Content Warning: This post discusses suicide and self-harm in the context of relationships. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

As always, the question this week comes from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions. And before I get to it, I want to acknowledge that we’ve been in some heavy territory lately. Two weeks ago, the question was about aborting a pregnancy knowing the child would be severely disabled. Last week, it was about ending the life of a severely handicapped newborn. Both of those hit hard — harder than most questions in this series — and I tried to be honest about where I land and why.

This week’s question is different in nature, but it’s not lighter. It’s just heavy in a different direction.

Here’s the question:

You become romantically involved with someone but after a couple of years realize you want out. What would you do if you were convinced that your lover would commit suicide if you left?

Okay. Let’s talk about this.

A Quick Disclaimer From Someone Who Has Never Been Here

I want to get something out of the way immediately, because I think intellectual honesty requires it: I have never been in a long-term romantic relationship. I am, as regular readers of this blog already know, a lifelong bachelor who lives alone with his dog and has strong opinions about television. So when I engage with a question like this one, I am reasoning entirely from the outside. I have no lived experience of a two-year relationship. I have no firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to be that entangled with another person — emotionally, practically, or otherwise.

I say that not to duck the question, but because I think it matters. The people best equipped to answer this one are the people who’ve actually been in it — or something close to it. I’m going to think through it as carefully as I can, but I want to hold my conclusions with a little more humility than usual, because this is territory I’m navigating entirely by map rather than by foot.

With that said — here’s where I actually land.

You Can’t Stay

I’ll say it plainly: I don’t think staying in a relationship you want out of — because you’re afraid of what your partner might do to themselves if you leave — is a viable long-term answer. And I want to be careful about how I say that, because I know it can sound cold when it isn’t meant to be.

But think about what that arrangement actually is. You are in a relationship you no longer want to be in, sustained not by love or genuine connection or mutual choice, but by fear. You are being held in place — whether intentionally or not — by the weight of another person’s potential suffering. And while that suffering is real, and while your concern for that person is real, the relationship itself has already ended in every meaningful sense. What you’d be maintaining is a structure. A shell. A thing that looks like a relationship from the outside but is actually something closer to a hostage situation in slow motion.

That’s not good for you. And — and this part matters — it’s not actually good for them either.

A relationship sustained by emotional crisis is not a healthy relationship. It is not what either person deserves. And staying does not address the underlying pain that person is carrying; it just postpones the reckoning while ensuring that you are both miserable in the meantime. You are not a treatment plan. You are not a therapist. You are not equipped — and should not be expected — to be the sole thing standing between another person and a decision to end their life.

So no. I don’t think staying is the answer.

But Leaving Responsibly Is Not the Same as Just Leaving

Here’s where I want to push back a little on the idea that “I have to go” is the end of the conversation. Because I don’t think it is.

If I genuinely believed — not suspected, not feared, but genuinely believed — that someone I cared about was at risk of harming themselves in the aftermath of a breakup, I would not just walk out the door and wish them luck. I would make sure there was someone in place to help them. A friend. A family member. A professional. Someone who could be present in the way that I was no longer able to be. I would not abandon a person I once loved to a crisis without doing everything in my power to make sure they had support on the other side of that door.

That’s not the same as staying. But it’s also not the same as simply disappearing and telling myself it’s not my problem anymore. I think there’s a version of leaving that takes the other person’s wellbeing seriously without sacrificing your own agency to do it. It’s harder. It requires more care and more intention. But I think it’s possible, and I think it’s the right thing to aim for.

Life is still precious. Even when the relationship is over. Even when you’re the one walking away. Even when it’s complicated.

The Part I Can’t Ignore

I want to be honest about something, though, because this question made me think about it and I think it deserves to be named directly.

The threat of suicide — or even the strong implication of it — is, in some cases, a manipulation tactic. I have known of situations where a person used the fear of self-harm to keep a significant other locked in a relationship they wanted to leave. And I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that everyone who expresses suicidal ideation in the context of a breakup is being manipulative. That would be both wrong and genuinely dangerous. People in the acute pain of relationship loss can experience real, serious crisis, and that should never be dismissed.

But the pattern exists. It is documented. And it is worth naming, because pretending it doesn’t happen doesn’t protect anyone — it just makes people feel like they can’t talk about it when it’s happening to them.

If you have been in a relationship where the threat of self-harm was used to prevent you from leaving, you are not wrong to recognize that as a form of control. That recognition doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about the other person. It means you are seeing clearly something that is genuinely difficult to see when you are in the middle of it.

And it probably means you need support too — not just them.

The Tension I’m Sitting With

Here’s the honest tension at the center of this question, at least for me: I believe that a person’s choices are ultimately their own. If someone makes a decision — any decision — in response to circumstances in their life, including the end of a relationship, that decision belongs to them. I cannot control it. I am not responsible for it in the way I would be responsible for a choice I made myself.

And I also believe that life is precious, and that belief comes with obligations. It means I care what happens to people, including people I am in the process of leaving. It means I don’t get to wash my hands of someone’s wellbeing just because the relationship is ending.

Those two things exist in tension, and I don’t think the tension fully resolves. What I can do is hold both of them at once — leave, because staying would be wrong, and do so with as much care and intentionality as the situation allows. Make sure help is available. Make sure the person is not alone in the immediate aftermath. And then, eventually, trust that the people and systems designed to help are doing their jobs, and let yourself grieve the relationship rather than carry the full weight of another person’s survival on your back.

That’s a hard thing to do. I suspect it’s one of the hardest things there is.

Your Turn

I said at the top that the people most equipped to answer this question are the ones who’ve been in something close to it — and I meant it. If you have navigated a relationship where you feared for a partner’s safety when leaving, or where you were on the other side of that fear, your experience matters more in this conversation than my theoretical reasoning does.

Where do you land? Do you think there’s a version of leaving responsibly that genuinely accounts for someone else’s wellbeing? Does the manipulation angle change how you think about it, or does it feel too cold to factor that in when someone’s life might be at stake?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. This is a topic where people’s experiences vary enormously, and I’d genuinely rather hear from you than have you read my take in silence.

Until next week — this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, still figuring this one out. Which, honestly, feels about right.