All* of my friends are ending their marriages

*OK, not all, but a lot of them, and only the heterosexual ones. And I'm pretty sure I know why

On Monday a friend told me, almost in passing, that she was leaving her “miserable marriage”. I didn’t know there was anything especially miserable about her marriage, although I’d always thought she was way more fun, interesting, smart etc than her, frankly, quite boring husband. (Having been stuck with him for several hours at a friend’s wedding, I’d often wondered how she put up with him. But, who knows, he probably felt the same about me.)

Anyway, even though I couldn’t say I saw it coming, I wasn’t honestly that surprised. After all, she’s not the first. She’s not even the second or the third. She is, in fact, about the fifteenth woman I know in their mid-40s to late-50s who has turned around in the last few years and gone… Is this it? Really? For the next thirty-odd years? No ta. 

Let’s be clear, these are not, on the whole, women in so-called bad marriages. Although I’m inclined to think that bad is in the eye of the person who has to lie next to it in bed every night. They are not, on the whole, having affairs, although “people” often find that hard to believe (and are vocal about it). And they have not, again on the whole, been cheated on (although some have). They are not even all suddenly “freed up” by the kids leaving home (although, again, some are). They have “just” tired of the daily grind of “acting the wife” as my aforementioned friend put it. And all that that, even in 2024, seems to entail.

The first of my friends to leave her husband turned out to be the advanced guard, not that we knew it at the time. She and her partner had been together more than twenty years, had four kids, and despite them both having excessively full-time jobs, albeit hers freelance, she had divided herself between the professional and the domestic for the bulk of those years. Everything else – a social life, an inner life, her health, friendships, everything – went by the wayside. Like so many other heterosexual women in traditional marriages (even if you think it’s not going to be traditional when you enter it, that you’re different, that you will never put up with that patriarchal nonsense) the effort was almost all hers. Well over 90% at least. If she wasn’t doing it, she was arranging for someone else to do it. If a ball dropped, no-one else was going to pick it up. (I’ll never forget interviewing BBC news broadcaster Mishal Husain for The Pool a few years ago and her talking about ordering nappies in bulk before going away for work so her husband wouldn’t run out…) And my friend’s partner – charming, funny, a “good dad”, definitely “one of the good guys” – just carried on regardless. Doubtless he absolutely would have collected the kids from school if one of them got sick but, y’know, he was at work. I guess it just didn’t occur to either of them that so was she. 

There’s nothing remotely standout about this story. Just as there’s nothing standout about his genuine shock when she told him she wanted a divorce, nor about the familial recriminations at her for “giving up on their marriage so easily”(although interestingly none of these came from the kids who were like, ‘well, yeah, of course’), nor about the assumption that she must have found someone else because why else would she leave…? (For the record, she hadn’t.) Why would anyone pull the plug if they didn’t have another bed to jump straight into? 

How long have you got? Pull up a chair! 

This is a relatively new thing, of course. In part, it’s about economics and women earning their own money, albeit often not a lot of it. It’s about privilege, of course. Many people who would love to leave relationships ranging from lacklustre to downright terrifying simply can’t afford to. And it’s about social mores.

It’s about women waking up one morning or slowly, over the course of years, coming to, and realising they HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

You don’t have to look very far back – or even at all – to stumble on the old trope of the man who gets successful in his chosen field and dumps his first wife (the one he’s often been with since school or college, who he’s had kids with, who has invariably subverted her wishes for his) for a younger glitzier model more befitting his new high flying status. On Tuesday night at The Shift Bookclub Live I was speaking to Emily Howes, author of The Painter’s Daughters, about the novel she’s working on next, Mrs Dickens, which takes as its inspiration Charles Dickens’ much overlooked first wife, Kate. The woman who bore their ten children and then found herself shamed for “letting herself go”. Woman has ten children, body changes, fancy that. The woman he left for the much less over-looked Nelly Tiernan (almost definitely, although possibly one of his other mistresses…). Chances are you don’t know anything about her other than that he dumped her, because it was a time-honoured rite of passage, almost. First wife dies/ages/gets boring/loses her looks/all of the above, man moves on.

I’m not saying that never happens any more. Of course it does. All the time. But it feels like there’s a sea change happening. A big one. And a lot of men (not all men obv – in fact take that as read for the whole piece) don’t like it. They like things the way they were.

