We’re not in love anymore. But we stay in a loveless relationship — for the kids.

“Love disappeared from my marriage some time ago. I’m no longer in a loving relationship, but I force myself to stay. I keep telling myself it’ll pass — or that I just have to push through. Because one thing feels absolutely impossible: to leave. Not for my children’s sake. I just couldn’t do that to them. But why do I stay in a loveless relationship?”

If this might be your situation — if these words stir something inside you — then maybe you need to hear this:

Yes, separating from your partner will be painful. Your kids will go through the heartbreak of a divorce or separation. Life will change dramatically. There will be grief, and many tears — yours, your ex-partner’s, and your children’s. It will be hard.

But here’s the other option: You stay.

In a relationship without love. One you maintain silently, perhaps resentfully, despite the absence of appreciation, tenderness, physical closeness, or kind words.

If you choose that path, you may unconsciously pass on to your children a blueprint for relationships — one that teaches them how to abandon themselves, suppress their needs, tolerate crossed boundaries, and confuse love with endurance.

Because children don’t learn love from what you say. They learn it from what you live.

So as painful as it is: Pick your poison. Which one would you rather choose?

Stay or leave?

In the end, it’s your decision. But in my experience, as devastating as a divorce can be for children, it is usually not the divorce itself that wounds them most. What leaves the deeper scar is the ongoing dysfunction, the quiet separation long before the official one — the daily absence of love and emotional truth between their parents.

Let yourself be supported through this delicate time. And above all: Stop modeling a life without love — not just for your children’s sake, but for your own. You all deserve a relationship shaped by connection, honesty, tenderness, even if the path there means walking through discomfort and fear.