When someone asks whether to stay or go — in a relationship or a job — Joe first distinguishes two kinds of people: the chronic questioner who has asked it across many relationships and jobs, and the person who was content for years and only recently arrived at the question. They look different but reduce to the same thing.
“Can I stay with myself or will I leave myself?”
The chronic version is a prediction made in advance: “I don’t think I can stay with myself if I enter this commitment.” It usually grows out of a childhood where commitment meant enmeshment — having to bend yourself to please a parent through guilt or criticism, where your job was not to be yourself but to please someone. The acute version isn’t a prediction; it’s the felt sense of having abandoned yourself inside the relationship or job until it started to hurt.
“I’m losing myself into this person instead of like oh, am I being myself?”
Either way, the surface question about staying or leaving is a stand-in for a question about self-relationship. The work isn’t to compute the right external answer but to find whether you can stay in relationship with yourself wherever you are.
Related Concepts
- Showing up as yourself answers the stay-or-leave question
- Real commitment is to stay in connection, not to stay together
- The relationship with yourself is the core issue
- Self-love dissolves relationship decisions rather than answering them
- Idealizing the future keeps you from what’s available now
- Be fully yourself and the relationship question answers itself