Because the truth is, heterosexual marriage works better for men than for women. 

When I was writing The Shift book I came across a 2019 study in which researchers asked three sets of married couples – heterosexual, gay and lesbian – to keep daily diaries recording their experiences of marital strain and distress. Women in different-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 were in the middle, recording similar levels of distress. “What’s striking,” the lead author of the study, Michael Garcia, pointed out, “is that earlier research had concluded that women in general were likely to report the most relationship distress. But it turns out that’s only women married to men...”

Women (generally – not all women, not all men…) do the bulk of the labour. They make most of the effort.

Who knew?

Then I canvassed the fifty women aged approx 40-60 who had volunteered to be my focus group. Of those in long-term relationships, substantially more than 50% were either dissatisfied or had recently left. Even some of those who said they weren’t especially dissatisfied expressed disquiet when they thought about the future. I will never forget Stephanie, then 49, who had been with her husband since their late teens and was in despair at their diverging levels of ambition. “Bless him for wanting a simple life – a shag, two bottles of wine, Kung Pao prawns and golf most days, stopping off for three pints on the way home – but that’s his dream life. It’s not mine,” she said. “I’m bored of it. I constantly wonder, is this it?”

It was salutary. I barely needed two hands to count the women who, like me, were in a long term relationship and happy with the balance of labour, power and responsibility. Even fewer if you only counted the women whose partners were the opposite sex.

In the case of the women I know, I’m pretty sure that perimenopause has also come into play, in some shape or form. The departure of what’s generously called the “nurturing hormone”, but I prefer to think of as “the doormat hormone”, causes them to look up and wonder why they’ve been doing and being and putting up with all these years. And perhaps conclude that they’re not doing and being and putting up with it any more.

That’s midlife women, but what about the rest? Because it’s not just women in their 40s and 50s who are taking a look at heterosexual marriage and finding it wanting. It’s women of all ages. 

I have much 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, of course they’ll miss him, but they certainly won’t be rushing to replace him. They might get a friend, for sex and fun and weekends away on the side. But marriage? More dinners? More socks? More snoring? More Sky Sports? Not on your life. 

And then there are the Gen-Z women who are distinctly less enthusiastic than Gen-Z men about having children some day. Who can blame them? You don’t have to have children yourself – and I don’t – to know that even now there’s only one person whose life changes radically, and it’s rarely the straight man’s.

But it’s not just about labour (be it emotional and domestic) and who ends up taking it on. It’s about who gets prioritised and whose hopes and dreams get collectively or individually shunted aside.

A couple of weeks ago, on The Shift podcast, something suddenly dawned on Australian author Helen Garner, 81, mid-conversation. She was talking about the trajectory her professional life took into non-fiction during her third marriage in her 40s and 50s to Australian writer Murray Bail, when she had already published the successful novels Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach. “Unconsciously I moved off the turf of our rivalry as writers,” she said. She wasn’t saying she doesn’t love writing non-fiction, she does. And she’s extremely good at it. She just hadn’t really thought about it like that before. 

Something similar was related by poet and memoirist

Maggie Smith

, 47, whose gorgeous memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful is one of a slew of recent American “divorce memoirs” by women in their 40s that have made an impression on the bestseller lists. (Others include Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters.) Smith met her ex when they were both studying creative writing. Marriage and kids saw her put aside her dream to support his, he went to law school, she became “more wife and mother”. She continued to write in a freelance capacity until, one day, she wrote a poem called Good Bones that went viral and projected her career into the fast lane. It could no longer take a backseat. As Smith says of the inconvenience (to her ex) of being obliged to travel for work. “I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff.”

Ultimately they divorced, but not before, by her own admission, Smith had come dangerously close to sacrificing herself and her dreams.

And this is why her memoir and the other women’s stories of divorce and reemergence are resonating so loudly right now, because a zillion other women are looking up and thinking, hang on, Me Too.

And this, I think, is why there seems to be a divorce/separation epidemic amongst my heterosexual friends. They’re done being the one who makes all the effort. Who remembers all the birthdays. Who works out what to have for tea. They’re done shelving their aspirations and prioritising other people’s dreams. If they’re lucky they have thirty, forty years ahead of them. This is their time. 

• Listen to Maggie Smith talking about her midlife reappearing act on The Shift podcast.

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