Going back or closing it: one of the two already costs you
Going back or closing it are not the same decision. How to tell what each path asks of you and how to choose without staying in the middle of the doubt.
Ricardo De Castro KingPsychologist · Meet the author 
“I do not know whether to go back or close this. I have been going around it for weeks and I cannot decide.” That sentence, or one almost like it, is what brought you here. You know the decision by heart: you have thought it in the shower, on the bus, before sleeping, and it still has no answer.
Direct answer. Going back and closing it are not the same decision. They are two different paths that you are putting into one single question, and while they stay together in there, neither of them gets resolved. What you are missing is not a faster decision: it is separating what each one is asking of you.
1. The two doors in front of you
When you say “going back or closing it” you are naming two things that only look alike from the outside. Going back is not an abstract idea: it is a return to something that exists and that has its history. Closing is not what is left when you do not go back either. It is a decision of its own, with its steps, its grief and its ending.
The trap is in the language. You ask “do I go back or not?”, and that question has only one possible answer: yes or no. Closing does not fit in there, because closing is not a no. Closing is a yes to something else, and that is why it does not show up when you shape the doubt as a yes or a no.
You spend weeks weighing whether you go back, and in that time you do neither. You stay in the middle, the only place where both doors stay open and neither is crossed. That middle has a cost, and you pay it.
There is a simple test. If you think about going back, can you say what you would do differently in the first week? If the answer is “nothing, just being together again”, you are not talking about a return: you are talking about a repeat.
2. Why confusing them costs you so much
Confusing the two decisions has one concrete effect: it leaves you with no criterion and with guilt. Every time you think about closing, the feeling shows up that you are throwing something away; every time you think about going back, the feeling shows up that you are caving again. Both feelings are real and neither helps you.
The cost shows up in practical things. You stop making plans because you do not know where you will be next month, and you explain the relationship in circles, always with the same half-sentence.
While the two options stay in the same question, nobody from outside can resolve it for you. Not your best friend, not your mother, not that person.
There is something else that does damage: the idea that deciding requires certainty. You wait for the moment when no doubt is left, and it never comes, because both doors have a cost. Going back costs: you return to a place where you were already hurt. Closing costs: you are left without something you wanted. When you wait for the option with no cost, you are waiting for one that does not exist.
That changes the whole question. It is not “which of the two is correct”, because neither is in the abstract. It is “which of the two can I hold, with what I have today”. That one has an answer, and the answer is yours.
3. What each path asks of you
The two decisions become clear when you stop asking which is better and look at what each one demands.
Going back asks for movement towards the other person. Closing asks for movement towards the gap. The first puts you in a negotiation, the second puts you holding an absence.
| Going back asks you | Closing asks you |
|---|---|
| A conversation the two of you still have not had | Accepting that this person will not change places |
| One concrete thing that will be different from day one | Finishing the paperwork: keys, money, shared accounts |
| Tolerating that the doubt stays alive for a long time | Tolerating that the gap feels enormous in the first weeks |
| Telling your people you are going to try again | Telling your people this time is different and taking the scepticism |
| Setting a date to review it together | Setting a date to review it on your own |
| Knowing what you will do if nothing changes | Knowing what you will do when they come looking again |
Look at the last two rows. Neither column holds without a plan for the moment things get difficult again. Going back without a plan is repeating. Closing without a plan is waiting for the first night you are alone.
That explains why so many decisions of this kind come undone on the fourth day: by the fourth night the plan does not exist and the gap does. What falls apart is not the decision, it is the lack of a plan to hold it.
4. How to tell them apart in you
Both options feel the same from the inside. The difference shows up in three places, and all three are in you.
The first is what appears when you close your eyes and think about the decision. Going back has a scene: you see yourself with that person on a specific day, with something different passing between the two of you. If only the emptiness shows up, that is not a wish to return. It is the fear of absence.
The second is the language. Pay attention to the sentence you use when you tell someone about it. “I am going to try again because…” and then either a concrete reason comes or nothing comes. When nothing comes, the real sentence is almost always another one: “I cannot stand that they are gone”. Both sentences deserve respect and they lead to different places.
The third is the body. Thinking about going back, when you truly want to go back, brings a mix of warmth and fear, something with energy. Thinking about closing brings a heavier, quieter sadness. If all you feel is a knot in your stomach and the wish that someone would decide for you, you are not in either one yet: you are in the waiting.
What if I want to go back and to close it at the same time?
That is normal and it does not mean you are confused. Loving someone and not wanting to live inside that relationship are two things that fit in the same week. What cannot hold is the indecision, not the contradiction: the contradiction calms down when one of the two things becomes a decision and the other stays as a feeling.
What these three signals give you is not the answer. They give you the material so the answer stops being a riddle. When you know what each path asks of you and which of the two you are standing in, the question “going back or closing it” loses its noise and one thing is left: what you can hold.
5. What each path needs so it does not repeat
A decision of this kind does not hold on willpower. It holds on conditions you set in advance, and they are different depending on the path.
