Wanting to leave is enough

Wanting to leave is enough is Sugar’s rule for recognizing when a relationship should end: a sustained, deeply felt desire to leave can be a sufficient reason, even when no single explanation settles the matter and even when the other person will be hurt. The principle is neither a license for careless flight nor a demand to remain until a partner has done something unforgivable. It treats honest self-knowledge as part of ethical life, and asks people to take their own deepest truth seriously alongside the other truths that bind them to someone they love.

Definition and Scope

Sugar gives the rule to three correspondents who are struggling with whether to leave their partners. Her immediate instruction is stark: go, even if there is nowhere else to go or the reason for being unable to stay is not yet clear. The decisive condition is not a perfectly assembled case against the relationship; it is wanting to leave. Sugar asks the correspondents to write that thought on their palms and read it repeatedly until their tears wash it away. The physical gesture makes the principle memorable, but also places it amid grief and difficulty rather than presenting it as an easy slogan.

The rule responds to the pressure to subordinate personal desire to other people’s needs. Sugar observes that women are especially expected to nurture, give, and consider others before themselves. She does not reject generosity or claim that ethical living means doing only what one wants. People sometimes must do what they do not want to do, and refrain from what they do want. But ethical life also requires telling the truth about oneself and living in accordance with it. The rule gives that truth standing in a decision that might otherwise be postponed indefinitely in the name of duty or kindness.

Responsibility and Deliberate Choice

Wanting to leave does not release a person from the obligation to behave decently. Sugar says a person can end a relationship while remaining compassionate toward the partner. Nor does the rule mean packing one’s bags at the first experience of conflict, struggle, or uncertainty. Its test is more sustained: if the yearning to be free of a particular relationship sits more firmly than the competing yearnings to remain, the desire to leave is valid and may be the right choice, even if someone loved will be hurt.

This distinction makes the rule an argument for considered honesty, not impulsiveness. Sugar explicitly separates a thought of leaving from a settled decision about one’s life. Her own history demonstrates the cost of failing to make that decision plainly. She says she desperately wanted not to want to leave Cheryl Strayed’s first husband and agonized over the choice, trying to be good, then bad, while feeling sad, scared, sick, self-sacrificing, and ultimately self-destructive. Rather than telling him directly that she wanted out, she eventually had sexual relationships outside the marriage. She describes this as a failure of courage: loving him too much to make a clean break, she made the separation dirty instead.

After she confessed, the roughly year-long process of splitting up was painful for both of them. Sugar does not cast the divorce as a contest between a wronged person and a villain; she depicts the two partners as struggling together through the aftermath. The distinction matters to the rule’s ethics: a valid reason to leave does not make the way one leaves inconsequential. Sugar calls divorcing Cheryl Strayed’s first husband the most excruciating decision she had ever made, showing that certainty about the need to go can coexist with anguish about its consequences.

Sugar’s First Marriage as Evidence

Sugar’s explanation for leaving consists of several specific truths, none of which alone exhausts the decision. She was young and did not feel ready to commit to one person or to long-term monogamy. She and Cheryl Strayed’s first husband were less compatible than they had initially seemed. Her writing mattered deeply to her, while he both celebrated her success and begrudged it. She grew up poor, he upper middle class, and she could not stop resenting that difference. After her mother died and her stepfather stopped acting as a father to her, Sugar felt orphaned at twenty-two and overwhelmed by grief.

Sugar does not dismiss these explanations; she says each is true in its own particular way. But she argues that their accumulation points to a simpler underlying fact: she had to leave because she wanted to. In this account, a list of reasons can clarify the circumstances without serving as a final courtroom verdict. The decision need not depend on proving that every other claim is false, including love for the partner. Several truths can run alongside one another; the task is to trust the one that is truest at the core when it comes to whether to stay.

The Core and the Counterexample

Sugar’s second marriage clarifies what the rule does and does not say. After several years with Mr. Sugar, she understands her first marriage more clearly. She sees substantial likeness between the two relationships: both husbands are kind men with gentle souls, share her interests in books, the outdoors, and left-wing politics, and work as artists in different fields. The marriages have comparable arguments and struggles, including sorrows that outsiders could not see or understand. In both, she and her partner have been down in the mud together.

The crucial difference is not that Mr. Sugar’s marriage is free of conflict. When she struggles with Mr. Sugar, she is not fighting for her freedom, and neither is he. Across nearly sixteen years together, Sugar says she has never thought of leaving him; instead, she has fought harder and emerged dirty but stronger with him. This contrast prevents the rule from becoming a general instruction to abandon relationships when they become painful. Struggle alone does not decide the matter. In her account, the enduring absence or presence of the desire to leave is what distinguishes the marriages.

Sugar anchors the principle in her belief that the core cannot be faked and that the truth living there will eventually prevail. She asks the correspondents whether they will act later or now, leaving them to decide the timing rather than pretending the choice is painless. The rule’s force comes from holding two claims together: love for a partner can be real, and leaving can still be necessary. It asks for neither a perfect explanation nor freedom from grief, only the considered recognition of what a person most deeply wants and the courage to act without disguising that truth.