206. The Decision You Can't Optimise: Staying or Leaving After Betrayal
After betrayal, the question “Should I stay or should I leave?” can become all-consuming. You analyse every possibility, weigh every consequence, imagine every future, and somehow still feel no closer to an answer. If you’re normally capable, decisive and good at solving problems, that uncertainty can start to feel like another failure.
But some decisions cannot be optimised. There is no perfect calculation that can guarantee happiness, protect you from regret, or tell you whether your partner will truly change. Betrayal recovery often requires something different from certainty: learning how to make a decision based on the information you have today, while rebuilding trust in your ability to respond to whatever comes next.
In this final episode of the three-part series, I explore why deciding whether to stay or leave after infidelity feels so difficult, how the search for certainty keeps you trapped in overthinking, and how shifting from “Which choice guarantees the best outcome?” to “Which choice am I willing to own?” can create greater relationship clarity and self-trust.
Key Takeaways:
Stop expecting a stay-or-leave decision to provide certainty about a future that hasn’t happened yet.
Separate the quality of your decision from the outcome it eventually produces; a painful outcome does not automatically mean you chose badly.
Recognise that trying to avoid all future regret can keep you stuck in indecision, false hope and endless prediction.
Make the decision smaller: ask “What am I choosing next?” rather than demanding an answer about the rest of your life.
Rebuild self-trust by choosing according to your values, boundaries, and current evidence, then trusting yourself to respond when new information arrives.
Why Staying or Leaving After Betrayal Can Feel Impossible
One of the hardest parts of staying or leaving after betrayal is accepting that neither option comes with proof. You can look at your partner’s remorse, their willingness to take responsibility, changes in their behaviour and the history of your relationship. You can consider finances, children, your emotional wellbeing and what rebuilding trust might require. But you still cannot know exactly what happens next.
That uncertainty often pushes betrayed partners into overthinking. You may create endless scenarios, revisit conversations, or repeatedly search for the one piece of information that will finally make the answer obvious. The problem is that more thinking does not always produce more clarity. Sometimes it simply creates more possibilities to fear.
This is where self-abandonment can quietly creep in. Instead of asking what you genuinely want, what aligns with your values, or what you are currently willing to tolerate, your attention becomes consumed by predicting everybody else’s future reactions.
Will the children understand?
Will your partner change?
Will you be lonely?
Will you regret leaving?
Will you regret staying?
Relationship clarity begins when you stop demanding that today’s decision answer every question about tomorrow. You may not need to choose forever. You may only need to decide what you are willing to participate in next.
Rebuilding Self-Trust Without Needing a Guarantee
A powerful shift in infidelity healing is moving away from “How do I make sure I get this right?” and towards “Can I trust myself to handle what happens next?”
That distinction matters because betrayal can seriously damage confidence in your own judgement. You may look backwards and wonder how you missed certain signs, why you believed certain explanations or whether you should have trusted your instincts sooner. It can create the belief that your next decision must be perfect to compensate for what happened before.
But self-trust does not require perfection. It means making the most grounded decision available with the information you have now. If meaningful new information arrives later, you are allowed to respond differently. Changing your mind is not automatically evidence that you failed.
Whether you are staying or leaving after betrayal, your task is not to guarantee a painless future. It is to make a choice you can take responsibility for without abandoning yourself in the process. That might mean continuing the relationship while observing whether honesty and accountability are sustained. It might mean creating space. It might mean deciding you already have enough information to leave.
The goal is not a regret-free life. It is developing enough trust in yourself to know that even if regret, grief, or uncertainty appears, you can meet it without turning against yourself.
💬 Reflection Question:
Are you trying to decide whether to stay or leave, or are you actually trying to find a guarantee that you won’t regret your choice?
People Also Ask
Why is betrayal so hard to get over?
Betrayal is hard to get over because it doesn’t just break trust in another person, it can shake your trust in yourself, your memories, and the future you thought you had. Healing means rebuilding safety, clarity, and self-trust.
How damaging is betrayal trauma?
Betrayal trauma can be deeply destabilising because it can affect your sense of safety, identity, and trust. You may feel anxious, hyper-alert, or emotionally overwhelmed. The damage is real, but healing is possible through support, time and self-trust.
How to stop ruminating after betrayal?
To stop ruminating after betrayal, notice when you’re trying to think your way to certainty. You don’t need to solve the whole future today. Bring your attention back to what you know, what you need, and the next decision you can actually make.
Connect with Luke:
Website: www.lifecoachluke.com
Instagram: @mylifecoachluke
Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com
Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity
Episode Transcript:
The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.
Let's go! Hello and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast. I'm your host Luke Shillings and today you're listening to episode number 206. This is the final part of this short three-part series.
