“Quiet Quitting” Isn't a Plan or an Acceptable Marriage – Part 1

Evelyn is sitting at her kitchen table. The day is almost done, but between work and her kids, she has little time for herself and is exhausted. As she sits there, she tries to reconstruct how her life turned into an empty and meaningless marriage.

It started like most marriages with love, hope, and anticipation of a life together with her best friend. But as the years went by, all of that went quiet. There wasn’t one single incident or big fight, but the slow, silent death of a marriage. Evelyn begins to cry as she feels the desperation and despair of being trapped in a loveless marriage. Maybe it is because of limited income, fear of trying to survive alone, or, as for many women, it is simply not wanting to go through the drama, expense, and ordeal of a divorce.

You may know a woman going through this ordeal, or maybe this is you. This is a two-part blog article that addresses the real problem facing many women and what options and support are available. In the first part of the blog series, we will discuss how quiet quitting comes about.

Awareness is the First Step

Many women resonated with an article written by Monica Corcoran Harel in November 2025 call “The Cut”. In that article, she described marriages that, for all intents and purposes, had ended internally, but to the outside it looked like a viable marriage in every observable way.

The spouses shared the same house, the same joint checking account, and attended school functions together. It all looked normal, but the marriage was anything but normal. The woman had withdrawn the part of herself that used to be in the marriage, and nobody had filed anything.

For many women, this article was validation and recognition of what her life had become. In fact, this issue resonated with so many women that the subject went viral. When Oprah used her podcast to discuss this issue, it became a public conversation. Women who sat alone in their despair realized their feelings were ones shared by many women and that this issue had a name: The Quiet Quitting.

When a Marriage Dies

Every marriage starts with hope and belief that the union will be until “death do us part.” However, sometimes what dies is not a spouse, but the marriage itself.

For many marriages, the time of death can be easily identified. An infidelity, domestic violence, or an argument that shook the foundations of the relationship. In other marriages, that time of death cannot be pinpointed as no single act or omission caused it.

These two death scenarios were found in a study conducted by John Gottman and Robert Levenson and published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in August 2000.

They followed 79 couples for fourteen years and found that divorce timelines tended to split into one of two patterns.

The first group tended to divorce early (an average of 7.4 years), and it ended loudly and badly. There was visible conflict and contempt.

The second group lasted longer and average of 13.9 years before divorcing. The demise of the marriage was not due to a contentious event, but it was the absence of warmth. These couples weren't hostile; they simply had less humor, less affection, less interest in each other. From the outside, the world did not see any problems; they looked like people getting along fine. It wasn’t a raging argument that split them; they had simply stopped bothering to try.

The women described in The Cut are emblematic of the second group, except they don’t officially end the marriage. The quiet quit really isn’t an alternative to divorce but simply a protracted, drawn-out disassociation found in the study

The Dead Marriage that Doesn’t End

The death of a marriage doesn’t always end in a divorce. Nearly 24% of ALL married couples stay married while wishing they were divorced. That is roughly 3.4 million people in California alone. The reasons for this vary but generally fall into one of the following categories:

1. Financial Barriers: A study cited across regional reports estimates that nearly one in four married individuals in the state delay or forego legal separation due to the high cost of living and maintaining separate households.

2. Legal and Court Expenses: Contested legal dissolutions in California can easily climb to upwards of $20,000 per side if they proceed to trial, with standard retainers starting around $8,500.

3. Cost of Living Paradox: California's high housing and living expenses act as a double-edged sword; while financial stress strains relationships, the sheer economic penalty of splitting one household into two.

Women Decide When the Marriage is Over

The heading of this section is a bold blanket statement, but the facts show it is mostly true. A study by a Stanford University Sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, found that women initiated 69 percent of all divorces.

This is further supported by an AARP study from 2004 that surveyed 1,147 people ages 40 to 79 who had divorced in midlife or later and found a similar split: 66 percent of the women said they'd initiated the divorce.

Buried in that same research is a number that explains a lot about the quiet quit. Twenty-six percent of the men said they never saw it coming, compared to 14 percent of women.

A quarter of husbands were blindsided. Not because they're oblivious, necessarily, but because the withdrawal that preceded the filing was designed to be undetectable. That's the operating principle of a quiet quit: keep the surface intact. Make the dinners, attend the thing at the school, answer the text about what time you'll be home. The performance is the whole point, and it succeeds, and then it ends, and the husband tells his friends he had no idea.

