What If Men Are Quietly Quitting Their Marriages Too?Perhaps women aren't the only ones who become tired of reaching...

​Someone recently said something to me that I've heard in one form or another for years: “Men just don't know how to talk to women.” I understood what she meant. After more than thirty years of sitting with couples, I have heard countless women describe the loneliness of being married to someone who seems emotionally difficult to reach. They have tried talking, explaining, choosing a better time, suggesting counselling. Eventually, some of them stop. There comes a point when asking for the same thing over and over again can become more painful than not asking at all.

It was still on my mind when I listened to an episode of The Oprah Podcast called “Quiet Quitting: Why Women Are Emotionally Checking Out of Their Marriage,” centred on Monica Corcoran Harel's article for The Cut, The Women Quietly Quitting Their Husbands. These weren't necessarily women who had packed a suitcase or hired a divorce lawyer. Some were still very much inside their marriages, doing what needed to be done, but emotionally they had begun to leave. They were tired of carrying what they experienced as the emotional weight of the relationship, tired of asking to be noticed.

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I understood these women. I know these women. I have sat across from them for decades. I have even been one.


But as I listened, I kept wondering about the people sitting on the other side of those marriages. Oprah eventually asked the same question. Her producers, it turned out, had spoken with husbands who felt there was another side to the story. Some of these men described feeling emotionally disconnected too, particularly after children arrived, when so much of their wives' attention had moved toward the kids that very little seemed left for them.


That caught my attention because I hear it all the time. A man will sit in my office struggling to explain what has changed since they became parents, and underneath the complaints about sex, affection and time together, there is often something harder for him to put into words.

So, I say it for him: “You miss your wife”. 

And usually, he does. 

Not the mother of his children, whom he may admire enormously. Not his co-parent, keeping track of dentist appointments and who has outgrown their winter boots. He misses the woman who once looked across a room for him, laughed with him, reached for him…who once wanted him.

This is something I talk about with my engaged couples, long before there is a crib in the house. I tell them that if they become parents, one of their challenges will be learning how to become a family without allowing the couple who created that family to disappear. Equality will not always mean fifty-fifty, and romance may occasionally consist of one person letting the other sleep for four uninterrupted hours. But somewhere in all of that, they will have to remember that before they were Mom and Dad, they were two people who chose each other.


Of course, there is another person in this story. When a husband says, “I miss you,” his wife may not hear longing. She may hear one more demand. She may be working, parenting, planning, feeding, carrying a mental load he doesn't fully see. She may have had a small child touching her body all day and finally have twenty minutes in which nobody needs anything from her. Then he reaches for affection, or tells her he doesn't feel important anymore, and she thinks, Are you kidding me? Everybody needs something from me. Now you do, too?


His longing can feel like pressure at the very time she has the least capacity to give. But her exhaustion does not make his loneliness any less real.

The fact is, there may be two lonely people in the room, each so caught up in his or her own experience of disconnection that neither sees much of what is happening to the other. It makes me wonder whether we always recognize love when it arrives in a form different from the one we are waiting for.

Some of the men I have worked with are not particularly fluent in emotional language. They may struggle to tell their wives what is going on inside them, yet they understand loving someone through what they do. They work hard. They fix things. They pick up the groceries, deal with the car, shovel the driveway before anyone else knows there is a problem. Ask them to describe the emotional state of the marriage, and they may look as though you have handed them an exam they forgot to study for. Ask them to drive across town in a snowstorm because their wife needs something and they already have their coat on.

I don't believe acts of service belong to men any more than emotional language belongs to women. I mention it because years of working with couples have taught me to pay attention to the language in which someone is already trying to show love. A husband may look at everything he does and wonder, How can she possibly believe I don't care? His wife may look at him and think, I don't need you to fix another thing. I need you to sit down beside me and ask how I am.


He believes he is showing up. She experiences him as absent.

My recent work around what I call the languages of repair has made me think more about this. We tend to repair in ways that resemble how we express love. Someone who loves through doing may also try to repair through doing. He makes the coffee the next morning, fixes the thing she mentioned, reaches for her in bed. In his mind, those actions may be saying, I hate that we're like this. I want us to be okay.

She may be waiting for something else: I understand why that hurt you. Maybe I made a mistake. I shouldn't have said what I said. I’m sorry. I love you.

She doesn't recognize his gesture as repair because, for her, it hasn't addressed what happened. He doesn't understand why what he intended as reconnection hasn't counted. After years of these missed attempts, each can begin to believe that the other isn't trying very hard anymore.

I see the pattern in real time, session after session. She wants connection, so she brings something up. He hears criticism and begins defending himself. She hears the defense as proof that he isn't listening, so she works harder to make him understand. He experiences her intensity as further evidence that nothing he says will be right, and retreats. She feels abandoned and follows harder. Before long, they aren't responding to the original problem at all. They are responding to what the other person's behaviour has come to mean.

