You know how when your driver’s license expires, you put off going to the DMV for so long you end up on “America’s Most Procrastinating”? And why do you so resist getting a new I.D.? Because, pleasant-wise, it ranks right up there with getting your hair caught in an egg beater.

And that’s just getting a new card identifying who you are. How much more painful is it to acquire an actual new identify?

A new identity is what a lot of women think they’re going to have to assume if they force a break-up with their man. In their heart of hearts, many women believe that initiating and securing a permanent separation from their former Mr. Right means irrevocably transmogrifying from the Selfless Conciliator they’ve always been, to a Selfish Terminator they never imagined themselves being.

Whether via nurture or nature, a lot of women identify themselves as Uplifting, Self-Sacrificing Healer. Their understanding of who they are is deeply vested in their fulfillment of the role of dutiful daughter, supportive mate, loving mother. They’re the ones to whom others turn for comfort and counsel. They heal. They support. They sustain. They forgive. They sacrifice. They reconcile. They … well, take to the role of Emotional Martyr like Flipper takes to water. Which in a great many ways is certainly a beautiful thing. Where would any of us be if none of us knew how to put others first?

But you take a woman whose identity is inextricably bound up with her self-image as a Sacrificing Giver, put her in the position of really having to choose between herself and the man to whom she once pledged her love, and what very often happens is her internal life splits. She’ll have no idea what to do. She’ll have no internal emotional paradigm for assuming the role of Xena, Relationship Terminator.

Selfless, she knows. But selfish? Not so much.

I think I’ll leave this here for now. Maybe for each of these seven reasons women stay in bad relationships I’ll do two posts: the first for defining the problem, and the next for articulating its solution.