There’s a concept in economics called the sunk cost fallacy.
It describes our tendency to continue investing in something simply because we’ve already invested so much.
You’ve spent $20,000 repairing an old car. Now it needs another $10,000.
You know the car isn’t worth it.
But walking away feels like throwing away everything you’ve already spent.
So you keep investing.
Not necessarily because it’s the right decision today.
But because you desperately want yesterday’s decisions to have been worth it.
I’ve been wondering whether we sometimes do something similar in relationships.
Except the investment isn’t money.
It’s being right.
Imagine making the incredibly difficult decision to end a relationship with someone you love.
You don’t make it lightly.
You think about it. You talk about it. You explain it to friends and family.
You defend it.
You build a life around it.
Over time, the decision becomes more than something you did.
It becomes part of who you are.
And perhaps the decision was absolutely necessary.
Perhaps the relationship really was unhealthy.
Perhaps distance was the right choice.
But then something happens.
Time passes.
People change.
Circumstances change.
And suddenly there’s a question you weren’t expecting to face.
What if the decision that was right five years ago isn’t necessarily the right decision today?
That’s where I think sunk costs become interesting.
Because reconsidering a decision can feel an awful lot like admitting it was wrong.
And if you’ve spent years explaining why that decision was necessary, changing your mind might feel like invalidating everything you went through.
All the pain.
All the difficult conversations.
All the holidays spent apart.
All the people who supported you.
Was it all for nothing?
But that’s not how decisions work.
A decision can have been right when you made it and no longer be right today.
Changing your mind doesn’t erase what happened.
It doesn’t mean your pain wasn’t real.
It doesn’t mean your boundaries were unreasonable.
It simply means you’re willing to consider whether the circumstances that justified the decision still exist.
And before I point this idea toward adult children, I need to turn it around.
Because parents can fall into exactly the same trap.
I spent years raising my son.
I made sacrifices.
I tried to do the right things.
I loved him.
And it’s tempting to believe that all those years of effort prove I must have been a good father.
But they don’t prove I never hurt him.
My investment in being a good father cannot become more important than my willingness to recognize where I failed.
Otherwise, I’m doing the very thing I’m questioning.
Defending yesterday’s decisions instead of honestly examining today.
Maybe that’s what makes estrangement so difficult.
One person may be defending a lifetime of effort.
The other may be defending a lifetime of pain.
And both may feel that reconsidering their position means surrendering something they can’t afford to lose.
But what if reconciliation isn’t about deciding who was right?
What if it’s about recognizing that neither of us is exactly who we were when the relationship ended?
I don’t need my son to declare that his decision was wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe he needed that distance.
Maybe I needed the lessons that came with it.
Maybe both things are true.
But I hope neither of us becomes so invested in the past that we lose the ability to reconsider the future.
Because there’s something tragic about two people who might be capable of having a different relationship today, but never discover it because they’re still defending the decisions they made yesterday.
Economists tell us that sunk costs are gone.
We can’t recover them.
The question is what makes sense going forward.
Of course, human relationships aren’t financial investments. Some wounds remain, and some boundaries need to remain in place.
But I think there’s wisdom in refusing to let yesterday make every decision for tomorrow.
You can acknowledge that leaving was necessary without deciding that staying away must always be necessary.
You can acknowledge that you made mistakes without believing those mistakes define you forever.
And you can reconsider a decision without rewriting the history that led you to make it.
Changing your mind doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong.
Sometimes it means something has changed.
And perhaps the greatest sunk cost of all would be spending the rest of our lives trying to prove we were right about a decision we no longer need to make.
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