Women who are currently in this arrangement should notice what that means. The strategy is working exactly as designed, and its success is the reason nothing is changing. The wife may believe that her husband is oblivious to her withdrawal, pain, and suffering. The husband’s version is that he cannot respond to information he doesn't have. Every month of competent performance is a month in which the marriage receives no signal that it's in trouble.

From either perspective, the outcome is the same. The withdrawal guarantees that the man will be making decisions with bad data and the woman will be carrying the entire weight of a situation she alone knows exists.

Why the Forties are a Critical Time for Quiet Quitting

When you think of a person going through a mid-life crisis, most picture a man who tries to capture his lost youth by acting out. Often this occurs when a man turns forty and plays out by buying a sports car, changing his appearance, or having an affair.

Women also experience mid-life crises, but it usually plays out differently. Many get reflective about whether their life turned out as expected and if they are willing to live the rest of their life under those conditions.

Division of Labor -Often that review starts with the household and division of labor. Pew Research Center's 2023 analysis of American Time Use Survey data looked at marriages where husbands and wives earn roughly the same, meaning each contributes between 40 and 60 percent of household income. In those marriages, wives spend 4.6 hours a week on housework and husbands spend about two. Wives spend 6.9 hours on caregiving; husbands about five. Husbands get 25.2 hours of leisure a week. Wives get 21.6.

Now the version that tends to land harder is where the wife is the primary breadwinner, earning 60 percent or more of household income; wives still do 4.8 hours of housework to their husbands' 2.8, and husbands' leisure time goes up, not down: 29.9 hours a week, against 21.1 for the wives paying most of the bills.

Four hours of leisure a week is a rounding error in any given month. Over twenty years, it's a different marriage. This disparity in the division of labor can play heavily on a marriage

Power Dynamic - The power dynamic in a marriage also seems to play a major role in the withdrawal and discontent felt by women. In a 2019 study by Allison Daminger and reported in the American Sociological Review, decision-making disparity in a marriage affects the gratitude or resentment felt by a spouse. Where the wife feels she has little or no input into her life decisions and those of her family, it fosters resentment.

Sandwich Generation - People have children later in life now, which means they often are in the throes of raising their own children when they find that their elder parents also need their care and help. Women in their forties often find that they need to manage daily tasks, emotional support, and financial help for two different generations. This places pressure on already fraught lives with high stress, tight schedules, and money challenges

According to the Pew Research Center, 54% of Americans in their forties belong to the "sandwich generation". They balance caring for or supporting a parent aged 65 or older while simultaneously raising minor children or providing financial aid to adult offspring.

According to the Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 report by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 63 million Americans—one in four adults—provide ongoing care for a family member.

The emotional, physical, and financial stress can drive a woman into a quiet hole of despair and regret.

Menopause – Added to all these factors is the inevitable march of time. While The National Institute on Aging puts the average age of menopause in the United States at 52, with most women entering the transition in their mid-forties. When you consider that physical symptoms last between two and eight years, it can result in the perfect storm of discontent. Among the symptoms the NIA lists: trouble sleeping, moodiness, irritability. A woman can be three years into disrupted sleep and a hormonal reorganization she didn't sign up for, running the anticipation and monitoring for a household of four, managing her mother's cardiology appointments, and getting four fewer hours a week to herself than the man asleep next to her.

The wife isn’t being dramatic. She is weighing in the real realities of her life. This was not what her life or expectations looked like when she was 32.

Which is why the quiet quitting often feels less like a decision than a system reaching capacity. There's nothing left to allocate to the marriage, so the marriage gets nothing. That's an honest description of what's happening, and it deserves to be met with something better than a suggestion to communicate more.

Summary

The first part of this series article explored the growing phenomenon of “quiet quitting” in marriage—where women emotionally withdraw from unfulfilling relationships while maintaining the outward appearance of a functioning marriage.

Drawing on Monica Corcoran Harel’s viral November 2025 article in The Cut, which Oprah amplified into a national conversation, we discussed why this has become a reality for many women in their forties who face legitimate issues that lead them to withdraw.

In the second part, we will discuss what the silence costs and what acting on it looks like.

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