Quiet Quitting Your Marriage

Last week, Oprah released an episode of her podcast that’s been sitting with me ever since I listened to it. It’s called Quiet Quitting: Why Women Are Emotionally Checking Out of Their Marriage, in it she sits down with journalist Monica Corcoran Harel and therapists Nedra Glover Tawwab and Julie Menanno to talk about something many women recognise but rarely say out loud: staying in a marriage while having already, quietly, left it.

I haven’t shared publicly before, but a while back, Dave and I were approached to be guests on this very podcast. At the time, we said no, not because we didn’t want a paid trip to the states 😉 but because it didn’t feel relevant to our story. To be clear, the episode isn’t about infidelity, and I’m not suggesting any of the women or guests featured in it had experienced betrayal. It’s a much more general conversation about marriage burnout. That’s why we couldn’t see where we fit.

Listening to the episode after it aired, I realised how wrong that read was. Quiet Quitting describes the pattern of emotionally withdrawing while still staying, it is a pattern that I knew intimately and even though I didn’t have a name for it then, it’s what I had lived myself years before David and I separated in 2018.

Who I was before 2018

The article that sparked Oprah’s episode describes women who keep the household running, who keep showing up, but who quietly stop hoping anything will change and begin to focus on their own identity and security whilst remaining in their primary relationship. Reading that, I felt like I was reading a description of myself in the years leading up to our separation, even though my version of it looked a little different.

I didn’t stay completely silent, I must honest about that. I kept expressing myself, kept saying what I needed, kept raising what wasn’t working and kept trying. I guess it was kind of one long drawn out and exhausting protest. What wore me down wasn’t a failure to speak up, it was watching the same cycle repeat itself, over and over, without anything really shifting. I’d raise it, something would seem to change for a while, and then we’d be back exactly where we started. Round and round. Eventually I was fatigued by the merry-go-round of it all, more than I was defeated by silence. N.B. keep in mind that all the while Dave was living in duality with his secret sexual basement that I knew nothing about.

What’s also important to note is that I didn’t completely abandon myself in the process. I kept looking after me, keeping my own interests, my own friendships, my own sense of who I was outside the marriage. Through this I remained buoyant, for sure I was probably clinging to the shreds of a life-raft at times but I didn’t let the exhaustion tip into disappearing altogether. Looking back, I think that’s part of why I was eventually able to call it, not from a place of collapse, but from a place of still having enough of myself intact to know something had to change. Everyone has different reasons for staying long enough to make the best decision for themselves, and their choice should be validated, supported and not judged. Quiet quitting, for me, wasn’t the end of me showing up for my own life. It was the end of getting back on a ride that kept promising a different outcome and never delivering one.

Two kinds of quiet

I think there are two kinds of quiet quitting, and I lived through both at different points in my life.

There’s the slow, older kind, the one I’ve just described. Not a failure to speak up, but the exhaustion that builds when you keep speaking up and keep watching the same cycle repeat anyway, with nothing intrinsically changing. That was who I was before 2018 and interestingly enough, this wasn’t the catalyst for change, it wasn’t more words that made a difference it was the words “Our relationship has come to the end of the road” followed by action. That action being, the end of the relationship as it was…

And then there’s a different kind of quiet, one I recognise in the women I’ve come to know since, the withdrawal that comes after a rupture, after discovery, while you’re still working out whether it’s safe to open back up. That one isn’t a failure to try, it’s your instincts asking, reasonably so, whether anything has actually changed before you let your guard down again.

I don’t think either kind makes you broken. I think they’re both just versions of a woman protecting herself the only way she knew how, at the time.

What I’d say to her now

If I could go back and speak to the woman I was before 2018, I don’t think I’d tell her to speak up sooner because she already was speaking up. I think I’d tell her that her exhaustion wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t weakness either. It meant something real kept going unmet despite her efforts, and that noticing the merry-go-round for what it was, even before she knew what to do about it, was already the beginning of coming back to herself.

I’d also tell her that staying buoyant mattered more than she knew. That holding onto pieces of herself outside the marriage wasn’t a betrayal of the relationship, it was what let her eventually leave from a place of clarity rather than collapse, and eventually, what allowed her return to the relationship as someone wholly confident in self rather than someone merely surviving.

Naming it, finally

There’s something powerful about hearing a phrase like “quiet quitting” attached to an experience you lived through without ever having language for it. I didn’t have that language back then. I just knew something in me had gone quiet, and eventually, that quiet became a decision.

I share this not as a counsellor with a framework to offer, but simply as a woman looking back on her own marriage, and on the version of herself who was quietly enduring long before she found the words, or the courage — to say she was done. That chapter, and everything that came after it, including the mess that led Dave and I back to each other, is part of why we wrote our memoir, Beyond Betrayal.

If truth be known, there are still times, even now, when that old instinct to withdraw sneaks back in. I don’t think it ever fully disappears. But Dave and I both live by what we call the 80/20 relationship rule, (80% of what you really want from a relationship and 20% of what your’e prepared to accept and can live with) and he has proven, consistently, that he can be a safe person for this relationship. That consistency is what lets me notice the withdrawal when it shows up now, and choose to stay open anyway, rather than let it quietly take over the way it once did.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, I hope it helps to know you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone in it. Have a listen to the podcast it’s worth it.

P.S. and if you’re interested Dave and I were recent guests on the Confident Again Podcast, our topic “The A Word; Naming Abuse in Betrayal”

With Love and Gratitude Noni xxx