Going back needs one single thing to genuinely change, not five. People who go back and come out well can almost always name what moved: a conversation they had never had, an agreement about money, a treatment one of them started. People who go back and end in the same place cannot name anything, and that is the whole diagnosis.
Closing needs the paperwork to end. It sounds cold and it is what frees you most. While things stay half-done, the cycle has a way back in: the box with their things, the shared account, the message you still send when something goes wrong. Closing for real includes the practical side, and that is the part most people postpone.
| The path | The condition that holds it | The sign it is coming undone |
|---|---|---|
| Going back | One concrete thing changed and can be named | Only the promise that this time will be different |
| Going back | There is a written date to review it | The date passed and nobody mentioned it |
| Closing | The practical side ended: keys, money, objects | There is still a box at home or a half-settled account |
| Closing | There is a plan for when that person reaches out | You have no answer and you trust yourself to resist |
| Both | Someone you trust knows what you decided | You have not told anyone yet |
The last row works for both paths. Telling someone what you decided is not asking permission: it is making the decision exist outside your head. A decision that only lives inside comes undone on the first bad night.
What if that person reaches out and I do not have a plan ready?
It is the most common scenario and it is not improvised at eleven at night. Having a decided sentence changes the outcome: something short, such as “I am not talking about this today” or “if you want to talk, let us talk on Thursday”. It is not to punish anyone: the midnight conversation is the moment when your decision has the least force and tiredness has the most.
6. The fear of closing, from the inside
The fear that holds almost all of these doubts needs to be named, because it is the one deciding in silence. The fear of closing is not the fear of losing that person. It is the fear of being left without the place where you already know how to be.
That shows when you picture closing: a life that is different does not appear, what appears is an empty table, a long Sunday, a night with nobody to tell something small to. Fear does not show you the life after, it shows you the gap after. And the gap, looked at that way, always wins the comparison against any person, however bad the relationship.
There is a trap here. In the first days of the closing, the memory edits itself: the good weekends, the private jokes, the version of that person that existed at the beginning are what come back. The months of arguments get erased and the past looks better than it was. That edit is not a fault in your memory, it is its way of defending you from pain, and it cannot be taken as advice.
On the doubt about returning, the evidence has something to say too. A study of relational uncertainty found that this uncertainty is linked to lower satisfaction in the relationship, and that self-disclosure works as a moderator and a mediator of that link (DOI: 10.1007/s12144-021-01478-0). Put to your case: the doubt does not only tire you, it lowers what the relationship gives you while you stay inside it, and that price gets paid even if the decision is never made.
And there is more. A study of fluctuation in these relationships asked whether breaking up and returning is a warning sign or a function inside the relationship, and found that the answer depends on what that fluctuation is doing in each case (DOI: 10.1111/pere.12211). Put another way: the number of times you have gone back does not say much on its own. What says something is whether, between one return and the next, a real change happened.
7. The case of Natalia, 34, two losses in one year
Natalia is 34 and works at a logistics company. In March her father died and in June she was laid off, with the twenty-minute meeting and the box in her hand. In July, with the house alone and the phone quiet, she wrote to her ex.
She did not write because she had decided to go back. She wrote because on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon the work she had to do ran out and there was nothing else on the agenda. That is the sentence she uses now: there was nothing else on the agenda. The ex came in through the gap, not through the door.
The relationship had ended twice in three years. The first time, because he disappeared on weekends. The second time, for the same reason. When they got back together in July, Natalia says the first week was good in a strange way, almost like relief, and that by the second they were in the same argument as always, only with one difference: now he had a job and she did not.
| What was happening | What she believed was happening | What she was really looking for |
|---|---|---|
| Her father died in March | That she had already got over it | A place where she did not have to be strong |
| She was laid off in June | That she needed money and support | A routine that told her what to do at nine |
| The empty house in July | That she missed her ex | Someone who answered the phone on Tuesday |
| She wrote and they got back together | That it was a sign | Going back to a place where she already knew how to be |
| An argument in week two | That he had not changed | That nothing had changed, and this time it was her |
Natalia did not go back to a different relationship: she went back to the same one with a different person, who was her. The grief and the layoff were not the underlying subject; they were the fuel. And the ex took the place of her father and her job at the same time for six weeks.
What takes her out of the cycle was not a revelation about him. It was a very unromantic thing: she got a part-time job in August. The agenda had things again at nine in the morning, and three weeks later she noticed she was no longer writing to him in the afternoon.
She sums it up in a way worth keeping: “I was not missing a decision, I was missing something to do on Tuesday”. Your case may not be that one, and the structure is. When there is a big gap in your life, any person who fills it for a while feels like a decision, and it is not.
8. The two-column exercise
Give this one about twenty-five minutes and keep it on paper, never in your head. Tried mentally, the list comes out short and dishonest; the paper is what draws out the things you did not want to write.
- Fold a sheet in half. On the left write “if I go back”, on the right “if I close it”. Do not write anything else at the top: no nice titles, no date.
