Aya's divorce: Making decisions despite the what-ifs
Aya, Priya, Daniel, and the uncertainty trap
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The other day, Hulu recommended the craziest show I think I’ve ever seen. So of course I’ve been binge-watching it for days.
It’s honestly scary how well the algorithms know us. Hulu knows, for example, that I’ll watch any competition show it dangles in front of me. Doesn’t matter what the competition is—baking, making swords, arranging flowers, blowing glass, creating movie special effects—you name it, I’ll watch it.
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So it shouldn’t have surprised me that when the platform released its newest competition show, I got its banner splashed straight across my screen.
This show is unlike any competition I’ve watched. The competitors aren’t scaling obstacles, building Lego, or throwing pottery.
They’re reading fortunes.
I’m struggling to describe how deeply fascinating it’s been to watch the competitors figure out how someone died just from looking at his face. Or what someone’s marriage prospects are based only on the size of her fourth toe.
What’s also fascinating is how many fortune tellers there are. Like, the producers had enough to choose from—from shamans to water dowsers to people who read the lines on their clients’ feet—that they could cast an entire 49-person show.
And that—awkward segue alert!—that says a lot about how we as humans relate to the future.
Basically? We hate the fact that we can’t see it. We hate the fact that it’s uncertain.
I’ve written before about uncertainty, about how doctors handle it, and even about the role of divination in decision-making. But today, I want to talk about uncertainty in the big decisions—like, the biggest decisions we ever make in our lives.
Which brings me to Aya…
Should Aya and Priya get a divorce?
Aya isn’t her real name; as I do with every client story, I’ve changed the identifying details.
Still, when Aya booked her first get-to-know-me call, she was 52 years old. Even though the call was on Zoom, I could still see the particular exhaustion that lines the face of someone who’s been having the same conversation with herself for two years.
Aya had been together with her wife, Priya, for fifteen years; they’d been married for eight.
Fifteen years is a long time, long enough to have built an entire world with, and around, someone—a home with its particular smell, a shared shorthand, a wordless way of moving through a Sunday morning.
But sometime in the last few years, that world had curdled.
Aya’s wounds were myriad—Priya’s too, I’m sure. “Death by a thousand paper cuts,” she described it.
Here’s one: For Aya’s 50th birthday, her wife had invited some of Aya’s closest friends, including a high-school friend named Jason.
As the wine flowed and the charcuterie board was picked over, Jason proposed a round-robin toast. “Let’s go around and everyone say one thing you like about Aya.”
Next to her, Aya felt Priya stiffen slightly. She brushed it aside, and the toasts started.
“I know that if I call you, no matter what time, you’ll be there,” someone said.
“You’re one of the funniest people I know, and you don’t even realize it,” came another.
“Only you could still be friends with people from so many eras of your life!” Jason offered.
And then it was Priya’s turn.
“No thanks,” she mumbled.
“Wait, really?” Jason asked. “What do you mean no thanks?”
“Just… No thanks,” Priya snapped, her voice tighter.
Aya painted a smile across her face. “Priya hates public speaking,” she excused her wife. “Someone else go!”
Because, she told herself, that’s what you do. The room needed her to smile, needed her to pierce the tension, to defuse the discomfort.
That was two years ago. Aya’s been holding that “No thanks” in her heart ever since.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
A year later, she met Daniel.
“I promise I wasn’t looking for him,” Aya insisted, as if I might judge her for what came next.
They met through friends. They talked. They kept talking. When the talking turned flirty, Aya convinced herself it was nothing. Daniel knew she was a married woman.
And suddenly, before she could stop herself, Aya had fallen head over feet.
As she told me this part of the story, a light broke through Aya’s exhaustion. Her face was wrecked and it was joyful.
And it was confused. “What the heck am I supposed to do?” Aya asked.
I’m not a marriage counselor—and didn’t need to be; Aya and Priya had already been in therapy for 18 months, stalled because Aya still hadn’t answered the most fundamental question:
Should she stay or should she go?
Before she and Priya committed many more months (and thousands more dollars) on counseling designed to save their marriage, Aya needed to know if she should stay in the first place. Was this even where she wanted to spend her time, her energy, and her money?
As she put it, “I just need to know. At the end of the day: do I need to call a divorce lawyer or a different marriage counselor?”
And that? That is a hard question. One of the hardest.
Because that question encompasses a whole lot of others:
What if I leave, and it doesn’t work out with Daniel?
What if I stay, and things with Priya just get worse and worse anyway?
What if I leave, but things would have gotten better with Priya if I’d just put more effort into it?
What if I blow up decades of my life with Priya, and Daniel turns out to be a fantasy? Worse, what if he eventually becomes another Priya?
God, what if I’m just destined to be alone?
What if, what if, what if.
Aya was spinning—had been spinning for years—because what if isn’t actually question.
What if is a feeling, cosplaying as a question. What if pretends like it’s analysis; it sounds like being a responsible, careful, realistic adult. What if feels like doing the noble thing, like assessing every contingency, like making the most informed decision.
But what if actually does none of those things. Instead, it spins; it creates the illusion of thinking, but, because there’s always another what if, it never arrives. Answer one what if, and four more immediately open.
And that’s where Aya was. Exhausted from asking all the “right questions,” but being never closer to a decision than the day she’d posed her first what if.
Should she stay? Or should she go?
How was Aya ever supposed to make a decision that big when the future is anything but certain?
That’s our work for this month.
Next week, I’ll introduce the science of expected utility theory (if it sounds heady, don’t worry. It’s the single best way to approach big, consequential, and uncertain decisions).
And, then, the week after that, we’ll put it to work. I’ll walk you through how Aya and I answered her question, step by step, so you that can use the process on whatever decision keeps you up at night.
And in the meantime, what do you think? Should Aya and Priya split up? Should they stay together? How should they decide?
Let me know in the comments! ↓
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