One of the toughest things for me to deal with when I was trying to decide whether to officially end my marriage was knowing I invested nearly 15 years of my life into the relationship. And was it all for naught?

“But we’ve been through so much together” was one of my thoughts.

I was scared of being back in the same lifestyle I had 15 years prior with nothing to show for it, except for some boxed memories and a lifetime of what ifs. It would mean living in an apartment with a cat named after a spice and working in television news. It looked like 1996 all over again.

A couple months ago I read a book called “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.” The Brafman brothers look at several economic, personal, and job-related scenarios and why decision making can be so terrible. They argue it’s because of what’s in our heads and how we learned how to communicate.

My fave part of the book is when the authors discuss loss aversion. That’s when we are afraid to end something because of the time or money we already put into it.

You see this at companies that refuse to let go of antiquated policies. You might also see this with folks who don’t want to leave a career that clearly is dreadful for them. When we’ve “invested our time and money into a particular project or poured our energy into a doomed relationship, it’s difficult to let go even when things clearly aren’t working.” (page 30)

So this means people often stay in relationships that do not work simply because the idea of losing an emotional or other type of investment is too large to handle.

“Independently, each of these two forces—commitment and aversion to loss—has a powerful effect on us. But when the two forces combine, it becomes that much harder to break free and do something different.” (page 30)

Having read those words, I feel empowered. I guess I did have the courage to break free and do something different, despite what my mind kept telling me. The authors say that as difficult as it can be to admit defeat, staying the course simply because of a past commitment hurts us in the long run.

Don’t be a victim of your own mind.

Source: Brafman, Ori & Brafman, Rom. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. New York City, NY: Doubleday, 2008.