When do you know it’s time to throw in the towel?

I never seem to know when to myself.

It's something I've been thinking about for the past week though.

I've been examining every detail, every part of my relationship with my boyfriend and I have asked myself if we are beating a dead horse at this point.

We've been doing this thing on and off for the past 7 years. We've had so many problems, so many trials, until recently others have come and gone for both of us. We've both had to do some growing up (I will admit mostly me). But this last time that we've gotten back together I pledged to myself that it was going to be different. I told myself before when even got back together that when we were back together we would be doing this thing for real. But as of right now, I'm struggling to figure out what that even means.

I thought it meant me being the woman he always wanted to be: a loving, faithful girlfriend, a nice person and not an evil bitch, looking at our relationship and moving it towards the future. There were certain problems that I knew existed, a number of them had existed since we first met back in good old 2002, but I had somehow managed to convince myself that they could be worked out, dealt with, and gotten over.

But the more time that goes on I'm wondering if we should have left us alone. As previously stated I have issues with letting go. Part of the reason I never just let things go was because I didn't want to have to deal with the pain of getting over him and I knew it would take quite a while. I've always been the one to do the breaking up to later regret the decision and I've always been the one left working my ass off to fix things. But this time I'm wondering if we should have left this alone a long time ago.

I hear about married couples and people taking years to make the decision to leave the person they are married to. Or women who keep going back to men time after time until they've made decision to really remove themselves from the situation.

But when you're not married or getting in your ass kicked how do you know when it's time to throw in the towel on a relationship? How do you bring yourself to end something you're not really sure you want to end in the first place?

I remember seeing this video the last time I was begging him to take me back and I just related so much. I feel like it's kind of appropriate now....