I couldn’t sleep tonight. And a question echoed in my head in Sarah Jessica Parker’s punny semi-profound yet still disembodied voice.

How long should you stay in an unhealthy relationship, to prove you gave it a fair shot?

Sometimes relationships quit on you. If the whole relationship structure becomes unfaithful right before your eyes, shouldn’t you have the right to turn and leave?

Other times it’s not as obvious, and the decision is much, much harder. Your relationship sits in a funk all the time and you can’t seem to crack its shell. Maybe it was never happy? Maybe you can’t make it happy now?

What if you settled for this relationship? Or worse, what if it settled for you.

What is it trying to make you become? Or would it play like it was happy, if you’d just follow all the rules it gave you.

Perhaps in the absence of a natural and healthy structure, we create an unnatural one. I suppose the real question is — how diseased is your relationship? An unnatural structure can come in very handy – even good situations need a break, and a false structure can help with coping there. But if you’re falling into an unnatural pattern of behaviors in order to suit the relationship and its demands… shouldn’t you be worried and complaining? Why should you have to change for a situation that obviously doesn’t like you anyhow.

I guess the idea is, if you love someone, you ought to love them like they are. And if you are unable to love someone as they are, you ought to let them go. You ought to give them a better chance at being loved.

Carrie Bradshaw would need to make some kind of comparison here, about New York City and its freaks, and then the freak in her own head. So maybe this isn’t the same as that.

Ir’s been six months in New Jersey. I still don’t feel trusted and I still struggle to want to be here. I love the kids but that can’t be why I stay, and I am grateful for my situation but that can’t keep me here either. God has provided everything I need and I shouldn’t think that since I’d leave, God wouldn’t provide for those girls just the same as he does for me.

Should I stay the whole year? Who wants that? I wish I could keep my commitment, so badly. And I know I could but they will always want more than a year from someone…. shouldn’t I let them go find that someone? And shouldn’t I set a goal that would tell me when to give up?

I suppose there is no guideline for when to give up, in general. I settle all the time. For unhealthy relationships, for no dreams and no success. I settle for being the bad guy in a lot of situations. …Truthfully…I settle for whatever I’m offered, really. At least I’m not alone in the fear that there’s something more.

I must have thought that making a commitment and seeing it through would make me content. That once I signed up, I’d be resigned to it and focus on other things. The truth is the opposite. I’m even more restless, on a grander scale. I consider myself stuck-for-my-own-good. But I know very well I could make the choice to leave. I could do it if I had to.

Once my mother was in the hospital and she had tubes in her nose and throat. Tubes she specifically asked not be used, because she knew she couldn’t breathe with them in. She woke up suffocating and after a few moments of struggle – in her words — the will to live took over, and she grabbed the tubes with her hands and ripped them straight out of her body, making a bloody mess – but getting the breath she needed, I have to say that a second time, because I panic for her if I don’t remind myself. She got her breath…

When I wanted to move out of my parents house, I would sit and complain to my aunt. And she was so dismissive of me, I was almost offended. When she did respond she would just harp on this nonsense phrase,”The minute you absolutely HAVE to be out of that house, you’ll move out.”

With a power to fight that comes from everything real in my heart, I battle the idea that the moment of desperation is the moment when we act bravely, shattering our own rules and doing what’s best so that we can breathe – begging your pardon for the play on words, I’m aiming for Bradshaw. Back to the point. It’s not reasonable to approach a situation with that attitude, and it couldn’t be wise. There’s nothing to temper the decision, and nothing left to hold it back.

But what’s satisfying is that Desperation, in those times, is a question with an answer, you know. A race with a finish line.

The situations and relationships I find myself in are most definitely akin to buildings, houses, sound or unsound structures. If there is nothing left to temper a decision in a moment of desperation, that is not because you have lost your marbles. It is because these things catch up with us, these unhealthy foundations.

Perhaps a relationship – a great one – would be self-sustaining. And the strength you need to care for the relationship, is drawn directly from within it. There would be an abundant core of resources with which you could build and build, and tend and tend, until you and whomever else were living in a veritable garden of strength.

…You know, I don’t believe in that though. But it sounds lovely. It sounds idealistic and stupid. It does not sound like what I perceive life to be. I did say that maybe you settle for a relationship… or it settles for you…. but I suppose I mean life.

Am I settling for being alive in a broken world?