We've talked about the trap of trying to think your way out of betrayal. We've talked about what happens when you're normally the capable one, the person who handles things and suddenly the fact that you're struggling starts to feel like evidence that something's wrong with you. And today I want to finish with perhaps the biggest example of all.
The decision so many of you are sitting inside of right now. Do I stay or do I leave? And I know I've spoken about this many times before on the podcast but specifically this time why does it feel like you can think about a decision for hours, days, weeks, sometimes even months and somehow still not feel any closer to the answer. If you're used to making good decisions you're probably used to a fairly reliable method.
You gather information, you weigh the options, what's the upside, what's the downside, what's the opportunity cost, what's the risk, what's the likely return. You compare the available options and eventually one becomes sufficiently or significantly better than the others to act upon. Maybe you've done this with jobs.
Do I stay where I am or do I take the new role? Maybe you've done it with houses. Do we move? Do we renovate? Do we borrow more? Do we wait? Maybe you've done it with investments, employees, business decisions, career changes. You don't necessarily need absolute certainty but you can usually gather enough information to create reasonable confidence and if you've been doing that successfully for years your brain has learned something very useful.
Important decisions can be improved through better thinking and generally speaking that's true. So when betrayal happens and you're faced with one of the biggest decisions of your entire life you naturally reach for the same process. Okay so let's work this out.
Stay? Leave? What are the pros? What are the cons? What happens financially? What about the house? What happens with children? What will Christmas look like? What will birthdays look like? Will I regret breaking up the family? Will I regret wasting another five years? What if they do it again? What if they don't? What if I leave and discover six months later that it they really had changed? What if I stay and discover six months later that they hadn't? What if they're happier without me, with somebody else? What if I'm happier without them? What if I never meet anybody else? What if I do meet someone else and I can't trust them either? What if the children blame me? What if the children eventually think I should have left? And before long you've effectively built the world's most complicated pros and cons list ever. You're trying to optimise the decision. You're trying to identify which option gives you the least regret, the happiest children, the greatest financial stability, the best future relationship, the lowest probability of being betrayed again, the greatest chance of future happiness, with the least disruption and ideally the least pain.
Find the option with the best expected outcome. There's just one small teeny problem. Almost none of those variables are actually knowable.
You cannot calculate the return on investment of a divorce. You cannot produce a reliable five-year forecast for a marriage, especially one that's just been fundamentally altered by betrayal. There isn't a spreadsheet where you can enter length of marriage, number of children, current level of remorse, financial position, sex life, frequency of arguments, partner's current behaviour, and then receive recommendation actions say, I don't know, 82.4% probability of long-term happiness.
I'm sorry but it just doesn't exist and if it did I'd probably have a considerably easier job. Because the future that you're trying to predict depends on hundreds, probably thousands of variables that haven't even happened yet. Some of those variables will be yours.
How will you change? What will you learn? What will you tolerate? What will become more important to you? What will become less important? Some belong to your partner though. Will they change? Will their remorse translate into sustained behaviour? Will they become more honest? Will they address whatever allowed them to make the decisions that they made in the first place? Will they become more emotionally available? Will they betray you again? And then there are the variables belonging to neither of you. Health, money, children, jobs, family, opportunities, losses, random events, life.
You're effectively trying to make a prediction using data that hasn't been generated yet. No wonder the calculation won't finish. And this is where the optimisation process that's worked so reliably elsewhere starts spinning.
It's like that little cursor on your computer screen that just keeps going round and round and round and round. You create another scenario. You have another conversation.
You make another pros and cons list. You ask somebody else's opinion. You start listening to yet another podcast.
You imagine leaving for ten minutes. Leaving feels obviously right. Then you imagine losing the relationship, the family unit, the house, the future you thought you were going to have.
Suddenly, staying feels right. Then you remember what they did. Leaving.
Then you see genuine remorse. Staying. Then you get triggered.
Leaving. Then you have a lovely weekend together. Staying.
And if you've been doing this for a while, you might start getting really quite frustrated with, well, yourself. Why can't I just decide? But perhaps indecision isn't always evidence that you're bad at making decisions. Sometimes it's evidence that you're asking a decision to give you something it simply can't provide.
Certainty. Because that's what the optimisation process is really trying to produce. Not merely a choice, but a guarantee.
You want to know that if you stay, staying will work. Or you want to know that if you leave, leaving will eventually prove itself to have been the right choice. And neither option comes with that guarantee, I'm afraid.
So the brain goes back to work. Maybe there's one more thing I haven't considered. Maybe there's one more question I need to ask.
Maybe there's one more piece of information. Maybe, if I think about it just a little bit differently, there we are, back in the loop, straight again. You're not failing to find the right answer.
