Staying in an unhappy marriage because of your kids is something I have seen more and more around me.

After my divorce I started paying much closer attention to couples. Having gone through my own drama, I kept wondering how many other people were also stuck in bad relationships.

We spend time with family, friends and colleagues and everyone looks fine on the surface. At social gatherings they show up as the happy family. But how many of them actually are?

In the many conversations I had with my mom, she was always very clear: if you are unhappy in your marriage, ask for a divorce. Nothing dramatic needs to happen first. Time passes, we grow older, and when we finally wake up we realise how many years we have wasted just to keep up the appearance of having someone beside us.

Every time I remember these conversations, I feel incredibly lucky to have had that woman as my mother.

It is very challenging to keep a long term relationship alive with someone. At the beginning everything is usually wonderful. But once the initial passion calms down, it has to make room for love, which is calmer and asks for sacrifice.

The problem starts when we do not set any limits to those sacrifices. We get used to that shared life and, with time, many couples end up living like siblings. The romance between them disappears, because it stops being nurtured, and the couple throws themselves completely into routine. There is not even a simple romantic dinner once in a while. Married life becomes an obligation, slowly shrinking until, one day, it almost disappears.

This is usually the moment when the couple resigns themselves to the situation. In some cases one or both partners look for the lost romance outside the relationship and put all their focus on the children.

How many couples like this do we know? And how many of us might be living exactly this right now?

However, when a couple is not willing to fight for a happy relationship, I simply cannot understand why they choose to stay in that situation and, even worse, use “the kids” as the reason to remain unhappy.

As a mother I can understand the fear of shaking the apparent stability of the family for a child, teenager or young adult. But as a daughter, the worst thing I can imagine would be discovering that my parents were unhappy and only stayed together because of me.

Many studies show that the vast majority of children would rather see their parents separate and be happy. Research published in Psychology Today consistently points to the same conclusion: children are far more affected by ongoing conflict at home than by the practical changes that come with separation. Is that not what we all want for the people we love? Their happiness.

On top of that, what example of a healthy relationship are we giving our children when we stay in an unhappy marriage, where there might be a lack of love, betrayal or different forms of violence. Children grow up without seeing their parents share a loving gesture, a knowing smile, a comforting hug or a genuine celebration of their achievements.

If you feel that respect has been missing for a long time, you might like this reflection on why love cannot exist without respect.

And that is the example they will reproduce. I am an affectionate, warm person, and I love constant little gestures of care, because that is what I saw while I was growing up. In general we unconsciously repeat what was part of our upbringing. It does not mean that a person cannot change, but change requires awareness of what needs to heal and real commitment to doing that work.

It is never easy to make such a complicated decision as separation, especially when it goes against your own principles.

Even so, we should not use our children as a justification to stay in an unhappy relationship. It is not fair to them. We also need to remember that human beings adapt to many different situations. We, as adults, are the ones who must manage the process so that it is as balanced as possible.

And one day our children will follow their own path and leave our home. What will be left for us when we look back and realise how much time has passed.

Time is incredibly precious. Every decision we make has to take its value into account.

For more on choosing yourself instead of staying stuck, I also wrote about the art of letting go and how to stop chasing those who do not chase you back.