Stay or Go
You've drafted the message twice and deleted it twice. Maybe it's a relationship that's gone quiet, a friendship that only calls when it needs something, a job you've outgrown. Nothing is wrong, exactly — no single betrayal you could point to. But you keep asking the same 2 a.m. question and getting no answer: do I stay, or do I go?
Aristotle, who tutored Alexander and founded a school that would shape thinking for two thousand years, spent a good part of the Nicomachean Ethics on precisely this — not romance in the modern sense, but the bonds that make a life. He noticed that we don't have one kind of relationship; we have three. Some, he argued, are built on utility — the person is useful to us. Some are built on pleasure — they're fun, they're pleasant to be around. And a rare few are built on character — we're bound to who the other person actually is, and we wish them well for their own sake.
The first two kinds, Aristotle observed, dissolve the moment the usefulness or the pleasure runs out — which is why they so often do. (The wording here is a paraphrase of his argument, not a direct quotation.) The friendship of good character is the durable one, precisely because it isn't propped up by what you're getting. It's slow to build and slow to break.
So here is the counsel. Before you agonize over stay or go, ask the prior question: which kind of bond is this, and which kind did I think it was? Grief and confusion usually come from a mismatch — you treated a utility tie as a virtue tie, and felt the gap. A relationship built on convenience isn't a failure when it fades; it was doing exactly what it was built to do. But a bond of real character is worth a great deal of repair before you walk. The test isn't "am I happy right now?" It's "when I strip away what I get from this person, is there still someone here I'm loyal to?"
If the answer is yes, stay and mend it. If the honest answer is that the usefulness left and nothing deeper was underneath, you already have your answer — you're just mourning the version you'd hoped it was.
Don't ask whether to stay. Ask what you were standing on.