247. Quiet Quitting a Difficult Marriage

In this episode, I break down something I've coached women through but hesitated to share—quiet quitting your marriage. Quiet quitting works by releasing the fairy tale "Plan A" marriage that was never going to exist and designing a Plan B life that brings you peace.

Your partner may have never had the capacity for the dream marriage you thought you were going to have. Until you grieve that reality, it's impossible to build what's available. you stay trapped—waiting, begging, and burning yourself out for something that will never come.

In this episode we walk you through the mental shifts that breaks this cycle.  You'll learn how to Accept that marriage is a construct—one you can redesign without anyone's permission.

This approach isn't for everyone. If abuse exists in any form, this isn't your path. But if you're exhausted from forcing a partnership that doesn't function, you have more options than you realize.

The same healing work waits whether you stay or go. The question is: what do you want to build?

Ready to explore your options? Book your consultation call at sadecurry.com/schedule-appointment

Transcript

Hello, my extraordinary friends. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. Today I practiced—I got that off my tongue with no issues. Welcome back to the podcast. We are continuing on with our divorce series, and today I want to talk about something that I hesitated to talk about publicly. It's something that I have talked to my clients about, which is the concept of what is now mainstream called "quiet quitting your marriage."

There was an article that came out about a month ago talking about women who are quiet quitting their marriages. They are not divorcing. They don't want to get a divorce, but they're also tired of the turmoil and the back and forth and the arguing and all those things. So they were talking about their own experiences of pulling back from the marriage and not putting as much effort and not doing all the things that they were doing. And I thought, what an apt name for something that I had been talking about and coached several women through.

I work with divorced women, as you know. Most of them are dating, but there are some who come to me at the beginning of their journey to talk about what's going on in their marriage, and should they leave, and should they divorce this man. Or some came to me saying, "I'm divorcing this man," and then we had a conversation about what would be best for them, and then they made a decision to stay in their marriage—but to stay in a different way. So I thought quiet quitting was a great way to describe that because I didn't have a name for it. I wanted to talk about it because I think it's useful to normalize women making whatever decision they want about their relationship.

I know that might sound scandalous to some, to encourage women to quiet quit their marriages. But again, this is not for everyone. Some women need to divorce their partner and leave completely. Some women need to run as far away as possible from an abusive partner. For some women, quiet quitting is the best option, and then for some women, working on their marriage is the best option—going to counseling and working with a partner who also wants to do that work in an environment where the ingredients are present for that kind of work to be done.

This topic is very nuanced, and this is why I don't do a lot of advice-giving on the podcast. I know sometimes people want to listen to the podcast and get the exact answers that they're going to go use, and I try to be careful not to do that because it is never a one-size-fits-all when it comes to relationships. Very few things in life are actually one-size-fits-all. As a coach, I have to be careful not to put out formulas. It might sound like I'm being uncertain or I don't know what a person should do—no, I know, but only when I'm talking to that one person. So if you have specific questions about this, you can book a call with me and we can talk about what would be right for you.

Let me talk about my experience with helping women around quiet quitting. Some of these women are also women who chose to stay. If you think about it, this is not a new concept. You can think of it as women who chose to stay. The assumption is that there are only two options: you can stay and your husband, your spouse changes, and then your marriage is blissful; or you can stay and nothing changes, and then you're miserable. Those are the only two options that people have had when they've thought about staying versus divorcing.

The concept of quiet quitting—or when I describe it to my clients, I talk about renegotiating the relationship—is a third option that opens up twenty, thirty, forty different options because there are so many ways to quiet quit the relationship. There are so many ways to renegotiate the relationship. There are so many ways to redesign the relationship for yourself so that you are making the choices that are best for you. You don't have to either leave and break up your family or stay and be miserable or subject to abuse or subject to toxicity or mental cruelty. There are always so many options.

