What We Need to Know Before Making a Relationship Decision

When we find ourselves at a relationship crossroads, our first instinct is often to ask, ‘Should I stay or should I leave?’

Sacred Crossroads starts somewhere different. Rather than forcing our way to a decision, it invites us through six thresholds of consciousness. Each threshold helps us become more aware of ourselves, our relationships and the life that wants to emerge.

Each threshold prepares us, not simply to make a choice, but to make one of the most significant decisions of our lives more consciously.

Sacred Crossroads | Step 6

The Threshold of Choice

When we find ourselves at a marital or relationship crossroads, it is natural to believe that the most important question is, What should I do?

Should I stay?

Should I leave?

Should I keep trying?

Or is it time to let go?

By the time we find ourselves asking these questions, it is understandable to want quick answers, as though clarity is just one decision away. That’s because we crave certainty; uncertainty is hard, and remaining suspended in that liminal space between possibilities can feel emotionally exhausting.

But when we look back, the journey through the previous five thresholds offers something different.

Awareness helped us see things as they are. By listening to our feelings, we got to know ourselves better and became more honest with ourselves and our partner. Taking responsibility meant owning what was ours, the good, the bad, and the ugly, without taking on what was not. Expressing ourselves let us be more genuine in the relationship, both as individuals and as partners.

Together, these thresholds have not been leading us towards a decision.

They have been leading us towards ourselves.

It is from this place that choice begins to emerge.

Not because uncertainty has disappeared, but because our relationship to it has changed. Rather than reacting from fear, urgency, or exhaustion, we respond from a deeper sense of who we are and what feels possible in our own lives and the relationship.

Choice is no longer simply about selecting between two futures.

It becomes an expression of consciousness.

The Journey Has Been Preparing the Person, Not the Decision

Each step of the Sacred Crossroads journey hasn’t been moving toward a final decision about the marriage with each threshold gathering information before eventually delivering the right answer. Our psychological growth doesn’t normally evolve in such a linear way.

The purpose of these thresholds is not to solve or fix the relationship, but rather to deepen our relationship with ourselves, deepen our capacity to relate and honour relationship from a place of understanding and compassion, whether we stay in it or leave.

Each threshold reshapes the person who will eventually make the decision.

When we shy away from engaging with and befriending our inner world, any decision we make will remain entangled in the same unconscious dynamics that created the crossroads in the first place. The destination isn’t about certainty and a regret-free, empowered life. It’s about living with greater consciousness and having a more soulful, connected life and relationships

When Urgency Begins to Loosen

Urgency surrounding the decision then begins to ease. This does not mean the marriage has become easier. This is not an on-off switch, and so the relationship may still be uncertain. Pain may still be present, and difficult conversations will likely still be ahead.

But what changes is the internal voice that insists a decision must be made immediately to escape discomfort.

When we arrive at the crossroads, decisions are often driven by understandable emotional energy. The fear of being alone or of making the wrong choice. Perhaps longing for relief or the hope that certainty about next steps will finally silence the anxiety.

Sometimes we make a decision about what to do because we cannot bear not knowing.

At times we stay in a relationship because the familiar discomfort feels a better choice than the disruption of change.

We, after all, are human beings making human choices, in the best we can.

But when urgency loses its grasp, another option becomes possible because we are no longer trying to outrun uncertainty. When we learn this, we can learn how to remain present within it.

Paradoxically, this creates the conditions in which genuine clarity can begin to emerge.

A Different Relationship with Uncertainty

Perhaps the most significant transformation is not that uncertainty disappears, but that it no longer dominates us in the same way.

It’s a common belief that when ‘we do the work’ to imagine that growth that follows will eventually remove doubt altogether. More often, it increases our capacity to be in relationship with it.

We begin to discover that uncertainty is not always a problem to be solved immediately. Sometimes it is a place to sit. Rather than demanding instantaneous answers, we become more curious. Rather than forcing certainty, we allow understanding to unfold in its own time.

This shift is subtle but so profound.

The external questions may remain remarkably similar.

Should I stay?

Should I leave?

Can this relationship continue?

Yet inside, something has changed.

The frightened, exhausted or disconnected self is no longer asking the questions. They are being held by someone who has gradually become more grounded, more integrated and more compassionate towards their own experience and the relationship.

The crossroads has not disappeared.

We have changed in our relationship to it.

Understanding How We Have Been Relating

Threshold #5 explored the importance of expression. Until we begin expressing more of who we are, our needs, desires, values, and vulnerabilities, we cannot fully know whether the relationship no longer fits, or whether the relationship can hold and support a more authentic expression of ourselves.

