Is Your Relationship Trapped in This Stay Go Cycle?

Summary

Alan Robarge describes the stay-go cycle as a repetitive, exhausting pattern of indecision. It can leave someone feeling confused, frozen, disconnected from themselves, and emotionally depleted. The video aims to help viewers recognize the pattern, assess what may be keeping it going, and find greater clarity—not to prescribe a single decision for every relationship.

How the Cycle Can Unfold

Robarge maps the cycle through 15 possible phases. They may overlap, occur in a different order, or not all apply:

1. Oscillating loop: Repeatedly debating whether to stay, leave, try again, or give up.
2. Self-refusal: Overriding feelings or evidence that suggest a change may be needed; making excuses or talking yourself out of leaving.
3. Ghosting presence: Checking out, suppressing feelings, or postponing a decision until after one more milestone or event.
4. Chronic friction: Unresolved anger leaking out as irritability, withholding, conflict, or silence.
5. Relational winter: A decline in warmth, kindness, and efforts to connect.
6. Moral fortification: Building a case against a partner, focusing on past hurts, and feeling superior or unquestionably right.
7. Exit wait: Hoping the other person will end the relationship while sending mixed signals or avoiding repair.
8. Reality splitting: Losing perspective through black-and-white thinking, idealized stories, or other distortions.
9. Savior delusion: Believing you must save your partner, or that they must rescue you; focusing on potential rather than present reality.
10. Cosmic anchoring: Treating destiny, soulmates, or a spiritual bond as proof that the relationship must continue.
11. Structural collapse: Feeling exhausted, lonely, emotionally deprived, and unable to influence the situation.
12. Descent: Experiencing deeper isolation, hopelessness, or despair, sometimes alongside old fears of abandonment.
13. Self-erasure: Feeling numb, disconnected from life, or unsure who you are.
14. Infinite return: Arriving again at “Should I stay or go?” and beginning the same loop.
15. Crossroads: Recognizing that continuing the cycle or making a new beginning involves a choice, even if it does not feel that way.

Self-Care and Assessment Strategies

• Respond to yourself with compassion. Reduce self-judgment and make room for empathy, especially if you are repeating the same questions or feeling stuck.
• Notice the cycle rather than shaming yourself for it. Naming its phases can make the pattern easier to understand, even when they blur together in real life.
• Assess reality using concrete information. Ask what you may be overlooking, how you are explaining away what is happening, and whether your reasoning helps you see clearly or keeps you from facing grief.
• Separate the relationship’s present reality from its story. Consider whether nostalgia, an idealized romantic narrative, or beliefs about destiny are outweighing what you and your partner are actually able to build together now.
• Check your capacity to leave without assuming you must leave. Identify what practical and emotional skills, resources, and support you would need to end a relationship with care and grace if that becomes your decision. Endings may involve a process of grieving and uncoupling.
• Examine fear of the unknown. Ask whether uncertainty about finances, housing, or life on your own is keeping you paralyzed. Try to understand the fear rather than letting it make the decision for you.
• Look at anger’s role. Consider whether staying focused on resentment, being right, or getting the other person to acknowledge your pain is keeping you tied to the conflict.
• Reflect on heartbreak and identity. Ask whether grief has become more than a temporary feeling—perhaps part of how you see yourself—and whether changing that pattern feels like losing your identity.
• Practice observing your thoughts. Robarge describes this as turning attention toward your own thinking and inner experience, rather than relying entirely on another person to reflect your sense of self back to you.
• Seek support without demanding that you “get over it.” Robarge shares how a friend responded to his repeated distress with patience and empathy, encouraging kindness instead of shame.
• Consider the longer history. Present indecision can echo earlier experiences of emotional neglect, unreliable connection, or difficulty ending relationships. Exploring those patterns may help explain why someone tolerates a relationship that feels emotionally unsustaining.

Presenter and Sources

Alan Robarge, an attachment-focused psychotherapist and relationship educator, is the presenter. He recounts support from his late friend Jonathan and cites a poem by Anne Sexton about the end of an affair.