Why It Can Take More Than Two Years to Plan an Escape From an Abusive Marriage

The question is never really "why didn't you just leave." It's what leaving actually requires, and why your nervous system, your finances, and your sense of your own reality all have to catch up before your feet can.

If you have ever watched someone you love stay in a relationship that was clearly hurting them, or if you have been that person yourself, you have probably heard some version of the question. Why didn't you just leave. It gets asked with genuine confusion, sometimes with judgment, and it rests on an assumption that doesn't hold up against what we actually know about coercive control: that leaving is a single decision, made once, and acted on immediately.

It isn't. For most people who leave an abusive partner, leaving is not an event. It's a process, and often a long one, built from failed attempts, secret preparation, and a slow rebuilding of the very trust in yourself that the relationship worked to dismantle. Understanding why helps explain a statistic that surprises almost everyone who hears it for the first time.

7

On average, it takes about seven attempts before someone leaves an abusive relationship for good. Not because they are indecisive or unwilling to act, but because each attempt is interrupted by forces that are, in most cases, working exactly as the relationship trained them to.

Cited widely from National Domestic Violence Hotline data, corroborated by peer-reviewed research on separation and return among IPV survivors.

Two years, five years, sometimes longer. If that number sounds impossibly long from the outside, it is worth sitting with the reasons why, because none of them are about weakness. They are about what it takes to leave safely when the relationship itself has spent months or years making leaving feel impossible.

The relationship was never just about affection. It was about control.

The researcher Evan Stark coined the term coercive control to describe a pattern of abuse that isn't primarily about individual violent incidents, but about a sustained campaign to restrict a person's autonomy: their money, their movement, their friendships, their access to information, their confidence in their own judgment. Physical violence, when it's present, is often just one tactic among many. The isolation is the architecture. And isolation is, by design, very difficult to plan an exit from.

When someone has spent years quietly steering you away from friends who asked too many questions, family members who didn't approve, or coworkers who might have noticed something was wrong, you don't just lose those relationships. You lose the practical infrastructure that leaving usually depends on: somewhere to stay, someone to help you move a box, someone who will believe you without needing convincing.

The cycle that keeps hope alive

Psychologist Lenore Walker's research on the cycle of abuse describes a pattern that many survivors recognize instantly: tension builds, an incident occurs, and then comes a period of calm, remorse, and often real tenderness, sometimes called the honeymoon phase. That period isn't fake in the way people assume. It's frequently genuine in the moment, which is exactly what makes it so disorienting. It offers real evidence, again and again, that the person you fell in love with is still in there, and that this time might be different.

This intermittent pattern, good periods unpredictably mixed with bad ones, is the same structure behavioral psychology identifies as the most powerful kind of reinforcement there is. Intermittent reinforcement is what keeps a person pulling a slot machine lever. In a relationship, it's what keeps hope alive long after a steady stream of evidence has quietly built up.

"I want to give hope that healing is possible, if not easy."

Leaving your own mind, then leaving the relationship

One of the most underdiscussed parts of abuse recovery is what happens to a person's relationship with their own perception. Gaslighting, chronic minimizing, and being told your memory or your reactions are wrong, over years, doesn't just create doubt about specific incidents. It erodes the basic trust a person has in their own read of reality.

Before someone can act on the belief "this relationship is unsafe for me," they often have to rebuild the underlying capacity to trust that belief at all. That rebuilding tends to happen gradually, often through a single conversation with a friend who says something confirming, or a therapist who names the pattern out loud for the first time, or a quiet moment of clarity that doesn't yet feel solid enough to act on. Clarity, in these situations, is not a light switch. It accumulates.

Identification with the aggressor

Research on what psychologists call identification with the aggressor, sometimes discussed in relation to trauma bonding, has found that emotional attachment to a violent partner is itself a significant predictor of whether someone returns after leaving, independent of financial or logistical pressures. The nervous system, under chronic threat, can form protective attachments to the very source of that threat. This isn't a character flaw. It's a well-documented trauma response, and it means that even once someone is physically out, part of the work of staying out is emotional and neurological, not just practical.

The practical machinery of leaving safely

Even once someone has the clarity and the emotional readiness, actually leaving an abusive marriage involves a level of logistics that most people never have to think about.

• Financial entrapment. Economic abuse, controlling access to money, sabotaging employment, running up debt in a partner's name, is present in the vast majority of abusive relationships. Building financial independence quietly, without alerting a controlling partner, can itself take years: a secret account, a small stash of cash, a job search conducted without leaving a digital trail.
  

• Children and custody. A parent who fears losing custody, or who worries about what an abuser might do with unsupervised access, often delays leaving until they have documentation, legal advice, and a safety plan specific to their children.
  

• Housing. Finding somewhere to live that a partner cannot access requires resources, references, and often a waiting period, especially when shelters are at capacity or when a survivor doesn't yet qualify for the kind of housing support that requires proof of abuse.
  

• Evidence and documentation. For those pursuing legal protection or custody arrangements, quietly gathering a record of incidents, messages, or financial control can take considerable time, particularly when done carefully enough not to be discovered.
  

• The most dangerous moment is the exit itself. Research consistently shows that the period during and immediately after leaving carries the highest risk of escalation, including lethal violence. A safety plan built by an advocate, rather than an unplanned exit, meaningfully reduces that risk, and building one properly takes time.
  

Recognition

Naming the pattern, often helped along by an outside voice, a book, a conversation, a moment of contrast against a healthy relationship witnessed elsewhere.

Quiet preparation

Building financial independence, rebuilding a support network, consulting a lawyer or advocate, all without tipping off a partner who may escalate if they sense the relationship is at risk.

Attempts and returns

For many, several exits and returns, each one adding information, resources, or resolve, even when it doesn't feel that way from the inside.

The exit

Ideally planned with a domestic violence advocate, timed around the highest-risk moment, with legal and physical safety measures already in place.

After

Ongoing safety planning, legal proceedings that can stretch on for years, and the separate, slower work of emotional recovery and trust repair.

A note on the evidence

Much of the foundational research on coercive control, the cycle of abuse, and survivor decision-making draws heavily on studies of heterosexual relationships where women are the survivors, which reflects real patterns in prevalence but doesn't capture every relationship configuration. Men, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people in same-sex partnerships experience abuse at meaningful rates too, often with additional barriers to being believed or finding tailored support. If your experience doesn't map neatly onto the research cited here, that doesn't make it less real.

If you recognize yourself in this

You don't owe anyone, including yourself, an explanation for why you haven't left yet, or why it took as many attempts as it took. What you are navigating is not a failure of willpower. It's a set of overlapping systems, financial, legal, emotional, neurological, all of which take real time to move through safely.

If you are in the planning phase right now, the most protective thing you can do is bring in someone trained in this specific kind of danger: a domestic violence advocate, who can help you build a safety plan calibrated to your particular situation, including the period around the exit itself, which research consistently identifies as the highest-risk window.

You are allowed to take the time this requires

Healing, like leaving, tends to happen in layers rather than in a single decisive moment. If today all you can do is name what's happening to yourself honestly, that is not a small thing. It is often where the two years, or the seven attempts, quietly begin.

If you need support

In Bulgaria, the National Hotline for Victims of Violence is free and confidential, reachable at 0800 18 676. If you are outside Bulgaria, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (US) is reachable at 1-800-799-7233, or via thehotline.org, which also has international resource links.