The Shift: Why More Women Are Leaving Marriages Than Ever Before

There is a quiet shift happening inside marriages everywhere but it’s turning into a crisis. Men are facing a loneliness epidemic and women are in their Independent Era. The shift isn’t loud, it’s not dramatic and it’s not even happening the way people expect. 

Women are shifting internally, slowly, emotionally and gradually. They are stepping into their power into their potential more than ever before. They are now CEOs of companies, highly respected healthcare professionals, they’re breaking the ceiling and the mold of what tradition is. 

Growing up I always thought divorce was for people who couldn’t work through things because they weren’t smart enough, driven enough or capable. Now as a woman going though my own divorce it’s not any of those things. It’s about choosing a path that doesn’t shrink who I am as a person. But like so many women today, the version of me inside that marriage became quieter, smaller, and more exhausted than I’d ever been willing to admit.

What’s happening in marriages today isn’t a coincidence and it didn’t happen overnight. There are major shifts happening culturally, generationally and emotionally. And women aren’t leaving because they suddenly stopped caring about love or commitment. They’re leaving because they stopped believing that living in pain is the price of marriage.

The Old Script Is Crumbling

Women today were raised with a very specific marriage script…

• Marriage is hard.
  
• Your needs aren’t always supposed to be met.
  
• Sacrifice is noble.
  
• “Good women” try harder.
  
• Men mature slower.
  
• Emotional connection will come later.
  
• Be grateful he’s a good provider.
  
• Love means staying, even when it hurts.
  

This script kept many women over-functioning, overthinking, over-giving, over-extending to the point of losing themselves. On the other side of things, this script kept many men under-functioning as a default.

For years, I followed that script. I saw my grandparents, my parents, aunts and uncles follow that script. It wasn’t until it started breaking me where I was once so proud of the person I’ve become, independent, self sufficient, that I thought this could not be it.

As I look around, I realize I’m not alone. The mom friends I met along the way in my motherhood journey expressed that they too navigated a divorce or are caught in the gray of deciding to stay or leave. Thousands of women are waking up inside their marriages thinking:

“Is this really it?”
“Is this supposed to be love?”
“Is this what I deserve?”
“Why am I carrying the whole emotional and mental load?”

Women aren’t leaving because they’re selfish. It’s much deeper than that and not an easy decision. They’re leaving because the script we were handed no longer matches what it means to be a healthy, emotionally connected partner in today’s world. It doesn’t align with our core and our desire for more. 

Women Have Changed but Marriage Hasn’t

This is the part people don’t want to say out loud, but it’s the truth:

Women have evolved faster than the institution of marriage. If we think about it, the marital structure wasn’t built for us. It was built for men and for us to rely on men for our survival. 

We are emotionally literate in a way our mothers and grandmothers never got to be. We know words like emotional labor, attachment wounds, stonewalling, people-pleasing, boundaries, self-gaslighting, generational trauma. Our drive is growth not just for us but especially for our children. We know what worked and what didn’t work for us and we are determined to break that generational trauma. 

And men, not all, but many, were never raised or taught to evolve with us.

So when women grow, marriage stays the same…unless both partners grow together.

And that gap becomes bigger, deeper and eventually unbearable. It became unbearable for me as I felt as if Kevin wanted a modern wife in the 1950’s. 

The Emotional Labor Crisis

This is a big one, maybe one of the biggest reasons women walk away. It was for me. Women for all time but especially today, aren’t just wives.

They’re the:

• default parent
• emotional sponge
• relationship manager
• social coordinator
• birthday planner
• child therapist
• marriage counselor 
• keeper of appointments
• maintainer of the home
• person who notices everything
• invisible labor force
  

Men have “helped” and want to help…. But women have carried. We’ve carried heavy burdens and we need men to say “let me help you carry, we will carry the burden together.”

I’ve been entertained by the content I’m seeing of men saying they provide financially and asking women what they’re bringing to the table. For a lot of women, WE ARE the table. We carry the majority of everything so men can leave and further their career while also working full time jobs. 

This is not about villainizing men. They may not even see the invisible work because the society trained them not to. Their laundry was probably always done, folded and put away. The dishes they used after eating a warm delicious meal was just set in the sink and it magically got taken care of. They were told providing was enough.

But women today want something different.

Women want partnership, not parenting their spouse.
Collaboration not making all the decisions.
Support not survival.
Emotional presence not emotional avoidance.

Eventually, the weight becomes too much for one person to hold. That weight fell down on me, hard in my postpartum. I pride myself on being able to do a lot and over extend at times. Maybe it was just in my epigenetics but I knew when I needed to reach out for help. I felt like I reached out to the wrong person, my spouse. 

We’re Not Willing to Shrink Anymore

In past generations, women stayed because staying was the only acceptable choice.Divorce was so taboo and women were painted the villain if they left their husbands. 

Today, women are realizing something powerful and I honestly think it scares men:

You can love someone and still outgrow them.
You can care about your family and still refuse to dim yourself in order to stay inside it.
You can cherish history and still acknowledge the present is hurting you and no longer serving you.

