In economics, there is a concept known as the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy occurs when someone makes a decision based on the time or resources they have already invested.

A classic example is when you buy something you don’t need or enjoy, but you force yourself to use it anyway because you don’t want to waste the money.

In effect, you are making yourself less happy than if you simply got rid of it because you want to justify the money you spent.

Another example is when a company spends a ton of money on an advertising campaign that fails. But instead of stopping the campaign, the company needs to feel like it got some return on all the time and money invested, so it keeps running it even though it’s losing money.

The sunk cost fallacy is also illustrated by the saying “throw good money after bad.”

People don’t want to leave a job that doesn’t pay them enough because they don’t want to feel like they wasted the last five years of their life.

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Companies don’t cut unnecessary spending because management doesn’t want to admit they were wrong about something.

Governments don’t give up when they lose a war because they don’t want people to feel like their soldiers died for nothing.

In economics, the sunk-cost fallacy is seen as completely irrational. Bob should leave his job at Acme. He can make more money elsewhere. But Bob stays. Why? Because Bob trained for years to work at Acme and doesn’t want to waste that training.

But the sunk-cost fallacy usually only seems like a fallacy because we measure the outcome in terms of money.

The truth is that when weighing whether a major decision is worth it, our emotions add a lot to the scale.

Maybe Bob doesn’t leave Acme because he values ​​his pride and identity as an engineer at Acme more than he values ​​the extra money he could make elsewhere. Maybe he’s afraid to deal with the uncertainty of the job market. Maybe his closest friends work at Acme, and he’s afraid of leaving them behind.

While economists focus on the financial wrongdoings of this fallacy, I think the fallacy is most apparent when we look at the emotional side effects. For example, the most common place I see the sunk cost fallacy is not in a casino, in business, or government.

It’s in relationships.

Sunken Costs in Relationships

We all know someone (or maybe we are that person) who is in a bad relationship and continues to stay in that bad relationship. Neither party is happy. Everyone knows they’re unhappy. And yet, they stay. For years and years and years, people hang on.

And why?

It’s easier to fight the sunk cost fallacy in work situations and financial situations because you can sit down and do the math.

But there’s no math for relationships.

There are no spreadsheets to calculate the expected costs of the pain of a breakup versus the misery of going home every day to someone you don’t want to see.

But when it comes to emotions, we’re really bad at measuring how we’ll feel in the future and how important those feelings will be.

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For example, we generally overestimate the importance of feeling a lot of pain today and underestimate the importance of feeling a little pain over years and years.

And so, we stay in a bad relationship. We keep doing the bad thing. We say, “I’ll wait another year,” because another year seems possible at that moment. When the destruction of our relationship seems unbearable.

In this sense, we get rid of good relationships after bad. Because every year we spend in a bad relationship, we lose the opportunity to find a good one.

While it may be easy to see this on paper, it is certainly not easy to feel.