Staying in an emotionally abusive relationship hoping they will change

Did the caring version of them ever really come back?

For the people here, the kind version does come back, but only in intervals, and the intervals never grow into the thing they were waiting for. Several describe a promise of change that holds for about a day, or a sober stretch, or a season of warmth, and then the same pattern returns exactly as before.

What separates the people who got some footing is not that the kind version finally stayed, but that they stopped treating its return as evidence and started counting what the years actually contained. The ones who were still waiting when they told their story had mostly been waiting for a long time already, and the ones who looked back from the far side said the main thing they would change is how many years they gave the hope.

Ember’s view. The question of whether he comes back is not really a question about him; it is a question about what you will accept as proof. Everyone here already had the proof, because the good periods kept arriving and kept ending, and the arriving is what made the ending survivable.

If it helps, try counting the last stretch of good time in days rather than feeling it as a sign, the way the people here did once they stopped hoping and began looking back at the years. The ones who did that describe it as losing something they had been living on, and it left them sadder before it left them clearer.

What made people finally think about leaving?

For most of the people here, the turn toward leaving did not come from a single bad night but from watching the same promise fail enough times that waiting stopped feeling like a plan. Several of them describe a moment where they stopped asking how to make the other person change and started asking whether they should go, and that shift in the question is usually what they point to as the beginning.

For others it came from seeing that no response they could give was safe, that quiet and speaking up were both turned into evidence against them, which made the hope that better behavior would earn better treatment hard to keep holding.

What follows differs sharply: some began working out the practical pieces, money, children, somewhere to go, while others reached the same recognition and still stayed, held by love, by a person who depends on them, or by the fear of being alone.

Ember’s view. The thought of leaving arriving is not the same as leaving, and nearly everyone here crossed that line long before anything moved. What separated the ones who eventually moved was not more certainty or less love but having started on the concrete arrangements while still inside the hope, rather than waiting for the hope to die first.

If you are already asking this question, begin the practical piece now, the money, the place, the arrangement for whoever depends on you, without deciding yet that you are going; the people here who did it that way paid for it in guilt and in feeling disloyal while they were still trying.

What kept people holding on so long?

What held people here was rarely the bad treatment being tolerable; it was that they had already built something around this person and could still see, in flashes, the version of them they had signed up for. For several, the hope had a shape: sober periods, a promise of change, a stretch of warmth that made the rest look like an aberration rather than the pattern.

Others stayed held by things that had nothing to do with the partner at all, the children, someone fragile who depended on them, a long shared history, money, and these were the ties that outlasted the hope itself. And for some, underneath all of it, what kept them was plain fear of the empty side, being alone, being without love, having the person simply not be there anymore.

Ember’s view. The ones here who got somewhere did not stop loving the person or stop hoping; what changed was that they stopped treating the good version as the real one and the bad as the interruption. People here who looked back after it ended said the same thing in different words, that the waiting itself cost them years they only counted afterward.

If you want something concrete, the ones who began to move were the ones who started naming what they would need in practical terms, money, who would care for whom, where they would go, and worked on that first rather than on getting the other person to change. It did not make them stop loving him, and it did not make the leaving feel less like a loss.