For many women, but definitely for me,  the marriage didn’t break in one moment. It broke in repetitive micro fractures:

• Every time I silenced my needs to keep the peace.
  
• I vocalized my emotions.
  
• I felt like a mother to a grown partner cleaning up after an adult and managing his emotions.
  
• I apologized first, even when I was hurt.
  
• My emotional world was dismissed or minimized.
  
• I had to be the “bigger person” over and over and over again.
  

Eventually, those fractures break a system we call marriage. A woman doesn’t leave because she stopped loving her husband. She leaves because she stopped recognizing herself and realizes being with her husband is doing more harm than lifting her up and supporting her.

The Therapy Generation

One of the biggest cultural shifts affecting marriages right now is therapy and not in the way people think.

Women are going to therapy in order to heal their childhood trauma or sexual assault traumas. We are learning the language of emotional health and learning about ourselves in the process.
Women are identifying patterns and learning how to change them by developing emotional tools and reaching out to their girl friends for support. Women are discovering that their friendships become more supportive than their relationship with their spouse. 

Meanwhile, many men are culturally taught to avoid emotions, avoid vulnerability, avoid therapy, and avoid introspection. Men are taught that seeing a therapist means something is wrong with you and that you’re somehow not man enough. Society has taught men that having feelings and emotions make you weak. 

They are shackled by these beliefs and are not supported in a system that encourages men to do the same work that women are doing, that is to improve and grow internally. 

So women grow, evolving, surviving. Men stay the same. And that emotional gap grows wider and wider, we’re not miles apart. Men and women are having difficulty finding common ground. 

I saw this in my own marriage. I was growing internally at a rapid rate, learning boundaries, emotional safety, conflict resolution, containing my own emotions and sitting with them. But my growth was creating distance because I wasn’t met with the same willingness or effort.

Marriage can survive many things but it cannot survive an emotional gap that keeps widening.

Women Aren’t Leaving for “More” — They’re Leaving for Themselves

Everyone loves to assume that today’s women are leaving because they’re “unhappy” or “want something better” or “aren’t willing to work on it.” Women have generally been blamed. But the truth is quieter, simpler, and more human than that:

Women aren’t leaving for more.
Women are leaving for peace.

Peace from chaos.
Peace from emotional loneliness.
Peace from carrying everything.
Peace from living as a single parent inside a two-parent home.
Peace from the version of themselves that was slowly disappearing.

And once a woman tastes peace, she realizes how noisy her marriage truly was. How it no longer serves her. Why be in a relationship that no longer serves you? 

This Isn’t Just a Women’s Issue — It’s a Crisis for Men Too

This whole series you’re reading is not anti-men. I apologize if that is my impact. 

It’s a wake-up call. A call to arms of sorts. 

Men are struggling too. They’re lost in a world that conditioned them to be the providers and only the providers. What happens when women are making more then men and they no longer need men to provide? Are they equipped to be “domestic”? 

I feel like they’re disconnected from their emotional world. Do men call each other and get real and vulnerable with each other? Vulunerabliity is often mistaken as weakness. They never learned how to express needs, or regulate emotions, or show up emotionally. They may not even know what their emotional needs are. Physical needs? Sure. But emotional needs? 

And that gap, that difference between emotional maturity in women and emotional suppression in men, is at the heart of our marriage crisis today. Not only marital crisis, but dating crisis as well. Women are busy and they no longer want to waste their time. This is women calling men to step up and meet them where they’re at. 

I am very pro choice in a lot of ways. I believe that everyone has a choice. Men, you can chose to step up or you can choose to stay the same. If you choose to stay the same, you have no one to blame but yourself for the loneliness crisis you are contributing to. 

The Shift Is Here and Now And It Isn’t Slowing Down

What can both sides do? 

Women

Stay true to yourself and your voice. If you lost yourself in your marriage or your postpartum, the first step is finding yourself again. It may not be the same self, but yourself. 

Continue to share your emotions in a respectful, nonjudgmental and blaming way. This is a skill to work on, it may not come naturally so don’t give up. You’re giving your emotions a voice and that’s important to stay grounded and true to yourself. 

Let go of expectations. Expectations of your partner changing. The only power you have is changing what you can within yourself and your choices. 

Men

Listen. Listen with an open mind and open heart. Push pause on the little boy inside who feels like they’re not doing enough. Let me say this, you are doing enough and even if it’s not enough for your partner, it’s enough for you and that’s important too. 

Remember that your partner is SHARING her perspective and feelings. The focus is feeling seen and heard, not to attack your character. Remember we are all trying our best (that’s an assumption) and we should offer our spouse that grace. 

Honor your feelings. Having feelings doesn’t make you weak, attacking and hurting others because you have feelings is NOT OKAY. We teach kids not to hit when they’re mad, what makes it okay for someone to lash out when they’re upset and mad? It doesn’t. Therapy is for the strong, not for the weak. Therapy is acknowledging that everyone is a work in progress and no one is above therapy. 

This is the first installment of many, diving deeper into a crisis that seems to grow bigger and stronger. We’re not talking about it enough and we should. This affects both men AND women single, dating, married or divorced. Times are changing, people are changing, society needs to change.