Whenever a client comes to me with this black and white thinking—"I either have to do this or this, and both are terrible"—one of the things I say to them, and I don't even know if this is true, it's just a theory that I use with my clients: there are usually three to five options. Let's find those three to five options. We do an exercise that creates a lot more flexibility in their brain so that they are starting to see things are not quite as rigid and fixed. What that does is lower that wall their brain has built up to new things coming in. It increases their curiosity about whatever it is we are talking about.

So you don't have to just leave and break up your family or stay and be miserable. There are at least five options for whatever it is you're thinking about when it comes to your marriage. Hopefully, by the time you go through this podcast episode, you'll see some more options for yourself than just things that point to misery.

The shift you have to embrace mentally is that you can have a different marriage. You can create a different marriage by yourself. When I heard this when I was in my marriage, the way this is usually said to women makes it sound like you're being asked to do all the work to get to a happy marriage. That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is: when you got married the first time, when you first met this person, when you were in love, when things were wonderful—before the infidelity, before the abuse, before the mental cruelty, before the addiction and all those things—you went into this marriage wanting a Plan A marriage. A marriage where you had a partner. You did great things together. You got along. You raised the kids. You were a team. You were happy. You enjoyed each other's company. You were in love. There was romance. There was sex. There was safety. That is your Plan A marriage.

So when people talk about staying and finding happiness while staying, changing—being the one person who changes the relationship—you think that I'm saying you should stay and then do the work to achieve the Plan A marriage, the marriage where everybody's happy and you're happy. What I'm saying is that Plan A marriage does not exist. That fairy tale does not exist for you in this relationship.

So when we're talking about staying, we're talking about designing your Plan B marriage. This is why a lot of people who stay say, "It's so hard to stay. I'm miserable. He's doing this. I can't detach emotionally." It's because you're still attached to your original marriage, the original marriage that you wanted, the Plan A marriage. You still want that marriage, and so you're in there doing the work to try to create the Plan A marriage by yourself. That Plan A marriage no longer exists.

The first thing you have to do is grieve that. I think not grieving the loss of the dream—the reality that maybe your partner was never going to be faithful, that your partner was always going to have this problem, that your partner lied and they were one person and turned out to be another—not embracing that reality is what keeps women from being able to renegotiate or redesign or recreate a new situation if they choose to stay.

That's really the first step: to accept that the marriage never existed. The man you thought he was—he was never that man. The situation you thought you had was never the situation. And that might take a minute and some work. Working through that by itself is one thing. Depending on the client I'm working with, it can take months to do that. Some clients, we work through it pretty quickly. But that is the breakdown. You're tearing down what exists in your mind. You're tearing down the fairy tale and, in a sense, the lies, the story, the narrative that this was going to be couple goals.

When you do that, you give yourself the opportunity to create something new. A lot of the resistance to doing the work or engaging with what's happening in a marriage is because a lot of people don't want to let go of the belief that they can have that.

Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. This is not the stuff I typically share on the podcast, but this is such a different topic, I have to be real with you. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. It depends on you, who you are. It depends on the partner that you're working with. Not every partner has the capacity for your Plan A marriage.

If you are listening to this and resonating with any of it, chances are you married someone who did not have the capacity to build that Plan A marriage with you. In order to move ahead in any direction—whether you are divorcing or you are staying—you have to accept that. And accepting it is work, depending on how long you built up that fairy tale in your mind, how long you've craved it and desired it and believed it was available and worked towards it. There might be some work there.

Once you do that, then you can start to say, "Okay, what do I want to build, and is staying and building this thing the best thing for me?"

Some people for whom staying and quiet quitting or renegotiating is the best option—a lot of times it has to do with children. I worked with a client who chose to stay, and her reasons were partly because of her kids. There were certain things in the mix with her children where having them in the home with their father was the best thing for them. It was just the way it was—those were actual facts. It was going to be the best thing for them to be in the home with their dad in her situation.

So then we did that work to say, "Okay, it's nice that you hear a lot about 'you should move out' and 'you should do this,' but is that always the case?" Not every divorced woman is escaping an abusive situation or a situation where there's mental cruelty or financial abuse or spiritual abuse or physical abuse. People divorce for many reasons.