You're searching for the kind of answer that this particular decision was never going to offer, well, anyone. And this brings me to something I think is quite important. We have a tendency to judge the quality of our decisions by the outcomes that they eventually produce.
If something works out well, good decision. If something works out badly, bad decision. But those two things are not the same.
Imagine you have an important meeting tomorrow morning. You know you need to drive for two hours to get there, so you check the weather, you check the traffic, your car is serviced, you're leaving plenty of time, you drive carefully, and halfway there someone runs a red light and drives into the side of your car. Was driving to the meeting a bad decision? Well, the outcome was bad.
But based on the information available you had when you made the decision, there was nothing particularly unreasonable about it at all. Now, let's reverse it. Imagine that you're late.
You know you've had too much to drink, you decide to drive anyway, you speed the entire way, and somehow you arrive safely. Good outcome. A terrible decision.
The outcome doesn't retrospectively change the quality of the decision. And this matters hugely after betrayal. Because imagine you choose to stay.
You take your time, you look at the evidence, your partner appears genuinely remorseful, they're taking responsibility, their behaviour is changing, you're both doing the work. You decide that, based on everything available to you, you want to try to rebuild. And three years later, they betray you again.
It would be incredibly easy to look backwards and say, I was an idiot, I should have left the first time. But were you? Or did you make a reasonable decision using the information available to you at the time, followed years later by somebody else making a decision that you couldn't control in the first place? They're different things. Equally, perhaps you leave, and six months later you're devastated.
You miss them, you miss your family, you hate being alone, you question everything. Does the presence of pain prove leaving was wrong? No. A good decision can hurt, and a bad decision can temporarily feel, well, pretty bloody fantastic.
Outcomes are influenced by far more than the quality of the decision that preceded them. Other people's choices, timing, luck, circumstances, are information you couldn't possibly have known. And if you need the future outcome to validate today's decision before you're willing to trust yourself, you've created an impossible standard.
Because the real question is, when do you even assess whether the decision was good or bad? Do you do it two minutes after you've made the decision? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? Two years? Two decades? Like, at what point do we decide this was a good or bad decision anyway? And what happens if a bit more time passes and it becomes the best decision of your life? Or what happens if a bit more time passes and it becomes the worst decision of your life? The reality is, you're never going to know ahead of time. It's impossible. There are just too many variables.
So stop trying to solve a problem that can't be solved ahead of time. I also think there's something else hiding underneath all of this optimisation. Regret.
You don't simply want to make a decision. You want to make the decision that protects you from one day looking backwards and saying, I got it wrong. And I understand that, of course, particularly after betrayal.
Because your confidence in your own judgement may already have taken a massive hit. You trusted this person. You believed what they told you.
Perhaps you dismissed suspicions. Maybe now you look backwards and you see things that appear painfully obvious with hindsight. And you're thinking, I'm not making that mistake again.
So now the standard becomes, I need to be absolutely certain before I choose. But here's the somewhat uncomfortable reality. You cannot guarantee a regret-free life.
Stay and you may sometimes wonder what would have happened if you left. Leave and you may sometimes wonder what would have happened if you stayed. Those thoughts don't necessarily mean the decision was wrong.
They mean you understand that another life was possible. Every meaningful choice closes certain doors. And occasionally wondering what was behind them is part of being human.
Self-trust can't mean, I guarantee I'll never regret my decisions. It's just impossible. Perhaps it means instead, I trust myself to deal with regret if it comes.
It's a very different proposition. There's another idea that I think can take some pressure off this. We talk about stay or leave as though you're standing in front of two enormous doors.
You choose one, the other door slams shut forever. And that's it. The decision.
Capital letters. But is that actually what you're deciding today? Because if you decide to remain in your relationship today, have you signed a contract stating that you must remain there for the rest of your life regardless of what happens next? Of course you haven't. You might decide, for now I'm willing to stay and see what happens.
That is a decision. You might also decide, I'm going to give myself three months before I revisit this. That is a decision.
You maybe could also decide, I'm willing to continue this relationship provided I'm seeing honesty, accountability and meaningful change. That is a decision. You may also decide, I don't know whether I want this marriage long-term, but I know I don't need to decide this week.
Again, a decision. Sometimes we become paralysed because we're treating today's choice as though it has to answer every future question. It doesn't.
You can make the best decision available today and then make another decision when new information arrives. That's not indecisiveness, it's responsiveness. In fact, I'd argue that's what good decision-making has always looked like.
You make a decision based on the available information. You observe, you gather feedback and if the information changes significantly, you're allowed to update that decision. Think of the scientific method.
It is literally what it is. It's about changing our perspective based on new information that comes to the table. Changing your mind later does not automatically prove that you were wrong today.
