Relationships & Love
The question most often asked about women who stay in difficult relationships — "why doesn't she just leave?" — reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces involved. Leaving is almost never as simple as that question implies. The forces that hold women in relationships that do not serve them are real, varied, and often operate below conscious awareness.
Financial dependence. One of the most practical and most consistent forces. The woman without independent financial resources is genuinely constrained in ways that the woman with her own economic foundation is not.
The Nigerian cultural pressure around marriage. In a cultural context where a woman's social worth is significantly tied to her marital status, leaving a marriage or committed relationship — regardless of its quality — carries a specific cultural cost that is not abstract. It is the loss of social positioning, the exposure to community assessment, the specific loneliness of the woman who is seen as having failed at the central female project.
The children. The genuine complexity of leaving when children are present — the disruption to their lives, the difficult navigation of co-parenting, the specific forms of loss that children experience in family dissolution.
The family's investment. When families have been significantly involved in a relationship — in introductions, in wedding planning, in the establishment of family relationships — leaving can feel like failing not just yourself but the people who invested their social capital in your relationship.
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Attachment. Genuine love for a person who is not good for you is real. The attachment to someone who causes harm is not irrational — it is the normal function of an attachment system that does not evaluate the worthiness of its objects.
Hope. The genuine, sometimes well-founded belief that the relationship or the person can become what it has occasionally suggested it could be.
The fear of the unknown. The difficult relationship is known. Its specific textures, its specific demands, its specific sorrows are familiar. The life outside of it is unknown — and unknown includes both the possibility of something better and the risk of being alone, of having no better option, of having been wrong to leave.
The sunk cost. The years, the vulnerability, the hope already invested. The painful belief that leaving would mean all of that was wasted.
No single thing resolves all of these forces. What helps is:
Support. Genuine, non-judgmental support from people who understand the complexity and will not simplify it.
Financial preparation. The building of independent financial resources as a practical prerequisite for genuine choice.
Professional help. Therapy that helps address the specific attachment and self-worth dimensions.
The honest assessment of what is actually present. Not what is hoped for — what is actually there, now.
Related: Red Flags You Should Actually Listen To · How to Know When to Leave a Relationship · Self-Worth and Relationships
Staying is not always weakness. But understanding why is always necessary. The Good Girl Delusion offers the deeper work that makes genuine choice possible.
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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