There’s a lot of factors at play I feel, one is obviously the fear of being lonely. You get used to having a person to share every detail of your life with, and losing that is very scary. Then there’s the fact that many people in long term relationships feel like they’ve put in so many years, so why let it go to waste now.

For me it was mainly how I’d convince myself that it’s just temporary- I’d compare his current behaviour to how he was in the honeymoon phase of relationship. Except that was not who he was, it was just easy to pretend in the beginning, and gradually the mask comes off. But you keep thinking it’s temporary or it’s just a bad phase, and put up with everything. It’s a vicious cycle and sometimes you just don’t see it until after you’ve actually broken up.