In her case, she wanted a divorce and she wanted to be out of that relationship, but she also wanted other things. I think the "alsos" are what's important. The "alsos" are what we need to take into consideration. For someone who's thinking, "Yeah, I don't like him anymore"—but also, what are your "alsos" that you want to consider?

What happens is when you bring all of those factors onto the table—finances, health, children, your geography, where you live, the culture you live in, the activities you're participating in, the life that you want, all the things—when you put all those things on the table, now you're looking at the big picture. It's not just, "I'm looking at the fact that he did this, and I hate it, and now I'm going to leave." It's, "There's this bigger picture of all these things. When I put all these things on the table in the priority that I want them, in the order that I want them for the life that I want, what does that picture tell me? And what can I have?"

With clients like this, typically what I do is take them back to first principles. You have choices. You have options. For many of them, they've been running the whole household anyway. Anything that's important in that relationship, for the most part, these women are the ones who have been running it. I tell them, "You have a lot of power, but because in your mind you're still buying into the fairy tale, and you're buying into this person being supposed to be the leader—even if they're not leading anything or doing anything or acting on anything—you're just buying into certain old beliefs and old constructs and conditioning. You're not exercising your ability and your capacity."

Once they realize where their power is, where their ability is, what is within their control within the relationship, then we begin to put together a design for the relationship that they want.

One thing that is helpful is to rename the relationship. I have one client—actually two of them that we did this work with—they renamed their relationship. One renamed her relationship with her partner to "co-worker" because when it came to paperwork and stuff, he was cooperative. I said, "When you look at him, stop looking at him like he's a husband. Look at him like he's a co-worker."

Immediately that charge comes down. That pain and the anger and the frustration—because a husband is supposed to be doing a whole bunch of things this man is not doing, has never done, and isn't getting ready to do. There's no point, because every time you look at him and say, "This is my husband," that gap between what he does and what you want, or what you define as what a husband should do, immediately brings up all of these negative feelings.

But if you go home and you're thinking, "Oh yeah, my co-worker for running this home is here"—the charge goes all the way down.

So one client, we did that. The other one, I think she named him "co-parent." In her mind, she was divorced, and he was her co-parent because it was about the kids. She was thinking, "Oh yeah, he would be a great co-parent. I love co-parenting with this man." So she took all of the other responsibilities of husband that she had given him in her mind and said, "Okay, he's no longer responsible for any of these."

Now, these are not conversations that these women had with their spouses at all. This had nothing to do with the man. It was not about changing him, controlling him, telling him, "Oh yeah, now you're my co-parent, no longer my husband." It wasn't about any of that. This was all a mental exercise so that my clients could get to peace in their own mind, free up their emotional space, free up their mental space so that they could do the things they wanted to do with their life.

For the other one, the renaming was co-parent, and it's amazing. I always see just how much relief that redesign of the relationship does for them. It's like, "Oh, all this drama is in my mind because I want him to do all these things. I want him to be all these things. And he was never going to do that."

So you can take responsibility for how you see your marriage—not the way I was told in my first marriage, "You're so negative." I wish someone had told me how to quiet quit my marriage. I really wish.

In the community that I was in, and in the conditioning and beliefs that I had, you either had to be totally happy in your relationship, or you were this terrible, negative, complaining, ungrateful person. But that middle ground is so beautiful if you can find it.

Taking responsibility for how you see your marriage—not in a shaming way, but in a powerful way—is really the second step. Seeing those choices. Then taking your needs that are not being met off the table from your partner.

Again, this is not about telling him anything. In fact, all of these women that I worked with did not have a single conversation with their partner. Now, I know there are some situations where having those conversations with your partner can be useful. For a woman who's on the verge of divorce, having conversations about quiet quitting the marriage is not useful.

Think about someone who's literally ready to move out, or has already moved out, or someone who's been married 25 years and her husband has just always cheated on her. Having a conversation about how he needs to not cheat in order to—it's just not useful because you know who this person is.

