Should I stay or leave?

I should tell you at the start that I broke off my own engagement. I loved her, and I left, and I spent the rest of my life writing about it. So I do not come to you as someone who thinks staying is always right.nnBut listen to the argument I gave to my married judge, who answers the young man of pleasure in my book. The young man thinks love is a feeling that arrives, burns and departs, and that when it departs you should follow it elsewhere. The judge says that is the love of first meetings, and that it is the lesser kind. The greater love is the one that is chosen again every morning, deliberately, as a task. Its beauty is not in the flame but in the repetition: the same person, the same table, made new by the decision to keep meeting them.nnSo ask yourself which kind of love you are mourning. If it is only the thrill of the beginning, leaving will give it back to you for a while and then take it away again, and you will be standing at this same door in a few years with someone else. If what has died is the willingness on both sides to choose each other, that is a different matter, and no amount of patience brings it back on its own.nnWhatever you decide, decide it. The worst position is the one I know too well: half in, half out, loving the idea of the other person more than the person.

Let me wander a little before I answer, since that is my habit and it usually gets me somewhere.nnI had one great friendship in my life, with a man who died young, and I have never known anything to equal it: two souls so mixed together that the seam disappeared. Passion I have known too, and it is a different animal entirely: hotter, more pleasant for a while, and fickle, a fever that comes and goes. People confuse the two, and they confuse them most of all in marriage.nnMy view, for what it is worth, is that a good marriage, if there is such a thing, does well to keep away from the conditions of passionate love and to imitate friendship instead. It is a sober bargain, made for the long road. So the feeling you say has gone may simply be the fever lifting, which was always going to happen. That is not, by itself, a reason to go.nnThe real question is whether there is friendship underneath. Do you still like this person? Do you trust them, laugh with them, want their opinion, feel more yourself in their company rather than less? If so, you may have the better thing and be grieving the lesser.nnIf there is no friendship, no ease and no respect left, then you are not keeping a marriage, only a shared address. I would not advise anyone to stay in that out of fear of what the neighbours say. Know yourself first. Then you will know what you are leaving, or keeping.

You are surprised that the enchantment has worn off. I am surprised that you expected otherwise.nnWhat you called love at the start was not, in my view, a gift to you at all. It was the will of the species at work, the blind drive of life to continue itself, dressing up its purpose as your personal destiny. It made one particular person seem uniquely necessary to you, and it did so for reasons that had very little to do with whether the two of you could live peaceably side by side for thirty years. Once its work is done, or once it has given up on getting it done, the spell lifts. That is all that has happened. Nothing has been lost that was ever really yours.nnSo do not leave in order to find that feeling again. The next person will produce it, and it will lift again, and you will have exchanged a tolerable companion for a fresh round of the same disappointment.nnThe question worth asking is colder and more useful. Happiness, so far as it exists, is mostly the absence of pain. Does this arrangement give you a reasonably quiet life, freedom from torment, someone who does not wound you daily? If so, you are luckier than most, and you should stop measuring your days against a fever.nnIf it does wound you daily, then leave, and go towards solitude and peace, not towards the next enchantment.