Twenty-seven years ago, I fell in love. True, mad, passionate love where we drank like fish, laughed like hyenas and were at it like rabbits. I’d finally found a down-to-earth man who was as sexy and funny as he was kind. Within a year, we were living together. Within six, we were walking down the aisle. Within eight, we were parents. Within ten, we’d entered the “quiet quitting” phase … if you can call something that lasts for more than a decade a “phase.”
It’s not only women [who pull back]. My [future] ex-husband withdrew not long after he moved in and took over my living room with his Technics turntables. Why make an effort? After all, he now had what he needed—someone with whom to split the bills, cooking and cleaning. Someone to watch The Sopranos with. Someone to have sex with whenever he damn well felt like it.
The problem is he stopped damn well feeling like it. (The stereotype of the woman losing desire doesn’t always hold up.) Maybe it was because sharing a toilet is a passion-killer. Or because he was “nagged incessantly”—i.e. asked—to stack the dishwasher. Or because he was avoidant. Whatever the reason, when his libido started dying, so did our relationship. It’s really bloody hard to bounce back from continual rejection, especially in a void of affection.
In the early 2000s, therapy was for rich, neurotic Manhattanites, not stiff-upper-lipped Brits. So rather than talk about the issues we let them fester into a stinking quagmire of resentment. Whether it stems from hurt, feeling taken for granted or carrying the domestic load, resentment sows the seed.
With resentment replacing intimacy, our connection disintegrated. But at least we still had, at this pre-kids stage, a joint social life. We’d go out with other couples and get absolutely hammered (because that’s just what you did back then). Mostly these were bonding sessions, reminders that we could have fun together. But occasionally the booze lubricated the resentment. Nights out would culminate in arguments or put-downs, mostly in private but sometimes in front of embarrassed friends.
I started having doubts but, ultimately, he was a good man, an outlier in a sea of bad ones. So when he asked me to marry him I swept all the hurt under the carpet, said yes and agreed to start a new life together in Sussex.
Committing to each other helped clean up the dysfunctional bullshit. We had a legendary wedding. And when we exchanged vows, we meant them. We even had sex on our wedding night. I know, right?! But—surprise, surprise—the honeymoon period didn’t last. Luckily, though, we’d squeezed in enough sex for me to get pregnant.
When our first baby was born we both discovered that parent/child love was too pure to be corrupted by rejection and resentment. Our daughter had given us a new receptacle for our love and we effortlessly poured every drop into her. Jolly handy, as this meant we no longer had to bother with the more complicated task of loving each other.
If resentment sowed the seed of our quiet quitting, having a baby fertilized it into an out-of-control weed. News flash: caring for a newborn is tiring. And carers may disagree on what constitutes good parenting, which blows open the floodgates for sniping and arguing. So snipe and argue we did. Until, that is, we realized fighting was more exhausting than accepting a continuous background hum of irritation, dissatisfaction and antipathy.
The following decade was defined by numbness. Our interactions were mostly perfunctory but occasionally terse. I can’t say we were like flatmates because I probably would have made more effort with a flatmate. Our new home in Sussex was big enough for us to lead separate lives in separate bedrooms. Instead of watching The Sopranos together, he was now free to watch Second World War documentaries in the living room while I tortured myself upstairs with tales of unrequited love. In all honesty, I had a more meaningful relationship with the dog.
We so craved alone time that our diaries became those of divorced co-parents. Everything got transactional. “You went out with your friends last weekend so I get this one.” And yet, had we made more effort to relive the bonding nights of our youth, we may have remembered there was common ground under all those weeds.
The rare times we did spend together felt awkward, like being with a stranger. Without realizing it, we’d taken different paths (him, rugby; me, writing) and were too far down these paths to turn back. The only thing we had left in common was our children. So, clichés that we were, we’d spend this sacred time together talking about the kids, thus rendering it pointless.
As our children got older and became more independent, we could no longer hide behind their all-consuming needs so the quiet quitting got louder. We flirted briefly with couples counseling. We got advice on rekindling intimacy—start slow with non-sexual contact. But the flame had long been extinguished and what I once craved now gave me the ick. He probably felt the same.
By the time the pandemic hit, the resentment that had permeated our home for the past ten years started spreading faster than Covid. With nowhere to go, the quiet quitting turned into outright mutual disdain. In that stunning summer sunshine of 2020, he would sit in our garden happily drinking wine and relishing the solitude, while I would pine for escape and friends.
Watching the lockdown favorite Normal People and knowing I would never again experience passion like that, I sobbed. Then I woke up (in a separate bed) and asked for a divorce. It took him a while to come around to the idea. Like a true quiet quitter, he wasn’t quite ready to blow up our comfortable but unhappy life together.
As divorces go, ours was relatively civilized. That said, telling the kids and upending their worlds created a guilt that will stay with us forever. Thankfully it’s a convenient truth that children are better off with divorced parents than unhappy ones.
Once the decree came through, I had been reborn and wondered why the hell it took more than a decade of quiet quitting to pluck up the courage. Yes, divorce was painful for all involved, but when you come out the other side you’re free to start again, armed with invaluable insights. One of which is: it’s better to feel something—even pain—than the numbness of quiet quitting.
Some details have been changed