So I typically teach my clients not to have the conversations with their spouse about quiet quitting so that they can take 100% responsibility for the changes that they want to make. Because those conversations typically then put them in the place where now they've said this to their spouse, now they've got to negotiate with their spouse. It gets messy.

So they're renegotiating with themselves what the relationship is going to be like. They are redesigning it with themselves, and they are taking responsibility for creating the changes that they want.

If you've been waiting for your partner to take you on vacation, and he never does, you take that off the table from him—because you wouldn't expect your co-worker to take you on vacation. Now you do that for yourself. Changes like that empower you to have the life that you want to the best of your ability, instead of waiting and begging and pleading and crying and manipulating and controlling and demanding that another person meet those needs—someone who has shown that they have no desire to meet those needs, no capacity to meet those needs, who has proven over and over and over again that they have no intention of meeting those needs.

So the steps here are: one, understand what your options are, and two, stop chasing the option that is not available to you. Stop chasing Plan A.

Now, there are some of you that are in great marriages, and the pursuit of excellence in a marriage like that is possible for you. Please keep that journey going. Keep that journey going so that your friends and your family can see an example of what is possible. This is not for good marriages. Hopefully everyone listening is applying nuance and realizing that everyone's situation is different.

I'm actually going to do a podcast episode on how to evaluate your own marriage—when you're thinking about what kind of advice to take, what kind of coaching to apply to your marriage, what are the things you need to be thinking about.

So you need to accept the reality of what your marriage is like. Let go of the fairy tale. You want to open your brain to options, and the initial response your brain is going to have is, "I only have these two options. I only have these three options." Listen, if you want to open up twenty options for resolving this, you need to book a call with me, because that is my superpower. I can help you do that.

Then finally, once you put all those options on the table, you need to do the work of renegotiating and redesigning and bringing those changes to the table so that you can have a life you enjoy without necessarily breaking up a relationship that didn't need to be broken up.

The last thing I want to say is that the foundational understanding that can be helpful to some of you is understanding that marriage is a construct. I know that is blasphemy, but if you think about it, nobody was born married. Marriage has not always existed. It's not something that has existed since the beginning of time. Culturally, around the world, there have been different forms of marriage, different kinds of marriage. Marriage is not like gravity. Gravity is a law—you go up, you're going to come down. Marriage is something that humans have designed to build our societies. There's a lot of history behind it, and there are a lot of factors behind it, and I'm not arguing against those factors. I think overall marriage could be a really good thing.

It's just that the way the predominant culture and the predominant religions have implemented and interpreted marriage, especially for women, has been harmful in many ways. It has also been useful in many ways. It has also been helpful in many ways. When you think about children having more adults in their life, families expanding and bringing resources together—all of that can be useful. But no matter how useful it is, it is still a construct.

So when you think about your marriage specifically as being a construct—just based on our society and religion saying, "Hey, this is how we want to do it," possibly with good intentions—okay, it's a construct. Do I have to hold on to the societal definition of marriage where I'm in love with my husband and my husband is in love with me, and then we make it work perfectly, and then we love each other all the time, and everything is good? That doesn't make sense. That's why looking at it as a construct can be helpful—not so that you can destroy it, but so that you can apply it in a way that makes sense for you.

An example that might be helpful—so that you don't think I'm really just trying to be weird about it—is thinking about borders. Geopolitical borders. The borders around countries are a construct. When you think about the Earth and the way the Earth exists in its natural form, there are no borders. In fact, most of the borders, when you get to the place where on the map you see a line, there's nothing there but rocks and trees and plants and animals. So the lines on the map are constructed by human beings—some for good reasons, some for not so good reasons. The borders are useful in some ways and they are harmful in some ways. They are helpful for some things and they are harmful for some things. Humans created those borders because they thought it was going to be useful—useful for who, that's a whole other conversation.

When you think about the reality, the reality is different from the construct. The construct helps us explain the reality, helps us navigate the reality, but the reality is always what's most important. Reality is more important than the construct. The reality is more important than the theory. The ground is more important than the map.

If you are on a bridge driving and there's water on both sides, and your map says turn left, and you look and you see water on that side—do not turn, because the reality of what you see with your eyes is more important than what your map is saying or what your GPS is saying.

