The Geometry of Indecision

On the quiet violence of staying stuck after someone shatters your trust

Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash

“The moment you choose, one of those futures dies. And we are not good, us humans, at watching futures die.”

The window was open, and I could hear someone below mowing their lawn in that mechanical, repetitive way that makes you want to scream or fall asleep, and I did neither. I just stood there holding a mug of tea that had gone completely cold in my hands, staring at the list on my phone.

It was a spreadsheet. I’d actually made a spreadsheet. Column A: reasons to stay. Column B: reasons to leave. The typography was clean. I’d used a sans-serif font. The spreadsheet looked like something a person would turn into a senior vice president of, and I’m not a senior vice president of anything. I’m a woman who makes spreadsheets when her marriage is collapsing, because that’s what people like me apparently do when they don’t know what else to do with their hands.

My husband was in the other room. The affair had ended six weeks earlier, or at least he said it had ended six weeks earlier, and the way he said it had this flat, rehearsed quality, like a man who’d practiced the sentence in the shower until it stopped sounding like what it was. I believed him, probably. But probably isn’t the same as certainly, and certainly is the only currency that works once someone’s rearranged the architecture of your trust without asking you first.

I told three friends. One told me to leave immediately. One told me to stay for the kids. The third one said she’d been through something similar and that I should focus on my own healing, as though healing were some financial product you could sign up for during open enrollment. All three of them were probably right. I nodded. I thanked them. I came home and ate toast standing up over the sink and felt exactly the same.

What I actually did, for weeks, was nothing. I went to work. I made dinner. I slept on the left side of the bed because that had always been my side. I didn’t throw a single plate. I didn’t weep in a parking lot. I performed the choreography of normalcy with the grim discipline of someone who’s figured out that if the inside is unavailable, the outside will have to do.

I noticed one night — I don’t even remember what I was doing, probably loading the dishwasher — that a thread on the cuff of my cardigan had come loose. I pulled at it. It kept unraveling. I stood there pulling it for longer than made sense, watching the gray yarn spool out into a small pile on the counter. I couldn’t tell you why that mattered. But I remember it.

And I thought. God, how I thought. I thought in the car, mostly at red lights. I thought while brushing my teeth and stared at the mirror, wondering if my face had changed in some way I couldn’t pinpoint. I thought during a meeting at work once — some presentation about Q3, whatever — and I could feel myself nodding at the right moments while the inside of my head was running a completely different program about who was going to make my coffee tomorrow.

The thing nobody tells you about betrayal — or rather, the thing everyone tells you but you can’t metabolize until later — is that the question isn’t actually whether to leave or stay. That framing is a courtesy the world extends so you feel like an agent, like a protagonist in your own crisis. The real question is whether you can survive the specific flavor of pain that whichever direction requires. And you don’t know that until you’re already walking into it. You don’t know whether you can stand the loneliness of a Tuesday night in an empty apartment until you’re standing there holding the remote. By then, the knowing is useless. By then, you’re already inside the thing.

But I wasn’t ready to be inside anything. I wanted the answer before the answer. I wanted certainty, and certainty, it turns out, isn’t something the universe hands you after betrayal. It’s what you used to have. And what you used to have is gone.

So I made the spreadsheet. And then I revised it. And then I revised it again, color-coding entries by category: financial, emotional, logistical, parental, existential. The parental column had the most entries. That’s what gets you, when there are children. The math of it. The way your decision stops being only about you and becomes about these small human beings who will inherit whatever wreckage you leave them. They’ll sit in a therapist’s office someday describing the month their mother stopped laughing, and the therapist will nod and ask how that made them feel, and the kid will have to invent an answer because the truth is too embarrassing and — also, the worst part — too boring to say out loud.

I’m not a brave person. I’ll put that on the table now so you don’t expect anything heroic from me. I read the books. I know the terminology. I know what gaslighting means, in the clinical sense. I know what attachment styles are. I’ve heard of the four horsemen, though off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you which two of them do what. I have a vocabulary for what happened to me that would’ve impressed a graduate student in 1997. And none of it helped. None of it helped because knowing the name of a thing is not the same as surviving the thing. I could’ve written a dissertation on the psychological mechanisms of marital infidelity and still been unable to decide whether to put my shoes on in the morning.

