On Monday, a friend told me, almost casually, that she was leaving her “miserable marriage.” I didn’t realize there was anything particularly miserable about her, although I had always found her much more fun, interesting, and smart than her downright dull husband.
After being stuck with him for a few hours at a friend’s wedding, I often wondered how she put up with him. But who knows, he probably felt the same way about me.
I couldn’t say I saw it coming at the time, but I honestly wasn’t surprised. After all, she’s not the first to announce an impending divorce. She’s not even the second or the third. In fact, she’s the 15th woman I know in her 40s to late 50s who has turned around in the last few years and said… Is this it? Really? For the next 30 years? No, thank you.
Let’s be clear: these are generally not women in so-called bad marriages, although I tend to think that “bad” is in the eyes of the person who lies next to them in bed every night.
They generally don’t have affairs. And they generally haven’t been cheated on. They haven’t all been suddenly released because the kids have left home.
A study found that women in opposite-sex marriages reported the highest levels of psychological distress, while men in same-sex marriages reported the lowest levels.
They are simply tired of the daily grind of “playing the wife” as my aforementioned friend called it, which even in 2024 still seems to mean that they are overexerting themselves on behalf of others without getting enough appreciation for it.
The first of my friends to leave her husband turned out to be the vanguard. She and her partner had been together for over 20 years, had four children, and, despite both working full-time for most of those two decades, she had divided herself between professional and domestic work.
That meant that everything else – her social life, her inner life, her health, her friendships, everything – suffered.
Like so many heterosexual women in traditional marriages (even if you think it won’t be traditional when you start out, that you’re different, that you’ll never put up with the patriarchal bullshit), the effort was almost entirely hers. Well, more like 90 percent.
If she wasn’t doing that household chore or that family errand, she would arrange for someone else to do it. If a ball fell, no one else would pick it up.
My friend’s partner — charming, funny, a “good dad,” definitely “one of the good guys” — continued to work his job while she took care of her own and the lives of five other people.
He would have undoubtedly taken the children out of school if one of them had gotten sick, but he was at work. It didn’t occur to either of them that she was too.
There is nothing special about this story. Just as there is nothing special about his shock when he was told she wanted a divorce, nor about her family’s reproaches for ‘giving up their marriage so easily’ (although, remarkably, none came from the children to say, ‘Well, of course’).
There was also nothing unusual about the assumption that she had found someone else—because why else would she leave? Why would someone pull the plug if they didn’t have another bed to jump into right away? (For the record, she didn’t.)
This is a relatively new thing. It’s partly about economics and women making their own money, although often not much. It’s about privilege. Many people who want to leave relationships that range from boring to downright terrifying simply can’t afford to.
The truth is that heterosexual marriages work better for men than for women, writes Sam Baker
And it’s about social mores. It’s about women waking up one morning or slowly, over the years, coming to terms with themselves and realizing they’ve had enough.
You don’t have to look back far — or even at all — to encounter the old cliché of the man who becomes successful in his field and dumps his first wife (the woman he’s often been with since school or college, with whom he has children, and who consistently undermines her desires for his) for a younger, flashier model better suited to his new, high-flying status.
I recently spoke with author Emily Howes about her latest novel, Mrs Dickens, which takes as its inspiration Charles Dickens’ much-forgotten first wife, Kate, the woman who bore their ten children and then felt ashamed that she had “let herself go.”
Chances are you know nothing about Kate, except that the acclaimed author dumped her, because it was a tried and true rite of passage, almost. First wife dies/gets older/gets boring/loses her looks/all of the above, husband moves on.
I’m not saying that it never happens again. Of course it does — all the time. But it feels like there’s a sea of change going on. And a lot of men (not all men, of course) don’t like that. They want things to stay the way they were.
Because the truth is that heterosexual marriages work better for men than for women.
While writing my book The Shift, I came across a 2019 study in which researchers asked three groups of married couples—straight, gay, and lesbian—to keep a journal recording their experiences with marital tension and stress.
