If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship longer than you should have because you had already invested X amount of time into it, please raise your hand.

I did.  I know many of you did.  But why?????

Well, we might have found ourselves stuck in the:

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Before I dive into the Sunk Cost Fallacy I want you to know this: My blog posts are intentionally short and are designed to get your wheels turning. There is no way I can cover all the “What if” scenarios on this topic. Please don’t make a huge decision about your relationships solely because of this one blog post from a random person on the internet. Let this post be an opportunity for you to learn and consider a new perspective and give you something to think about.

As usual with my blog posts, let’s start with a definition of the Sunk Cost Fallacy:

Individuals commit the sunk cost fallacy when they continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort) (Arkes & Blumer, 1985). This fallacy, which is related to loss aversion and status quo bias, can also be viewed as bias resulting from an ongoing commitment. – behavioraleconomics.com

While this fallacy is applied primarily to financial investments, it’s not exclusive to that.  However, let’s start with the financial lens first:

Have you ever watched a show like Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den where people come to investors to acquire money and help them grow their business?  If so, you’ll see the Sunk Cost Fallacy at play all the time.  Someone who is trying to keep their business going will sell everything they own, take a loan against their house, and borrow from anyone who will loan them money.  All because they think their business idea or product is going to be the next big thing, and they think they are just one more loan or business contact away from making it happen.  Here’s the thing: Many of them are already many years into their endeavor by the time they come onto that show.  Sometimes even over a decade of pursuing their business with a loss year after year.  Despite all the VERY clear data that their business wasn’t working, they continued to stick with it and continued to not succeed.  They just continued to lose more and more money every single year.

So why have these people continued their business despite experiencing a continued loss year after year?  Why do they ignore all the data and evidence that’s right in front of them that their business is failing?  It’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy.  They have invested SO MUCH time, energy and money into their business that they feel like giving up is not even an option.  They feel like they HAVE to make it work because they’ve put so much into it.  So they continue on way longer than they should have in the first place.

Someone from the outside without the emotional connection can easily see that stopping at any point before now would mean they would have experienced less loss altogether.  Usually the “Shark” or “Dragon” will tell the entrepreneur to “Please, stop.  Please stop before you keep digging this hole deeper and deeper.”  

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is not just a human trait, it’s an emotional trait and it’s found in many animals that have more sophisticated emotional characteristics (mice, rats, dogs, primates, etc). 

The good news is that if you’re experiencing a Sunk Cost dilemma in your relationship(s), you’re probably not a psychopath.  It means you’re probably in that place because you’re trying to make a decision about the future of your relationship using your emotions and not using pure logic and facts.  That’s why when you see a friend in a really bad situation, it’s so easy for you to come to the conclusion that they should leave that situation.  You can come to that decision easily because you observe the facts objectively and without your emotions.  However, if you put yourself in the same spot as your friend and now there’s love, moments of happiness, fond memories, and time invested–all of a sudden it feels a lot harder to leave.  This is just another anecdote for the saying: Love is blind.

When you’re trying to determine if you should step away from a relationship, try to not let the Sunk Cost Fallacy cloud your judgement.  How much time and energy you’ve invested in someone shouldn’t be a primary factor considered in that decision.  Mostly because people change and grow all the time.  Humans are fluid, complex and extremely dynamic.  Maybe they were a good match for the version of you 10 years ago but aren’t a good match for the version of you today.  Maybe you have outgrown your partner or you two just grew in different directions.

Here are some questions/thoughts to try and hack the Sunk Cost Fallacy: 

• If you met this person right now, for the first time and there was no history at all, would you choose to be with them?  If you didn’t know them and saw them on a dating site, would something on their profile be a flag for incompatibility?
  
  
• Think about what advice you’d give to a friend who was in the exact same situation you are facing.  What would you tell them if you were being objective?
  
  
• What are the facts at hand showing you?  What does the data look like?  What story has the patterns of this person’s behavior been trying to tell you?
  
  
• Is the only reason you’re still with them because of the time you’ve invested and nothing else?  
  
  
• Would you feel happy/relieved if this person broke up with you?
  
  
• Do you find yourself feeling way more unhappy with this person than happy?

I’m going to switch it up a little here because I want to remind you of something important: Sometimes our partners do things that are unattractive.  Sometimes they go through things that need patience from us (e.g. mental health issues).  Sometimes they do things that make us unhappy or make decisions that we don’t agree with.  That’s all a normal part of relationships, and no relationship is perfect.  You can actually use the Sunk Cost Fallacy to your advantage in these situations to help you work through those things with your partner.   As long as you’re actually getting through them and observing some sort of progress.

Lastly, because many of us were taught that you must stay with someone for your entire life, Uncle Iroh wants to remind you of something really important:

HUGE Disclaimer: I’m a 30-something childless cis white male with my own bank account and a job where I can support myself.  I have the luxury and privilege to not have to ask myself if I “can” leave someone.  Determining if you “can” is a huge part of this equation that I’m not covering in this blog post.  If you know you need to leave but don’t know how you can, please know there are some resources.  When looking into these resources, keep in mind that abuse isn’t always physical or gender specific: https://www.thehotline.org/ National Domestic Violence Hotline.

If you want to learn more about Sunk Cost Fallacy, check out this perfectly nerdy podcast episode: