How To Evaluate a Relationship

Many people come to counseling for help making a decision about the fate of a particular relationship—typically one with their romantic partner or current employment. Inevitably, they have doubts about staying, for sure, along with similar doubts about leaving. They’re at an impasse, stuck, grappling with the vital question, “Should I stay or should I go?”

Because no one wants to make a decision they will later regret, it makes perfect sense to thoroughly evaluate a relationship before making a final determination. But how can we ever know for certain whether we're making the right decision? What’s the most effective way to evaluate a relationship? I can answer this in a single word.

Don’t.

Seriously, never evaluate a relationship, at least not while you're actually in it. This is the one approach that will absolutely, positively, 100% of the time, teach you exactly what you most want to know, namely, whether it makes better sense to stay or to go. Indeed, the only way to flawlessly evaluate a relationship is not to evaluate it. This may seem totally illogical, so let me explain.

First of all, no one evaluates something that has a known value. Evaluation is something we do when we’re not so sure, when we have doubts, when we’re unclear.

By the time someone makes it into my office for counseling, they’ve probably been evaluating their relationship for a while now, getting no closer to the clarity they crave. Why haven't their previous efforts at evaluation helped them reach a conclusion yet? It’s not because they’ve been evaluating incorrectly; it’s because the very act of evaluation confounds matters. This is what I tell my clients:

"You cannot evaluate and participate at the same time."

Imagine a quarterback trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a play while, at the same time, trying to execute it. Imagine a dancer trying to assess the quality of a piece of choreography while, at the same time, performing it. If either's attention is on evaluating rather than participating, it's going to negatively influence what's being evaluated. Was it a good play? Or good choreography? It’s impossible to tell, because the thing being evaluated wasn't given a fair chance to succeed. This is why evaluation doesn’t provide clarity. The evaluation itself creates an inferior version of the thing being evaluated and, whenever this happens, the outcome is bound to be somewhat lackluster and inconclusive.

When we try to evaluate, it’s not like we are in a movie theater trying to decide if we like a certain film enough to keep watching it. We’re not a passive observer in this thing we're evaluating. No, we have an enormous role in the quality of what we're evaluating. This isn’t someone else’s film we’re watching; it’s ours. We are the director and cinematographer and lead actor, all wrapped into one. Want this film of ours to be extraordinary? Then we best focus all our attention and energies on making it extraordinary. We participate fully.

Instead of lingering in a state of evaluation—which undermines our experience and prevents us any chance of finding true satisfaction—we commit. With utter confidence, we give our relationship our all, intent on making it the very best it can be. We invest ourselves fully into this relationship, without reservations, without doubts, without the distraction that comes from evaluation.

Only when we are participating in a relationship fully can we discover whether or not it is worth continuing. Only by participating does the answer emerge. You’ll enter a place of certainty, knowing either that, “I gave it my all and discovered that this simply was not the relationship that I want for myself,” or “I gave it my all and was amazed at how fantastic this relationship became.” Either way, you achieve the clarity you desired, all without the stress and confusion of evaluation.