Why Is It So Hard to Walk Away From a Bad Bet?

For their anniversary, Sagar booked the hotel in Coonoor where they had spent their honeymoon. For two days he was the man Vandana married. He carried her bag. He asked what she was reading. He put his phone in the drawer.

“You see?” she told her sister when she got home. “He can be like this.”

Her sister was quiet for a moment. “Twice a year,” she said.

The machine that pays out sometimes

The psychologist Ramani Durvasula explains Vandana’s weekend with a slot machine.

A slot machine pays out unpredictably. Mostly it gives nothing. Now and then it gives a little, and once in a while a lot. Behavioural psychologists call this a variable reinforcement schedule, and they have long known that it produces the habit that is hardest to break. A machine that returned one coin for every five would bore you in minutes. The one that might pay on the next pull keeps you on the stool all night.

A relationship with a narcissistic partner, Durvasula says, runs on the same schedule. There is a lovely weekend, a gift, a sudden conversation about the future. Between them are dozens of small dismissals, which are the pulls that paid nothing. You remember the wins. And you cannot leave, because what if the next person sits down and gets the jackpot?

She makes one further point that stays with me. A machine has no idea what you need. A person is supposed to.

What you have already put in

Durvasula brings in the social psychologist Caryl Rusbult, who modelled commitment as a kind of sum. How satisfied am I? How good are my alternatives? How much have I invested that I would lose?

The model predicts most couples well. It stumbles here. Satisfaction is low, and people stay for years. Part of the reason is the third term. Time, children, a shared history and a home are hard to write off, even when the other person is squandering them.

The rest, she thinks, is something the model has no column for. It is hope. She comes to believe that these relationships run more on hope than on anything that is happening.

The story about his childhood

There is usually a back story. A father who walked out, a cold mother, a first wife who betrayed him. It is sad and it is probably true.

Durvasula’s concern is what the partner does with it. You turn it into a permanent pass. It is easier to argue with his past than to face what he did on Tuesday. You become his interpreter to your friends, explaining that he is misunderstood. She describes a woman who put up with being monitored round the clock because his father had abandoned the family and she wanted to prove that she would never leave.

Her distinction is useful. Understanding a person lets you predict what he will do. It does not oblige you to excuse it.

Two faces, and the rest of the world sees one

She compares these partners to Janus. There is the easy, successful man the world meets, and the irritable one who comes home. Everyone else is getting the first. That makes it hard to find anyone who believes you, and easy to wonder whether you are imagining the second.

It also explains the going back. After a few weeks apart, the bad days blur. The charm is still fresh. The cycle starts again.

What you would really be leaving

Durvasula writes that the hardest thing to walk away from is not the person. It is the hope. For years it has held everything up.

She does not tell Vandana to get off the stool. She tells her to look at what kind of machine it is. Two good days are real. So is the count.