This is where quiet quitting looks different depending on where you're sitting. For a woman, it may reach the point where she decides she isn't going to ask anymore. For a man, it may be less conscious: he stops initiating conversations he expects will end badly, works more, golfs more, gets absorbed in projects and gravitates toward places where he feels competent. He may even become easier to live with because he no longer sees much point in disagreeing.

At the same time, she may stop complaining. Ironically, he can interpret the quiet as evidence that things between them are finally getting better, when for her the opposite may be true. She has stopped complaining because she has stopped expecting the conversation to change anything.


I have seen enough couples to know that the end of fighting isn't always evidence that a marriage has healed. Sometimes someone has stopped believing there is any point in having the conversation.

There is another question I keep coming back to. When a husband says he was blindsided by his wife's decision to leave, what did he think was happening during all those years when she was telling him she was unhappy? It is easy to conclude that he wasn't listening, and sometimes that may be exactly what happened. But after years of listening to husbands as well as wives, I don't think that is always the whole story. Some men know perfectly well that their marriages aren't particularly happy; they just don't necessarily understand that the unhappiness means the marriage is ending. He may think this is what marriage looks like after fifteen years, two children, a mortgage and two exhausted adults trying to keep everything going. He may even be unhappy himself. While she is interpreting his silence as evidence that he doesn't care, he may be looking at the life they are still managing together and thinking, We're tired. We're not great right now. But we're still us.


Last winter I wrote about something I called The Tired Marriage…couples who weren't necessarily angry or unfaithful, just worn down by the accumulation of years: caregiving, careers, bills, aging parents, and the thousands of ordinary decisions involved in keeping a life running. Listening to these women talk about quietly quitting made me think about that piece again because, underneath so much of what they were describing, I heard tiredness. Tired of asking. Tired of explaining. Tired of waiting for something to change.

The person who once made your heart race now reminds you to pick up milk. I still believe the tiredness isn't always about the marriage. It can be about aging, repetition, and the unsettling realization that life has become smaller than either person imagined. But the conversation about women quietly quitting made me realize there was another part of the tired marriage I hadn't considered enough.

What if he is tired too? 

Not necessarily tired of her, but tired of feeling that he cannot get it right. And she may not be tired of him either; she may be tired of feeling that she has to keep asking him to even notice.


Those experiences can exist in the same marriage. They are different, of course, but one can feed the other for years. She may have spent years wondering why he doesn't see her, while he has spent those same years wondering why the things he does never seem to count. Each may experience themselves as the neglected one, and eventually both may become lonely inside the life they built together.

This is why I don't think “communicate better” gets couples very far. They can have the same argument, with impressive consistency, for twenty years. What interests me more is whether they have remained curious about one another…curious enough to bother to ask.

Esther Perel has written about the tension between familiarity and mystery in long-term love. We assume intimacy means knowing someone completely, but familiarity can fool us. After twenty or thirty years we know how our partner takes his coffee, what she'll order in a restaurant, which cupboard he'll leave open. We become so familiar with the pattern that we confuse knowing someone's habits with knowing the person.

But people don't stop changing because they got married. Parenthood changes us. Work changes us. Loss and aging change us. What mattered at thirty may bear little resemblance to what matters at sixty. Yet it is remarkably easy to keep relating to a version of our partner we formed years ago.

That is why I sometimes think the question a tired marriage needs isn't “Do you still love me?” It may be, “Who are you now?”

What are you thinking about that you haven't told me? What do you miss? What have you stopped asking me for? What have I stopped noticing?


That may be where a tired marriage begins to wake up. Not with a romantic holiday or another promise to have date night every Friday. Sometimes it starts when two people become interested in one another again.


Many long marriages don't lose their way because love disappears. They fade because curiosity does, and because two people have been trying to love each other in ways the other no longer recognizes. Women may quietly quit some marriages because they have become tired of asking to be emotionally met. Some men may retreat because they have become tired of feeling that the ways they know how to show love no longer count. Neither possibility excuses emotional neglect, chronic withdrawal, or an unfair mental load. Loving another person requires more than insisting that our intentions ought to be enough.
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I think it begins with a little less certainty about who stopped loving whom. Before deciding that either one has quietly quit, there are two questions worth asking:

What have I stopped noticing about you?

And:
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What have you been asking me for that I stopped hearing?
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I truly believe that, even after all these years, there are still things we don't know about the person beside us. And...I don't find that discouraging. Quite the opposite. It means there is still someone there to discover.


Maybe neither person has completely quit the marriage. Maybe they've both become tired in ways the other hasn't understood, and somewhere along the way they stopped looking closely enough to notice.


It may be time to look again.


Lydia Waruszynski is a relationship educator with more than 30 years of experience helping couples understand life, love and long-term partnership. She works with engaged and married couples through Let's Talk About Love.

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