You have been deciding whether to leave her for eighteen months
The length of the deliberation is itself the most informative number in the file. What it means, and the one reading of it that lets you off the hook.
$ eldr --explain decision-drag
Eighteen months. You have run the same conversation with yourself roughly once a week for eighteen months, which is about eighty repetitions of an argument that has not acquired a single new fact since month three.
Nobody deliberates for eighteen months about a decision that is close. People deliberate for eighteen months about a decision they have already made and do not want to carry out, because carrying it out requires hurting someone who has done nothing obviously wrong, and because the version of you that does that is a version you have not agreed to be yet.
The claim
Duration of deliberation is the strongest single signal in a relationship read, and it points at avoidance rather than at difficulty. Past roughly six months, additional deliberation stops producing information and starts producing a habit.
This is falsifiable and you can run the test tonight. Write down, in one sentence, the thing you learned about this relationship in the last six months that you did not know eighteen months ago. Not felt — learned. A fact, an event, something a third party could verify.
Most men cannot fill the line. A few can, and for them this piece is wrong in a way I will come back to.
What the eighty repetitions cost
Not the relationship, at first. Attention. Masicampo and Baumeister's result is that an unresolved intention keeps intruding on unrelated thinking until a concrete plan exists — not until the goal is achieved, until a plan exists. An undecided exit is a maximally unresolved intention, and it has been running in the background of every meeting, every weekend, every conversation with her for a year and a half.
It costs her too, in a way that is worth being blunt about. She is in a relationship with someone who is partly not in it, and she has almost certainly noticed, because people notice. Most men in this position believe they are protecting her by not raising it. What they are usually protecting is their own position as the person who has not yet done anything wrong.
And it costs identity. After eighty repetitions, "I am deciding" quietly becomes "I am the kind of man who does not decide", and that generalizes. It shows up at work six months later and you will not connect the two.
The question underneath the question
The question you are asking is "should I leave". The question the file usually contains is different and sharper:
What would have to be true for you to stay on purpose?
Not stay by default. Stay as a chosen position, with a date on it, reviewable. Almost nobody in month eighteen has ever answered that, and the answer tends to arrive fast and be uncomfortable — usually a specific change, usually one that requires you to say something out loud that you have been managing around for a year.
That is a forced move, and it is available today. It is also the only version of this where the outcome is not already determined by attrition.
The case against this
Here is where the piece is wrong, and it is wrong for a real minority of the men reading it.
Long deliberation is not always avoidance. If the relationship is genuinely good four days out of seven, if there are children, if there is a sick parent, if you have been at this eighteen months because the cost of being wrong is enormous and irreversible — then slow is correct, and a piece that reframes your caution as cowardice is doing you harm to make a cleaner argument.
Accepted, with one condition attached. Slow is defensible when you can name what the slowness is buying. If waiting is purchasing a specific thing on a specific date — therapy you both started in March, her job situation resolving in June, a child finishing school in two years — then this is a HOLD and it is honest, and the instrument will return HOLD, and it will say so in one line.
What is not defensible is "I will know more later". You will not. You have had eighteen months of later. The rule the debriefs keep confirming: a HOLD is only honest when you can name the event that ends it. A date is an event. A feeling is not.
What to do with ninety seconds
Read the counter-case before the position. If the case against leaving lands harder than the case for it, you have your answer and you did not need the rest of the page. If it does not land, write one sentence explaining why not. That sentence is usually the actual decision, and men are frequently shocked by what comes out of their own hand.
One practical note on the arithmetic, since nobody puts it this plainly. Eighteen months is not the cost. The cost is eighteen months multiplied by whatever fraction of your attention this has been consuming, and if that fraction is even one part in ten you have spent the equivalent of seven undivided weeks running an argument that stopped producing new conclusions in month three. Nobody would agree to that project if it were presented as a project. It gets approved because it arrives in weekly installments.
This is not therapy and it is not couples counseling, and if what you actually need is one of those, this instrument will not pretend to be either. It does one thing: it returns a position you did not author, with the argument against it, so the loop closes and you find out.
For entertainment and reflective purposes only. Not a substitute for professional financial, legal, medical or mental-health advice.