You’ve been running a line item for two years and you’ve never once priced it.
You’d never allow that anywhere else. You review budgets. You kill projects that aren’t performing. You’ve told somebody this quarter that the numbers don’t support continuing.
And then there’s this one thing, sitting on the books since 2024, costing you every single day, that has never been through a review.
First, the part nobody gives you credit for
Staying on the fence is not passive.
Holding a marriage exactly where it is, day after day, while your gut tells you something is off, takes an enormous amount of strength. You’re managing the temperature of the house. Deciding what to bring up and what to leave alone. Running versions of the conversation at two in the morning and deleting every one of them before anybody hears it. Answering “how are you” without the real answer coming out.
That is a full-time job with no days off, no pay, and nobody applauding.
It’s also why the cost is invisible. You’re so good at carrying it that nobody, including you, notices what it weighs.
Seven and a half years
I’ve never sat on a fence wondering whether to leave. My marriage ended in one day. I came home to an empty house and the decision had been made for me.
So I can’t tell you I know what two years of not-deciding feels like from the inside.
What I do know is what not-deciding costs, because I did a version of it myself.
He left in January 1988. My divorce wasn’t final until July 21, 1995.
Seven and a half years.
Not because it was complicated. Because I thought I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and I was afraid to ask what one cost. So I didn’t ask. For seven and a half years I didn’t ask.
The consultation was free. I found that out later.
I didn’t lose seven years to a hard decision. I lost them to a question I never asked, because I’d already decided I knew the answer.
The three lines on the invoice
Your health. Women tell me they’ve stopped sleeping properly. That they’ve been carrying a headache since spring. That their doctor asked about stress and they said everything was fine.
I’m not a doctor and I’m not going to guess at what’s happening in your body. What I’ll say is this: when a woman tells me her health shifted around the same time the question started, I’ve heard it enough times now to think it’s worth mentioning to someone qualified. Say the real thing at your next appointment. That’s all.
Your attention. Not your time, your attention. There’s a difference and you know it.
You can be at the table at dinner and be nowhere near it. You can read the same paragraph of a contract four times. You can sit through a birthday party and afterwards not be able to say who was there.
Two years of partial attention is not two years lived at half speed. It’s two years you were not in the room for.
Your core values. This is the one that costs the most and shows up last.
Ask a woman who’s been on the fence for two years what she believes in and watch what happens. She’ll pause. Not because she doesn’t know. Because she hasn’t checked in a while, and some of the answers have been quietly edited along the way to keep things calm.
You don’t hand those over all at once. You trade one small piece at a time, for peace, and each trade is reasonable on its own.
Then one day somebody asks what you think about something and you hear yourself give an answer that isn’t yours.
Who were you meant to be the second you were born?
That woman had values. Go and find out whether they’re still the ones you’re running on.
Run the numbers the way you’d run them at work
When I rebuilt my finances after he left, I did it with a spiral notebook, a pen, and a ruler. A line straight down the middle of the page. Bills on the left. What each one cost on the right. Took me about six months to get it working, and the whole time I could at least see what I was looking at.
Do that with this.
Left side: what the last two years have cost you. Sleep. Attention. The trip you didn’t book. The friendship that got thin because you couldn’t say what was going on. The thing you used to believe and have stopped saying out loud.
Right side: what you’ve bought with it.
Not what you hope it buys eventually. What it has actually bought, so far, in two years.
Don’t decide anything. Just look at the page.
Most women are quiet for a minute when they see the left side, because they came in thinking they’d been doing nothing.
What I’m actually asking
I’m not going to tell you the answer is leave. I’m not going to tell you it’s stay. I have no stake in which one you land on and I never will.
What I’d like is for you to stop paying for a decision you haven’t made.
Stay, and stay on purpose, with your eyes open and some things renegotiated. Or go, and go on purpose. Either one ends the invoice.
The only option that keeps charging you is the one you’re on.
A place to start
If you’ve been going in circles on this, I put together a free guide. Ten questions, and nothing on the other end but the questions. No score, no agenda, no right answers.
→ Download it free at https://10questions.sheroempowered.com/crossroads
When you’re ready to go deeper
For women who want structured support working through the decision itself, that’s the work I do through my “Do I Stay or Do I Go” program. Three months, weekly sessions, zero agenda about which way you choose. And if you’d like to start with a conversation first, a 30-minute call is just $49, no pressure, no pitch, just clarity.
When you’re ready, I’m here:
→ https://tidycal.com/franyakisley/stuck-on-the-fence
Written by Fränya K. Isley, founder of SHeroEmpowered.com. Not medical, legal, or financial advice — for those, talk to someone qualified in that field.