So perhaps you're asking, should I stay or should I leave? What if you ask a smaller question? What is it that I'm actually deciding right now? Maybe you're deciding whether you're willing to continue trying. Maybe you're deciding whether the current version of the relationship is acceptable. Maybe you're deciding what it is that you need to see before you're willing to invest further.
Maybe you're deciding what you're no longer willing to tolerate. Maybe you're deciding whether you need physical space or not. Maybe you're deciding to postpone the final decision whilst you stabilise yourself.
Maybe you're deciding that you already have enough information. The smaller question doesn't avoid the bigger decision. It just makes it more accurate.
Because what am I doing with the rest of my life? It's a pretty big question. It's a really big question to ask yourself whilst, again, it's a big enough question in and of itself, but when you lay on top emotional overwhelm that you are very likely experiencing right now, I think it's a huge unimaginable weight. So what am I choosing next is a much more answerable question.
And this leads us to the shift that I really want to offer. Instead of which decision produces the best outcome, maybe try which decision am I willing to take responsibility for? Just sit with that distinction for a moment. Not which decision guarantees I'll be happiest.
Not one will my children eventually thank me for. Not which guarantees they won't hurt me again. And not which decision means I'll never look backwards with regret.
Which decision am I willing to own? Because that decision doesn't require you to predict the future. It brings the decision back into the only place where you have any meaningful influence. You.
Your values. Your standards. Your boundaries.
The information currently available. What you're willing to participate in. What you're not willing to participate in.
And who you want to be whilst you do it. Maybe you choose to stay. Then stay because you're choosing to explore whether something can be rebuilt, not because you've somehow guaranteed that it will be.
Maybe you choose to leave. Fine. Then leave because you've decided that continuing the relationship is no longer aligned with what you want.
Not because you've guaranteed that life outside the relationship will be painless. Neither option removes some certainty but both options can contain ownership. And perhaps this is the thread connecting all three episodes in this series.
Self-trust isn't built by always knowing. It's not built by never becoming overwhelmed. And it's certainly not built by producing perfect outcomes.
Self-trust is built through your relationship with yourself when you don't know. Can I make the best decision available to me without demanding a guarantee? Can I act in accordance with what matters to me even when I'm scared? Can I update my decision even if meaningful new information arrives without using that as evidence that I failed? Can I experience an outcome I didn't want without immediately attacking the person who made the original decision? Me? Because maybe the goal isn't I trust myself to always get it right. Maybe it's I trust myself to respond to whatever happens next.
It's far more useful because that form of trust doesn't depend on your partner behaving. It doesn't depend on the relationship surviving. It doesn't depend on the divorce going smoothly.
It doesn't depend on your children agreeing with you. It doesn't depend on you meeting somebody else. It doesn't even depend on you never regretting anything.
It depends on your willingness to remain on your own side while you navigate whatever comes next. You are never going to be able to calculate your way to certainty here. Nobody could.
And the discomfort of that isn't evidence that you're missing some crucial piece of information. It's not necessarily evidence that you need another month or another conversation or another podcast or another pros and cons list. Sometimes uncertainty isn't a problem waiting to be solved.
It's simply a part of the decision. And perhaps the relief doesn't come from finally knowing what the future holds. It comes from no longer requiring yourself to know.
You don't need to know exactly how staying turns out before you choose to stay today. You don't need to know exactly how leaving turns out before you choose to leave. You need enough information to make a decision that you are willing to own.
And then you need to trust that if tomorrow gives you new information then tomorrow's version of you gets to respond to that one too. A good decision doesn't guarantee a good outcome. But a decision that you can actually own rather than one you're desperately hoping will eventually be vindicated by what happens next gives you something much more valuable.
The foundation on which you can begin rebuilding trust in yourself. And that brings this short three-part series to a close. We've looked at overthinking.
We've looked at what happens when being capable becomes part of the problem. And today the decision you can't seem to resolve no matter how hard you think about it. And if you've recognised yourself anywhere in these three episodes, if outwardly you're functioning, you're getting things done and continuing with life, while internally you're running the same questions again and again, then I'd love to help you work through that properly.
Because you don't necessarily need somebody to tell you whether to stay or leave. You need somewhere to separate the fear, the predictions, the expectations and everybody else's opinion from what you actually want. And that's exactly, exactly the kind of work we do together inside my one-to-one coaching and the After The Affair Collective.
You can find out more at lifecoachluke.com. You can contact me luke at lifecoachluke.com or if you're on the socials, come and pay a visit to Instagram at mylifecoachluke. Thank you. And I apologise because I said that these episodes were going to be around 10 minutes each and I did not fulfil that promise.
However, I do promise, I do promise to keep producing content like this and to help you and people just like you move through betrayal. So, until next time, take care. I'll talk to you soon.
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