This therapist's perspective reveals what really keeps people emotionally invested in unequal relationships.
4 Reasons You Stay With Partners That Are No Good
It begins with understanding the unconscious patterns and emotional needs that make walking away feel so difficult.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
Many people stay in relationships that they, in their hearts, know are not working. They are acutely aware of how little their partner contributes to their life emotionally, financially or relationally. They may also silently put up with vague promises, inconsistent effort or lop-sided growth in the relationship.
This is why, when they're asked about why they choose to stay, they rarely say they're happy. Instead, they say things like, "It's not that bad," "I've already invested so much" or, "What if I leave and regret it?"
From a psychological perspective, this pattern has less to do with love and more to do with how the human brain evaluates loss and the cost of change. Here are four reasons why you might be choosing to stay in relationships that don't serve you.
1. You See Your Partner As 'Not Bad Enough'
One of the strongest forces keeping people in unsatisfying relationships is loss aversion, a principle from behavioral psychology explaining how, to our minds, losses feel more painful than equivalent gains feel pleasurable.
Pioneering research on prospect theory demonstrates that people are significantly more motivated to avoid losses than to pursue gains. In relationships, this means the potential pain of leaving often outweighs the potential relief of freedom, even when staying is costing you heavily.
This is because leaving requires accepting immediate losses, including the time you invested, the life you built, the routines you shared, the joint social identity you nurtured together and, crucially, the hope you held onto that things might improve. Staying, by contrast, preserves the familiar, even when it's disappointing as the brain treats it as safer than uncertainty.
This is why people often remain in relationships that are "good enough" but not nourishing. Their minds are often too preoccupied with the potential loss they're avoiding to evaluate if the relationship is even fulfilling them in the first place.
2. You've Already Invested Too Much In Your Partner
Another powerful mechanism at play in relationships that stretch out despite dissatisfaction is the sunk cost fallacy: a cognitive bias that leads people to continue investing in something because of what they have already invested, rather than because of future benefit.
This bias leads people to irrationally persist in failing endeavors when they have already invested time, effort or resources in them. In romantic relationships, sunk costs can take many different forms, including the years spent together, the emotional labor given away generously, the financial commitments that are too entangled to separate, the shared history and the sacrifices that would otherwise have been for nothing.
The more someone invests, the harder it can become for them to walk away. Ending the relationship can be like admitting that all those investments did not pay off. Psychologically, this can feel intolerable. So, instead of asking, "Is this relationship meeting my needs now?" this inflated sense of having invested too much keeps people stuck on the question, "Was all of this for nothing?"
3. It's Either Your Partner Or Regret
After loss aversion and sunk costs, the next hoop our mind has to jump through is the fear of regret. Classic research shows that anticipated regret can be more influential than anticipated satisfaction. In relationships, this shows up as fear of the hypothetical future where leaving turns out to be a mistake.
This tendency forces people to compare their less-than-ideal relationships with imagined worst case scenarios like ending up alone, realizing their partner was the best they could do or watching their ex change for someone else.
Naturally, in these unfair comparisons, their relationships come out on top. Even when these outcomes are unlikely, the emotional weight of imagining them keeps people frozen. Staying allows people to avoid immediate regret, and leaving requires tolerating the possibility of wondering, "What if?"
4. Your Partner's Familiarity Feels Safe
Status quo bias, or the tendency to prefer the current state of affairs even when better options exist, also pushes people to stay in relationships they should have opted out of a long time ago.
People disproportionately stick with existing choices simply because they are familiar. And in relationships, this familiarity comes with the added benefit of predictability. You know what to expect, even if what you expect is mediocrity. Uncertainty, on the other hand, requires cognitive effort, activates anxiety systems and also demands identity renegotiation.
A deadbeat partner may be disappointing, but they are still a known evil at the end of the day. In contrast, leaving the relationship means entering a period where outcomes are completely unclear. And for the brain, that ambiguity is often more threatening than ongoing dissatisfaction.
People with anxious attachment styles are especially vulnerable to staying in low-effort relationships. Anxious attachment is associated with heightened fear of abandonment and stronger motivation to maintain proximity, even at personal cost.
Finally, hope also plays a subtle role, as inconsistent rewards (unpredictable affection or breadcrumbs of commitment) can be more motivating than consistent ones. When a partner shows effort or affection occasionally, it can reinforce the belief that change is possible.
Those rare moments of improvement keep the emotional system engaged, even when the overall pattern remains unchanged.
Why Logic Alone Cannot De-Centre A Deadbeat Partner
From the outside, staying with a deadbeat partner often looks irrational. Their friends may point out the imbalance in the relationship with evidence repeatedly, but in most people's experience logic alone rarely leads to change.
That is because a majority of our decisions are not driven by conscious reasoning. They are driven by emotional and cognitive biases designed to protect against loss, regret and uncertainty.
Until those fears are addressed directly, people continue to rationalize staying, unconsciously lowering their standards, minimizing their dissatisfaction and by telling themselves that things could be much worse. This tendency to rationalize shouldn't be viewed as a weakness, though. Instead, look at it as an attempt by the brain to do what it evolved to do: protect and stabilize.
However, we should also keep our eyes peeled for evidence if someone is taking advantage of our affection and not doing their bit. And that can only happen after a perspective shift from past investment to future well-being. Letting go of unattainable goals can reduce stress and improve mental health. Applied to relationships, this means recognizing when effort is no longer leading to meaningful change.
Another key factor is identity separation. When people reconnect with parts of themselves that exist outside the relationship, the perceived cost of leaving decreases. The relationship no longer holds an individual's entire sense of self.
Finally, reframing loss is critical not just to your immediate well-being, but also for your approach to romantic relationships in general. Leaving is often framed as "failure," but psychologically, it is more accurate to see it as information about one's needs, boundaries and limits.
Understanding these forces does not automatically make leaving easy, but it does remove the shame of staying. Staying stuck is a predictable human response to how the mind processes attachment, investment and risk. And once those forces are named, people regain the ability to choose differently.
Curious to know your unique romantic style? Take my Romantic Personality Quiz for an instant, science-inspired answer.
A deadbeat partner affects the quality of a relationship. Take the research-backed Relationship Satisfaction Scale to know where your relationship stands.