“I plan my escape every night. I never leave.”

This is a composite situation, drawn from the questions people typically bring to this decision — not a submitted letter. The answer is written from the published research, sources below.

Most nights after my wife falls asleep I lie there and plan it: which flat I'd rent, how we'd split the savings, what I'd say about custody, even which boxes I'd take first. I've done this for about two years. It's weirdly calming — I fall asleep mid-plan. Then morning comes, we have coffee, everything's normal, and the plan feels absurd. We don't fight much. Nothing is terrible. Does the nightly planning mean it's over and I'm just too comfortable to admit it?

Two years of nightly rehearsal is not nothing, and I won't pretend it is. But before you treat the 11pm version of you as the honest one and the morning version as the coward, look closer at what the planning actually does for you — because there are two very different machines that produce this exact behavior.

Machine one: anxiety discharge. For some people, detailed planning is how a nervous system self-soothes — the mind builds an exit not because it wants to use it, but because knowing the exit exists makes the room bearable. The tell for this machine: the calm comes from the planning itself, and the plan never accumulates. Two years in, you're still choosing the flat. Nothing progresses, because progress was never the point; the ritual was.^[1]

Machine two: suppressed decision. For others, the nightly plan is a decision that's already been made everywhere except out loud, leaking through at the only hour with no witnesses. The tell here is different: the calm isn't from planning — it's relief at the imagined outcome. Kirshenbaum built her most famous diagnostic on exactly this: imagine full permission to leave, and watch whether the first wave is relief or grief. If two years of nights have been two years of relief, that's not insomnia. That's data.^[2]

So here's the question that separates your machines, and only you can answer it: when you picture the plan completed — you, in the flat, boxes unpacked, custody schedule running — is the feeling relief and space? Or does the calm live only in the planning, while the completed picture brings a drop in your stomach? Sit with that one honestly. The trend across weeks matters more than any single night.^[3]

And notice what's missing from your letter entirely: her. Two years of logistics — flats, savings, boxes — and not one sentence about what's wrong between you. That absence is worth more attention than the planning. Either nothing is wrong and your nights are managing something that isn't about the marriage at all (worth exploring with a therapist, alone), or something is wrong that has never once been said in daylight — in which case you've spent two years negotiating with her sleeping body instead of talking to her.

Whichever machine is yours, the exit ramp is the same: one real conversation moves more than seven hundred rehearsals. Not the plan — the feeling. "I've been unhappy in a way I can't name, for a long time, and I need us to look at it." That sentence, said at a kitchen table, is the only version of your 11pm work that can actually change your life. The nightly version can only repeat.

You asked if it's over. Here's the honest answer: it isn't over — it's unexamined. Those aren't the same thing, and only the examined version will tell you which one you're in.

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