The real cost of staying in a relationship where you can never be right isn’t just the arguments — it’s the quiet erosion of trusting your own judgment

I want to tell you about a woman I’ll call S, because that wasn’t her name, and a relationship that lasted about three years in my early thirties.

S was, by most measures, a remarkable person. Bright, accomplished, very funny in a particular dry way that made me feel, in the early months of dating her, that I’d finally met someone who could keep up. She was, I told my friends at the time, the smartest person I’d ever been with.

What I didn’t tell my friends, because I didn’t yet have the words for it...