Dear Anna,

My wife and I are in our early 30s, married five years, no kids yet. I’ve started quietly looking up divorce lawyers, and I hate that it’s gotten to that point. The root of it is that I can’t trust what she tells me anymore. It’s been a pattern for years — she’ll agree to something, and I later find out she never actually stopped doing the thing we agreed she’d stop. The clearest example is money: she promised me, more than once, that she’d stop using credit cards we’d agreed to close after a rough financial year. I found two new cards last spring, maxed out, that she’d opened without telling me. When I confronted her, she denied it for weeks until I had the statements in hand.

We also barely touch anymore. Maybe once every few weeks, if that, and there’s very little affection outside of it. She’s got plenty of energy for her friends, her coworkers, her hobbies — just not really for me. Then, this past winter, she started looking for a new job in a different city. When I said I hadn’t agreed to relocate our whole life, her answer was that if I didn’t want to come, I didn’t have to. I’ve asked for marriage counseling more times than I can count. She says therapists “always end up ganging up on me” and won’t go. Lately, when I bring up how unhappy I am, she just says she’s content with things as they are, and if I’m not, I know where the courthouse is. I feel like I’ve been the only one treating this marriage like something worth fixing. She seems totally fine leaving it exactly as it is. — Tired of Trying Alone

Dear TOTA,

I’ll answer what I think you’re really asking: Are you allowed to stop trying when you feel like you’re the only one trying?

And the answer is: Yes. Fully. Without guilt. (Though there will probably be guilt anyway.)

A marriage doesn’t get repaired by one person’s effort. It takes two people who are willing to look at what isn’t working with stone-cold honesty and to do something about it. And from your letter, that seems to be the part you’ve been missing for a long time.

You’ve got a long list of things that need attention: the lying, the secret credit cards and debt, the lack of affection and intimacy, the unilateral decision to potentially move your entire life to another city, and your repeated requests for counseling. But the individual problems aren’t even the most concerning part.

It’s that you keep saying, “I’m unhappy. I want us to work on this,” and her response seems to be, “I’m fine with things as they are.”

You can’t really have a conversation about how to fix something when one person doesn’t believe anything needs to be fixed.

And I want to pause on the credit cards, because it might have long-term impacts on you — if you’re looking up divorce lawyers, you should understand your financial situation before announcing anything or making major financial moves — and because it’s a pretty serious breach of trust. She didn’t simply make a financial decision you disagreed with. You made an agreement about money, she broke it repeatedly, opened new accounts without telling you, accumulated debt, and then denied doing it until you had the statements in front of you.

So many red flags! Trust isn’t rebuilt because someone says, “I won’t do it again.” It’s rebuilt when their behavior becomes consistently trustworthy. You haven’t described that happening.

The lack of sex and affection matters, too, but not because your wife owes you a particular amount of sex. What concerns me is that you’re lonely inside your marriage and she doesn’t seem interested in addressing the loneliness with you. You miss her. You’ve tried to get help. You’ve told her you’re unhappy. And she’s essentially told you that if you don’t like the marriage as it currently exists, you can leave.

Maybe the “you know where the courthouse is” line is an empty threat, and maybe she is genuinely content with the marriage you have, but even if those things are true, they don’t negate the problems you’ve brought up and you’re allowed — compelled, even! — to start taking things into your own hands.

Start by believing what she’s actually telling you.

I don’t think you need to produce a stronger case for divorce. You don’t need to catch her doing something worse. You don’t need her to admit that she’s been a “bad” wife. You don’t need a dramatic final straw that makes the decision obvious to everyone who hears about it.

You can leave because this marriage, as it currently exists, is not a marriage you want to continue living in.

That doesn’t mean you have to stop loving her. It doesn’t mean the last five years were a mistake. It doesn’t mean she’s an irredeemable person or that you’re the good guy and she’s the villain. Sometimes two people reach a point where one person is saying, “I want to change this,” and the other is saying, “I don’t.”

That’s enough.

And since you’re already quietly looking up divorce lawyers, I think it’s time to stop trying to convince her that the marriage needs saving and start getting informed about what leaving would actually look like. Start by making a confidential appointment with a divorce attorney. Gather the documents you’ll need. You don’t have to file tomorrow. But you should know what your options are. And let’s hope there aren’t other secret credit cards you don’t know about.

You may feel guilty. You may be devastated. You may even wonder afterward whether you made the right decision. None of those feelings would mean you made the wrong decision. Leaving a marriage can be the right choice and still be incredibly painful.

You don’t need her permission to decide that this marriage isn’t working for you. You don’t even need her agreement that it’s broken. You just need to stop confusing wanting the marriage to work with the marriage actually working.

And from everything you’ve written, you’ve been doing your part for a very long time. It’s OK to stop.

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