These predictions shape emotion regulation and relationship choices in adulthood long before conscious reasoning enters the picture.
This is a partner's unpredictability might feel like chemistry if inconsistency once served as a cue for connection. And why distance in a relationship may feel normal if intimacy initially came with contingencies. What an individual is experiencing as "love", then, may simply be their nervous system recognizing an old blueprint.
This doesn't mean they're choosing the wrong people on purpose. It just means their body chooses what it recognizes. Perhaps to them, unconsciously, walking away from a relationship means walking away from the emotional framework that has been their only reality for decades.
So, they are bound to be doubtful. But their recovery can start from the understanding that what feels right is not necessarily good. And, possibly more importantly, that which feels strange is not always dangerous. The uneasiness we feel in new relationships is likely just the uneasiness of getting accustomed to a new love language.
2. You Stay Because You're Trying To Heal An Old Wound
One of the most overlooked reasons people stay too long in unfulfillling relationships is the quiet pull of the repetition-compulsion cycle, recreating unresolved emotional experiences with new partners. While it may look like self-sabotage on the surface, it's actually an unconscious attempt to resolve what once felt overwhelming.
Studies on recurring traumatic dreams show that the mind revisits old wounds so that it may master them, turning helplessness into agency and chaos into coherence. People re-enter threatening or painful scenarios during recurrent dreams, because the psyche attempts to integrate what was once fragmented and unbearable.
In waking life, repetition compulsion works similarly. We feel drawn to relationships that resemble early injuries because, on some level, we are trying to rewrite the original story.
Someone who chooses to stay with partners who give intermittent validation may have felt unseen growing up, and their psyche might be trying to resolve the pain of invisibility through them.
The painful paradox, though, is that reenactment does not lead to resolution. Just as traumatic dreams recur precisely because the fear has not yet been integrated, these relational patterns continue because the wound is still unresolved. The partner becomes less a companion and more a symbolic figure; they act as a stand-in for the original source of pain.
Deeper healing requires a person to stop using the relationship as the site of repair and bring their focus back to themselves: their boundaries, their narrative, their history and their healing. They should aim to see the relationship for what it is, not the arena in which their past might finally be redeemed.
3. You Stay Because You Fear The Uncertain Future More Than The Unhappy Present
Even highly intelligent, emotionally aware people underestimate the power of uncertainty aversion. The human brain is wired to avoid risk (both social and relational) because, historically, disconnection from one's bonded group came with life-or-death consequences. Modern life is safer, but the wiring remains the same. This is why an unsatisfying relationship can feel strangely "safer" than the prospect of life after it.
A 2023 study, for example, found that people stick with their choices not only after positive reinforcement but even after negative feedback, showing a pattern of cognitive inertia. The brain exerts less effort when staying put, and some individuals remain committed simply because the absence of clear cues, or the presence of discomfort, doesn't outweigh the internal cost of change. In other words, the mind defaults to the status quo because shifting course requires more cognitive and emotional labor than maintaining course.
This plays out in questions people quietly fear:
- "What if I never find someone else?"
- "What if starting over is worse?"
- "What if I regret leaving?"
When these questions surface, it may be an indication that the brain is catastrophizing the future because the present state still feels familiar enough to safely navigate (even when it's a source of unhappiness).
This inertia feels further magnified by the psychological tax of leaving, logistical, emotional, financial or existential. The bottom line is that humans do not make choices based on benefits; they make choices based on anticipated losses. And so, people stay until the pain of remaining finally outweighs the fear of stepping into the unknown.
The antidote here is self-trust. When you build a clearer internal map of you are and what you need, the future stops feeling like a blank threat and starts feeling like terrain you can navigate. And then, leaving doesn't feel like they are going deeper into a black hole, because it feels like it's a real step toward alignment.
People often judge themselves harshly for staying "past the expiration date." Do you do that too, or do you take active measures to change? Take the Relationship Control Scale to find out.
Curious to know who your historical personality twin is, as well as your historical opposite? Take the Historical Figure Quiz for an instant answer.
A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.