I was on the right path.

I had made the decision, at least within myself, that my marriage was no longer working. I haven’t asked for a divorce. I’m still married. I’m still living in the same house. But mentally, I had finally reached a place where I wasn’t asking myself the same question over and over anymore.

I knew something had to change.

So I started putting my ducks in a row. I started thinking about what I needed to do, what my future could look like, and how I might eventually get from where I am now to where I know I want to be.

And then it started.

The part of the cycle that has made me question myself so many times before began again.

The high.

The love bombing.

Love bombing can look different in every relationship. For me, it looks like suddenly getting all the things I’ve been missing.

My love language is physical touch. So suddenly, my husband becomes extremely touchy-feely. There is more affection. More attention. More touching. More of the things that make me feel loved and connected to someone.

He starts doing things with me that he normally has no interest in doing.

He helps around the house without me having to ask.

For a little while, it feels like I suddenly have the partner I’ve been asking for all along.

And every single time, the same thought starts creeping into my head.

Maybe I’m overreacting.

Maybe things aren’t really as bad as I thought they were.

Maybe I haven’t given this enough of a chance.

Maybe this time really is different.

That’s the part that can really mess with your head. When you’ve spent so much time wanting affection, communication, support, effort, and connection, and suddenly those things show up, it’s hard not to believe that maybe something really has changed.

I want to believe them.

But then the other shoe drops.

The communication becomes inconsistent again.

The support disappears.

The touching stops.

The affection fades.

The effort around the house goes back to what it was before.

And that feeling of connection that had me questioning everything disappears almost as quickly as it appeared.

Then the cycle resets itself.

The difference this time is that I see the cycle for what it is.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t mean I don’t still have moments where I question myself. And it definitely doesn’t mean I’ve figured out exactly what I’m going to do next.

I’m still in it.

But I’m looking at it differently now.

A big part of that has come from taking the time to work through Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay by Mira Kirshenbaum, a book my therapist recommended to me.

This isn’t a book that simply tells you to leave your relationship or tells you to stay. Instead, it has forced me to slow down and really look at my marriage, my experiences, the patterns I keep seeing, and the questions I have spent years asking myself.

One of the biggest things I’m learning is that I can’t judge the health of my marriage based only on its best moments.

I have to look at the whole pattern.

The highs count.

But so do the lows that keep coming after them.

The affection matters.

But so does what happens when that affection disappears again.

The effort matters.

But so does whether that effort is consistent.

I think that’s what has kept me stuck so many times before. I would get to the point where I thought I knew what I needed to do. Then things would get better, and I would immediately start questioning whether everything I had been feeling before was valid.

Then things would go back to the way they were, and I would find myself right back where I started.

This time, I’m trying not to let a temporary high erase everything that came before it.

I’m paying attention to the pattern instead.

If you’re in a similar place, wondering whether your relationship is too good to leave but too bad to stay, I do recommend working through Kirshenbaum’s book. Not because it will make the decision for you. It won’t. But sometimes you need something that helps you ask yourself the questions you’ve been avoiding and look at the answers you may not have wanted to see.

For me, seeing the cycle doesn’t magically tell me exactly how or when this chapter ends.

But it does mean I’m trying not to let one good stretch convince me that I imagined everything that brought me here.

And maybe that’s what progress looks like for me right now.

Not getting swept up in the high and forgetting the pattern that came before it.