Women in opposite-sex marriages reported the highest levels of psychological distress. Men in same-sex marriages reported the lowest. Men married to women and women married to women fell somewhere in between, registering similar levels of distress.
“What’s striking,” noted Michael Garcia, the study’s lead author, “is that previous research had concluded that women were generally more likely to report relationship problems. But it turns out that’s only true for women married to men…”
Women (again, not all women) do most of the work. They put forth most of the effort.
I then interviewed the 50 women between the ages of 40 and 60 who had volunteered as a focus group for the book.
Women (again, not all women) do most of the work… and put forth most of the effort
Of the people in a long-term relationship, more than 50 percent were dissatisfied or had recently left the relationship.
Even some who said they were not particularly dissatisfied expressed concern when thinking about the future.
I will never forget Stephanie, then 49, who had been with her husband since their late teens and was desperate because of their differing ambitions.
“Luckily he wants a simple life – sex, two bottles of wine, Kung Pao prawns and golf almost every day, with a three-pint stop on the way home – but that’s his dream life, not mine,” she said.
“I’m tired of it. I keep asking myself, is this it?”
It was healing. I could barely use two hands to count the women who, like me, were in long-term relationships and were happy with the balance of work, power and responsibility. And even fewer if you only counted the women whose partners were the opposite sex.
For the women I know, I’m pretty sure perimenopause plays a role too, in some form or another.
The disappearance of those monthly floods of estrogen – which we mildly call the “nurturing hormone,” but I prefer to call it “the doormat hormone” – leaves them looking up and wondering what they’ve been doing, being, and enduring all these years.
And perhaps come to the conclusion that they no longer do it, no longer are it, and no longer accept it.
These are middle-aged women, but what about the rest of us? Because it’s not just women in their 40s and 50s who look at heterosexual marriages and see it as something deficient. It’s women of all ages.
I know a lot of older friends who joke that if/when they die, their husband will probably remarry in the time it takes to get (someone else) to change the sheets. But if/when their husband dies, they will miss him, of course, but they certainly won’t rush to replace him.
They might get a boyfriend, for sex and fun and weekends away on the side. But marriage? More dinners? More socks? More snoring? More Sky Sports? Not in your life.
And then there are Gen Z women, who are currently between the ages of 12 and 27 and are significantly less enthusiastic about having children than Gen Z men.
Who can blame them? You don’t have to have children yourself — and I don’t either — to know that even now there is only one person whose life changes radically, and it is rarely the man’s.
But it’s not just about labor (emotional and domestic) and who ultimately takes it on. It’s about who gets priority and whose hopes and dreams are collectively or individually pushed aside.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by poet Maggie Smith, 47, is a stunning book and one of several recent American “divorce memoirs” by women in their forties that have made a splash on the bestseller lists.
Others include Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Smith met her ex while they were both studying creative writing. Marriage and children forced her to put her dream on hold to support his. He went to law school; she became “more of a wife and a mother.”
She continued to freelance until one day she wrote a poem called Good Bones that went viral and launched her career. It couldn’t stay in the background any longer.
As Smith says of the inconvenience (for her ex) of having to travel for work: “I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as a staff member.”
Eventually, inevitably, they broke up, and Smith was saved at the last minute from sacrificing herself and her dreams. And this is why her memoir and other women’s stories of divorce and resurrection resonate so loudly now, because a trillion other women are looking up and thinking, Wait a minute, me too.
And this, I think, is why there seems to be a divorce epidemic among my heterosexual friends. They’re done with being the one who makes all the effort: the one who remembers all the birthdays; the one who figures out what to have for tea.
They are done with putting aside their aspirations and prioritising the dreams of others. If they are lucky, they have another 30, 40 years ahead of them. This is their time.
The Shift With Sam Baker is a newsletter aimed at middle-aged women. Find it on Substack at theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com