People kept telling me to “choose myself.” I hated that sentence — it implied there was a self, intact and waiting, somewhere underneath all the confusion, like a piece of furniture under a sheet I could uncover if I were brave enough. But there wasn’t. There was just this. This woman, standing in her kitchen, holding a cold mug, trying to remember what she’d actually wanted before she wanted the other woman to disappear.

And here’s the part I keep coming back to, the part the advice columnists won’t write because it doesn’t sell. The worst thing about the indecision wasn’t the indecision. It was that the indecision felt like power. For weeks, I walked around with a kind of secret ballot in my chest — I could leave. I could leave at any time. The door’s right there. And that imagined exit became a kind of currency I spent against the daily humiliation of staying. I’m choosing this, I’d tell myself, when I wasn’t choosing anything. I was just not moving. There’s a difference, and the difference is the entire distance between agency and paralysis, and I couldn’t see it then.

Because if I hadn’t decided, I hadn’t failed. If I hadn’t decided, I could still imagine a version of myself six months from now who’d made the right call, who’d ended up okay. But there was a third thing, and it took me longer to see. If you haven’t decided, you get to keep both apartments, both lives, fully furnished, fully plausible. They keep costing you, but they don’t go anywhere. That’s the trap.

Time, though. That’s what nobody warned me about. Grief I expected; grief is in the contract. Anger showed up like a hostile relative who’d already RSVPed yes before I even knew there was a party — annoying but not surprising. What I hadn’t banked on was how time would behave during all of this. How a Tuesday could be a Tuesday and then somehow it was June, and I still hadn’t washed a single jacket I’d been meaning to wash, and I had no memory of the months in between.

I had imagined that if I thought long enough or hard enough, something would clarify. It didn’t. The universe doesn’t clarify. The universe keeps handing you Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and a kid who needs a permission slip signed, and a mortgage payment that doesn’t care whether your husband slept with someone in April. The world doesn’t pause for your deliberation. The world has its own agenda, and its agenda is lunch.

I remember the morning I finally moved. Not made a decision — moved. I drove to a coffee shop I’d never been to, in a neighborhood I had no reason to be in, and ordered something ridiculous, a lavender latte, which I’d never normally order. I sat there for an hour and a half or so. The foam on the latte kept settling into this weird flat skin. I watched it. There’s a particular kind of pleasure in watching a drink go from adorable to undrinkable. Most of that hour and a half was that.

At some point between the first sip and the second, I understood something I wish I hadn’t. Which is that the question of stay or leave was never the real question. The real question was whether I was willing to be hurt in a new way instead of an old way. That was the trade. That was the only trade. I wasn’t going to figure out which hurt I preferred by making spreadsheets. I was only going to figure it out by picking one, walking into it, and letting the hurt find me.

I picked one. I’m not going to tell you which. Not because it’s a secret, but because it isn’t the point. The picking didn’t feel like freedom, and it didn’t feel like surrender, and it didn’t feel like healing. It mostly felt like the weather changing. Like putting on a coat I’d forgotten I owned.

It’s been long enough now that I can tell you, with the confidence of a woman who’s lived on both sides of this particular line, that the people who told you there would be a feeling of resolution were either lying or selling you something. There isn’t a feeling of resolution. There’s a Tuesday, again. There’s a permission slip you forgot to sign. There’s the cold mug in the sink.

I don’t know what I’m trying to tell you with this. I thought I would, by the end. I thought the writing of it would clarify the way I kept hoping the thinking would, and it didn’t, and that’s probably the most useful information in the whole essay, but it’s also the part you can’t use.

I do think about the other apartment, sometimes. I notice it on Sundays, mostly, when I’m doing something small and boring like washing a dish I’m not sure where to put away. Then it floats up. Then it goes back down. That’s not peace. I don’t know what it is. I keep carrying it because there’s nothing to set it down on.

I’m going to stop typing now. The mug is still cold. I think that’s the end, although I notice I keep almost arriving somewhere and then not arriving there. I apologize. I wanted to have something for you. I don’t think I do.

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