It’s a situation as old as time: the spark is gone, you’re emotionally drained, and just know the relationship has passed its expiration date.

In an ideal world, you’d sit down with your partner, talk it out, and would end things neatly and respectfully. But illness, money problems, or as in the case for Reddit user Disastrous-Split-518, an in-law’s wedding can make everything way more difficult.

Recently, she made a post on the subreddit ‘AITAH‘ describing her predicament and asking for advice, reigniting the debate around the question if there’s ever a good time to break up.

Leaving your partner is already hard

Image credits: Tiago Bandeira (not the actual photo)

But this woman has also made promises to her in-laws that are making things even worse

Image credits: Kampus Production (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Aksel Fristrup (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Thomas William (not the actual photo)

image credits: Disastrous-Split-518

Arrangements like the one between the Redditor and her sister-in-law are rarely a good idea

“I wouldn’t usually recommend having a family member act as a supplier at your wedding, whether that’s using their home or having them as your photographer,” Lisa Burton, the founder and head planner at The Bridal Consultant, told Bored Panda.

Burton, together with her UK-based team, is organizing affordable and memorable destination weddings, from intimate 10-guest affairs to big over-100-people events. She said she has had numerous instances where a distressed bride or groom has called her at the last minute because they’ve had a falling out with this person, leaving the couple to find a last-minute replacement with unexpected costs.

“There are always exceptions, such as marrying at the family home where you still live, but as a rule of thumb, I’d air caution,” she highlighted. “There might be a cost-saving advantage, and it could seem like a lovely offer at the time. But for an event as important as your wedding day, you need certainty by way of contracts; you need to be comfortable discussing service levels and quality, two things not always possible with family and friends, and for me, would be a big ‘red flag.'”

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For example, as she pointed out, how do you insure against something going wrong when all you have is their word?

“I once had a very stressed bride call me a few weeks before her wedding because she’d had a falling out with her chief bridesmaids, also her hairdresser, and now needed to find someone last-minute to do 8 people’s hair, including hers! That’s not exactly a major disaster, but the added stress… and costs are just not worth it.”

So the incredibly nuanced nature of interpersonal relationships doesn’t make a good professional environment. And when the wedding is already planned, changing the venue affects virtually everything.

“I had a venue that had to close down due to license issues just 4 weeks before one of our weddings,” Burton recalled. “It’s still one of the lowest points of my career having to call the couple and tell them. I remember it like it was yesterday. The wedding had been planned over 2 years, a beautiful, extravagant affair with every detail considered. It took a team of 7 expert planners and 48 hours to negotiate a new venue, terms, and contracts and then relocate and redesign. The couple didn’t have to do a thing, but still their worry, disappointment, and upset were evident, understandably.”

“How a couple alone without a team to support them would handle this, I really don’t know,” Burton added. “Whether it’s one day or 4 weeks before, it takes a lot of planning, effort, and reorganization. How you do that whilst being distraught, shocked, disappointed, I’ve no idea, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

So if you’re risk-averse (which, when it comes to your big day, why wouldn’t you be?), spare yourself the potential last-minute complications that are associated with private arrangements. As this story illustrates, life finds a way to get in the way.

As her post went viral, the woman joined the discussion in its comment section

Long, committed relationships are rarely easy to get out of

Interestingly, we have research that helps us understand what happens to people who feel they must stay in a relationship even though they’re unhappy.

In 2014, Kansas State University family studies researcher Amber Vennum and her colleagues investigated patterns of “cycling” among cohabiting and married couples. (Among couples not in a committed relationship, the process is referred to as churning, but for people already committed, the less dramatic term cycling is used to convey the same sense of going in and out of the same relationship.)

image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)

Using a nationally representative sample of over 300 cohabiting and over 750 married couples, the team asked them to report, from memory, the times when they ended and renewed their relationship with the same person.

An unexpectedly high one-third and one-fifth of couples in each group of couples experienced at least one of these cycles. Furthermore, it turns out that the more frequently a couple cycles at one point in time, the greater the chances are that they will cycle again in the future.

So coming back to the topic of our story, cycling couples were more likely to have children who required child care, to have joint investments such as a home, and to have already gotten married rather than just cohabiting.

Researchers found that it was the presence of the “additional load,” rather than dedication to the relationship itself that predicted whether a couple would get back together after a breakup. These constraints build up over time: the longer you are in a relationship, the more costly it is to extricate yourself. There’s a term from economics that could be applied here, it’s sunk costs. Once you’ve invested in your relationship, you’ve already put so much into it that it becomes difficult to get out.

So the fact that the author of this Reddit post has been committed to Ryan for so long suggests that there had to be something that would have made her exit burdensome.

But the woman released an update, saying that she pulled through

Image credits: Blue Bird (not the actual photo)

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION (not the actual photo)

image credits: Disastrous-Split-518

There were a lot of sunk costs involved here

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