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!