It's the same thing with marriage and all of these constructs that we humans have created in our society for our own use to help our society. But you as an individual need to say, "Okay, I got this map that says marriage should be like this. It says husbands should plan family vacations for their wives. And husbands should watch the kids when their wives go for a girls' night out," or whatever.

If that is not happening—if you look with your eyes in your relationship and that is not happening—do not try to force it and sit and wait and cry about it for twenty years. You can ask, "Hey, can you watch these kids while I go to a girls' night?" And he might say, "No, I'm not doing that." He might say he will do it, and then ends up not doing it. And for the last 25 years, he has not done it.

Okay, you're looking with your eyes, you can tell that this is not happening. You have more choices than, "Well, I'm never going to go on a girls' trip. I'm just going to have to sit here and never go on a girls' trip until my kids are grown," or "I have to yell and scream and wail until whatever," or "I have to divorce him to be able to go on a girls' trip."

No. You can just make arrangements for someone to watch your kids while you go on a girls' trip. That's you redesigning it. So he's now your co-worker or your co-parent or whatever, who is unable to or unwilling to watch your kids while you go on vacation. It doesn't mean you can't go on vacation.

What's interesting about redesigning your relationship versus divorcing is that literally everything you have to do after you get divorced is the same thing you would have to do to redesign your relationship—except now you get to stay in your house. Because when you are divorced and you want to go on a girls' trip, guess what you have to do? You have to arrange babysitting. It is the same work.

It is the same work to redesign and renegotiate and create a different relationship that brings you peace and maybe doesn't break up the family if you don't want, and doesn't break up the finances if you don't want to do that, or doesn't break up your business if you don't want to do that. The same actions you have to take—of grieving, of healing, of taking your power back, of finding options and choices and recreating your identity—all those things you're going to have to do if you got divorced anyway. But now you have the divorce and all of the work and the logistics of a divorce on top of that redesigning work.

If you don't want to leave—okay, I'm going to caveat this here. I didn't say this earlier. I meant to say it earlier. If you are experiencing abuse, if you're experiencing any kind of abuse—any kind of abuse—this is not likely for you. The clients that I did this with were not experiencing any physical abuse. They were not experiencing financial abuse. They were not experiencing spiritual or sexual abuse. They were not experiencing verbal abuse really. So this does not apply if there's even a scent or a whiff of abuse in the air. Quiet quitting is not the way to go there. The first thing to do is to evaluate what's happening when it comes to abuse with a professional.

So that said, you don't want to assume that divorce in and of itself solves a bunch of problems. Divorce is a solution to a lot of problems, but it does not take away the work that has to be done to implement that. For some of you, staying in your relationship and doing that work—not the work of creating a Plan A marriage, remember I'm going to keep saying that—but doing the work of creating a Plan B life within that marriage, that's the right thing for some of you.

This is some of the work that I've done with clients that I'm most proud of, because for all of the women that I've done that work with, they didn't think that anything could be done. They had been to marriage counselors who had wanted to help them get the marriage together and teach the husband how to love them, and all the whatever, and I was their last resort. I'm so proud that I was able to help these women, quote unquote, "save their marriage."

We didn't save the original marriage. It was literally creating the marriage that they had the ingredients for, the marriage that their partner had the capacity for, the relationship that he had the capacity for. They accepted that and then designed around that.

Hopefully you're not hearing that I'm giving advice to you specifically in this conversation, because how this is implemented and how this is put together is very nuanced. It's very individual. But I did want to introduce the concept as a possibility as part of the series for divorce.

So for those of you who are thinking about a divorce, if you think this might be right for you, book a call with me. My link is in the show notes. Or you can find me at sadecurry.com—S-A-D-E-C-U-R-R-Y—and we can discuss the specifics of what might be best for you in this case.

All right, I really appreciate you hanging with me for this episode and letting me just share some of the things that I never put out into the world. I hope it was useful to you. Thank you for your time and attention. I'll see you next time.