But the journey towards choice involves more than discovering and expressing who we are. Through the previous thresholds, we may also have begun to understand something about how we have been relating.

Perhaps we have recognised how much we have depended upon our partner to provide a sense of security we are beginning to discover within ourselves. There may now be an opportunity to experiment with standing more firmly in our own lives, trusting our capacity to care for ourselves and discovering what happens to the relationship when our partner no longer has to carry that role.

Perhaps we have become aware that when we feel frightened or emotionally overwhelmed, we try to regain safety through control. As we learn to regulate ourselves with greater compassion, we may become more able to tolerate the vulnerability that intimate conversation requires.

Or perhaps we have begun to recognise that we unconsciously asked our partner to occupy something of a parental role. Understanding this may cast the emotional or sexual distance between us in a very different light.

Choosing from Greater Awareness

These recognitions do not tell us whether to stay or leave. They give us an opportunity to experience the relationship differently before deciding what it can or cannot become.

Choice, then, is not simply the final act of preserving or ending a relationship. It emerges from what we have come to understand about ourselves, our partner and the relationship we have created together.

The question begins to shift.

Not simply:

“What should I do?”

But perhaps:

“Knowing what I now know, what becomes possible between us—and what no longer feels possible?”

The answer may be to stay. It may be to leave. It may be to continue exploring for a while longer.

The framework cannot answer that question. Nor should it.

What it can offer is the possibility of making that choice with a fuller understanding of what belongs to the relationship, what belongs to our own history, and what we may now have the capacity to do differently.

Sometimes the Path Chooses Us

Even though we tend to live out our lives as if we are in full control, life is unpredictable. And there are inevitably times when the choice about what happens to our marriage or relationship is not entirely ours.

Relationships can and do end unexpectedly. One partner suddenly makes a decision before the other is ready, pulling the rug from beneath the feet. Illness, death, changing circumstances, affairs, or simply the passage of time change the relationship in ways we never anticipated.

Even then, consciousness remains deeply relevant.

While we cannot always choose what happens, we retain the capacity to choose how we meet what happens next.

Sometimes the most courageous act is not directing the path before us, but responding to it with honesty, dignity and compassion. Choice is not always about control. Often it is about participation.

Life continues to invite us into relationship with what is emerging.

Why Relationship Decisions Can Still Feel Difficult

Whatever decision you make, uncertainty will still make its presence known. All meaningful marital decisions carry both hope and grief.

To remain may involve letting go of imagined futures.

To leave may involve mourning a relationship that once held deep significance.

There is no path entirely free from loss.

Yet when a choice has emerged from a place of greater awareness, responsibility and authentic expression, it can carry a sense of coherence. Not certainty or perfection, but congruence.

It feels less like forcing an outcome and more like stepping into a life that has gradually been revealing itself.

A Final Thought

We often imagine that we need complete clarity before we can choose. But at a relationship crossroads, certainty may never fully arrive. What can emerge is a deeper understanding of ourselves, our partner and the relationship we have created together, and sometimes that is enough to make the next choice.

At a relationship crossroads, therefore, the deepest transformation may not lie in the decision itself.

It may lie in discovering the place within ourselves from which that decision can finally be made.

The six thresholds of Sacred Crossroads have never been about finding the perfect answer.

They have been an invitation to meet yourself more fully.

From that place, a path often begins to emerge.

Not because every uncertainty has been resolved.

But because the one who is walking it is no longer the same.

Sacred Crossroads

The Sacred Crossroads is a reflective, depth-oriented process for those navigating periods of relational uncertainty, emotional transition, and psychological awakening.

Learning what it means to express ourselves more fully is often one of these thresholds. Not simply by speaking our truth, but by allowing our needs, values, creativity, vulnerability and emerging sense of self to find authentic expression within the relationship and in our lives.

This is not about offering simple answers to whether you should stay or leave. Instead, it invites a deeper, soulful exploration of consciousness, relationship, identity, attachment, shadow, and love across the lifetime of a relationship.

Sometimes, the task is not to decide right away, but to learn how to stay in an honest relationship with what is emerging.

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© Sandra Harewood 2026

About Sandra Harewood

Sandra Harewood is a registered Transpersonal Psychotherapeutic Counsellor, Couples Counsellor and Jungian Coach. Sandra is a specialist in working with women and couples facing crisis or at a crossroads in their marriage. Over the last 15+ years, Sandra has helped 100s of women and couples transform their lives and relationships. She has a private counselling and life-coaching practice in Pimlico and Bromley, South London. Sandra is passionate about helping couples create conscious relationships and put the soul back into their lives.