Why Do You Stay?
Commitment is made of three things, and only one of them is happiness
One of the most tested models in relationship psychology says that whether you stay is not simply a matter of whether you are happy. Three things feed commitment: how satisfying the relationship is, how good your alternatives look, and how much you have already put in. The third one is the uncomfortable part. Time, money, a home, shared people and years of history all raise commitment on their own, independently of satisfaction - which is how someone can be certain they are staying and unable to say they are happy.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
This one only works if you answer it honestly, and nothing you answer leaves your device. If you are not in a relationship, answer about the last one that lasted.
What it measures
The three bases of commitment in the Investment Model. Satisfaction is how good it is. Alternatives is how good you think the other options are, including being alone. Investment is what you would lose by leaving. High commitment can be produced by any combination of the three, which is why the combination matters more than the total.
Based on: Investment Model Scale (Rusbult, Martz & Agnew, 1998)
Possible results
Satisfaction
How good it actually is to be in it.
Alternatives
How good the other options look from here.
Investment
What you would lose by leaving.
Common questions
Does a high investment score mean I am settling?
On its own, no - it means you have built a life with someone, which is what long relationships are made of. The pattern people mean by settling is the combination: investment high, satisfaction low, alternatives low. In that shape, commitment is being produced by cost and constraint rather than by the relationship being good. Even then it is a description rather than a diagnosis, because the same three bars describe couples in a bad year and couples in a bad marriage, and nothing in the numbers separates them.
Why is leaving harder the longer it goes on?
Because two of the three bars move in the same direction with time and only one of them is about happiness. Investment accumulates - years, people, arrangements, a shared account of your own life. Alternatives shrink, partly through practical narrowing and partly because a long relationship recalibrates what you think is available to you. Satisfaction, meanwhile, goes up and down. So commitment can rise steadily while satisfaction does not, and that is not a failure of will or a trick: it is what the model predicts.
What should I do with this result?
Treat it as a starting point for a question rather than as an answer. The most useful thing to do with a low satisfaction bar is to get specific: what exactly is missing, is it something that was ever there, and has it been said out loud to the person it concerns. That last one is where most of the movement is available, and it is the step that gets skipped. If the relationship matters and the conversation has stalled more than once, couples therapy has better evidence behind it than most people assume - including for couples who think they are past it.
Sources
- Rusbult, C. E., Martz, J. M., & Agnew, C. R. (1998). The Investment Model Scale: Measuring commitment level, satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size. Personal Relationships.
- Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Investment Model Scale and it is not a judgement on your relationship. No test can tell you whether to stay, and any that claims to should be closed. What the model does well is describe where commitment comes from, and it has held up across decades, countries and relationship types. What it cannot do is tell you what a result means for you: a high investment score alongside low satisfaction describes a common and difficult position, but it describes many relationships that recover as well as many that end, and the model itself is silent on which is which. One more thing worth saying plainly. The model was built to explain staying, including in relationships people should leave - it has been used in research on abusive ones. If you are staying because you are afraid, or because you have been cut off from money or from people, that is a different situation and this is not the right tool for it. A local support service is.