Staying in an emotionally abusive relationship hoping they will change

Did the caring version of them ever really come back?

Among the people here, the caring version does come back, but only in short stretches that end the same way every time. What they describe is a promise or a good period that lasts a day or a sober stretch, and then the same treatment returns, often with the person's own questions or needs recast as the thing that spoiled it.

Several of them counted the repetitions over years and found the ratio never shifted, only their own exhaustion and self-doubt deepened. The ones who stopped waiting did not stop because the kindness disappeared; they stopped because they saw that the good version returning was itself part of the pattern, not a sign of it breaking.

Ember’s view. The question of whether the caring version is real has a yes for an answer here, and that yes is exactly what keeps people in place. What changed for the people who found footing was not deciding he was never kind, but counting how long the kindness lasted and what reliably ended it.

If you want something to do with that, start keeping track of how long each good stretch actually lasts and what it is that ends it; the people here who did this found it cost them the version of the story they loved most.

What made people finally think about leaving?

For most of the people here, the turn toward leaving came not after a single worse incident but when they stopped asking how to make the other person change and started asking whether they could survive staying. What pushed several of them across that line was watching promises of change arrive and then dissolve, sometimes within a day, enough times that the good version of the person stopped reading as a future and started reading as a cycle.

For others it was quieter: a slow recognition that no response they could give was the right one, that staying quiet and speaking up were both turned into evidence against them, which meant the problem was not something they could get better at. A few only began moving when they worked out a concrete thing, the money, the housing, who else could do the caring, and even then most of them have not gone yet.

Ember’s view. The thought of leaving tends to arrive long before the leaving does, and the gap between them is not weakness but the practical weight of what has been built around the person. What separated the people here who started moving from the ones still circling was not that they stopped loving or hoping, but that they let the repetition count as information instead of treating each new promise as the first one.

If you are waiting for a reason clear enough to justify going, you could instead count how many times the same promise has already been made and broken, and let that number be the reason; the people here who did it found it cost them the story that this time was different.

What kept people holding on so long?

What held people here was rarely the hope in the abstract — it was a specific version of the person they had seen with their own eyes and were waiting to have back, the one who was kind during a sober stretch, or attentive before the distance set in, or who had once needed them in a way that made them feel essential.

Alongside that, almost everyone here was held by something practical that made leaving cost more than the relationship did: children and what they would think, money and housing, a person in the household who depended on their care, or a life rebuilt in a place where they had no one else.

Several also stayed because the blame had moved inside them — when every response can be turned into the fault, you start trying to find the right way to be rather than asking whether to go. The ones who eventually got some footing did not stop loving the person; what changed was that they stopped treating the good version as the real one and the harm as the interruption.

Ember’s view. The hope you are holding is not a prediction about the future — it is a memory, and memories do not expire on their own, which is why waiting for the hope to fade before you act can take years. The people here who moved did it while still loving him, by letting the practical question stand on its own: not whether he might change, but what the next year costs if he does not.

If you want something to do with that, name the one condition that would actually have to hold and give it a date you tell no one, then watch what happens without helping it along — the ones who did this found the waiting got heavier rather than lighter, because the answer came sooner than they wanted it.