Simone Stolzoff

This is a Hallmark movie.

They're going to go their separate ways and come back together and fall back in love.

Another half is like, no, there's no way.

If they spend a year giving their energy outside of the relationship, it's like a plane that's tilted a few degrees off.

They didn't have kids.

And the spoiler is out there.

They ended up breaking up.

And so I talked to lots of people about it.

I talked to this guy named John Gottman, who runs this thing called the University of Washington.

Their couples therapist was Esther Perel, the most famous couples therapist in the world.

And the thing that really stuck with me was from the psychologist that I talked to.

And he said, when people are faced with uncertainty, they have either one or two main responses if they're really uncomfortable with it.

They either try to gather as much information as they can.

They act super impulsively.

So say you're looking to like buy a new pair of jeans.

If you're super intolerant of uncertainty, either you try on every single pair of jeans in the store or you just buy the pair of jeans in the window.

And a more sort of adaptive approach is maybe try on like a few pairs and then pick your favorite.

But that sort of impulsivity or need to gather lots of information are both responses to the same stimulus, which is uncertainty makes me uncomfortable.

What should I do about?

We all have a friend who is maybe in a relationship that they know isn't working for them, but they'd rather the comfort of the relationship they're in than having to face the uncertainty of what might be outside of it, or maybe in a job that they know isn't working for them.