- Under each heading write what that path asks of you. On the left, what would have to change and who would do it. On the right, what you would have to finish.
- Write the real sentence on each side. On the left: “I go back because…”. On the right: “I close it because…”. If nothing appears after the “because” on either side, leave it blank for half an hour and come back. That gap is the data.
- Map the first week of each scenario. What would you do on Monday if you went back, and if you closed it? If nothing differs from the Monday before the breakup in the going-back column, you already have that answer.
- Write the day-four plan. On the side you choose, what will you do on the day things get difficult? For going back, what you do when he disappears again. For closing, what you do when he writes at eleven at night.
- Set a review date. Pick a day thirty days out and write it at the top of the sheet. On that day you read the sheet again, not to decide again but to see whether the decision is holding.
- Tell one person today. Not to ask permission: to make the decision exist outside your head. One sentence is enough: “I decided this and I am telling you”.
Twenty-five minutes and one sheet. If you are still writing at forty, the exercise is feeding on your own loops: the doubt going round itself adds nothing to the paper.
One limit is worth being straight about: this exercise does not deliver the same for everyone. If you come from years of breaking up and going back, or if children and paperwork sit in the middle, the sheet clears the view and not much more. It helps you see what you already know. When what is needed goes beyond paper, a therapist does something this sheet cannot.
9. What to expect if you decide to go back
If you go back, the first week proves nothing and the third one proves almost everything. The first forty-eight hours are good in a way that deceives: there is a reunion, there is relief, the sense that something finally got fixed. That feeling is real and it is not information.
What is information starts when the routine comes back. Monday, money, tiredness, family, the same disagreement as always. That is where you see whether you went back to a different relationship or to the same one with a new date.
What helps is having the difficult conversation early, not once the honeymoon has passed. It is uncomfortable to do it when things are going well, and that is exactly when it can be done. After the first fight, that same conversation sounds like blackmail.
One expectation is worth killing from the start: that going back resolves the doubt. It does not resolve it, it relocates it. The question stops being “do I go back or close it?” and becomes “is this changing or am I waiting?“.
10. What to expect if you decide to close it
Closing has a calendar almost nobody mentions. The first two weeks are usually relief: there is finally a decision.
The third and fourth weeks are the ones that send the most people back. That is when the message at dawn appears, the photo you see by accident, the song in the shop. And the argument shows up that you have to recognise in order to discard it: “if it still hurts, it is because I have to go back”. That argument confuses pain with direction: the pain of a closing proves you loved that person, not that you should return.
Between month three and month six the comparisons appear. Any new person gets measured against the edited memory of the previous one. It is worth not making any big decision in that period until the memory starts to resemble the facts again.
To close well you need one more thing: holding the gap without filling it with the same person. A gap filled with the ex is the same cycle under another name, and the only way to cut it is for there to be something else at four in the afternoon on Tuesday, or for there to be nothing and for you to be able to hold it.
Does closing mean blocking and disappearing?
No. Blocking is a protection measure and it is used when there is harassment, not as a closing ritual. What helps you close is reducing contact to the practical side: things to return go back once and in a single shipment, pending paperwork gets settled in writing. After that, contact can be left quiet without announcing it. An announced silence looks for a reply; a silence without an announcement is the one that closes.
11. Crisis box — if you are in crisis NOW
If the crisis has you right now, if you cannot bring the desperation down, if hurting yourself is on your mind or if a breakup left you unable to sleep or eat, stop reading here and call.
- Colombia: Line 123 (national emergency) · Line 106 (mental health)
- United States: 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
- United Kingdom: 116 123 (Samaritans)
Whenever you can, do not hold this alone. The end of a relationship and grief over a recent loss look alike, and both bring a moment when your head is not good company.
12. The question you can now answer
Back to the sentence from the start: “I do not know whether to go back or close this”. You have thought it so many times that it no longer sounds like a question, it sounds like a room you live in.
Now there is something there was not before: you know what each door asks of you, you know which one you are standing in, and you have a sheet with two columns and a day-four plan. With that, the question changes shape. It stops being “what do I do?” and becomes “what can I hold, with what I have today?”.
That second question is not answered with a hunch or with the fear of the gap. It is answered with the sheet in front of you. And if the answer still does not show up when you read it, the thirty-day date is not a failure either: it is data about how long you have been holding a life on pause.
What no longer fits is the middle. The middle was comfortable because it demanded nothing, and it is the only place where both doors stay open and neither gets crossed. The decision is not going to take the pain of either one away. It is going to give you back your afternoons, which is more than you have now.
The on-and-off relationships hub extends this piece with everything around it, and the interactive tools give you something to do with it today. If what keeps you turning in circles is why you always return to the same person, that is in why we go back to the same person; and if what you want is to recognise the pattern, it is in signs of an on-and-off relationship. To locate your moment more clearly, there is a test of on-and-off relationships that turns what you feel into a guiding result, not a clinical label. And if this decision has stayed still for months and your whole life waits on it, therapy at rdkterapia is something concrete you can walk into.
