Quiet Quitting: Why Women Are Emotionally Checking Out of Their Marriage

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:00)
Modern women, millennial women, are quiet quitting their marriages.

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (0:05)
These women are staying in marriages when they actually could leave.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:09)
So why did this concept resonate with so many women?

**Nedra Glover Tawab** (0:13)
The term quietly quitting gave people a voice to what they were already experiencing.

**Jess** (0:18)
The mental load of managing the house and being the CEO of the kids, I feel like I'm treated like I'm Google.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:25)
You're speaking for a lot of women right now. As you're saying this, I'm thinking, all the women are saying, aren't we managing everything?

**Jess** (0:30)
Yeah.

**Kesha** (0:31)
For the longest time, I was like, do you even like me?

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:33)
Wow.

**Kesha** (0:34)
I'm getting emotional.

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (0:35)
Women in midlife are saying to their husbands, you haven't changed and I'm evolving. You're not growing. So this relationship's not growing. They're stuck in stasis and the women are ready for their second act.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:47)
Look at all the amens.
Hello there and welcome to The Oprah Podcast. I'm so glad to be with you all. So last fall, maybe you saw this article or your friend or your sister may have forwarded to you. This was, everybody was forwarding this article to everybody else. It was called The Women Quietly Quitting Their Husbands. It was in New York Magazine's The Cut and it just, it just ricocheted across the Internet hitting a real nerve for many women. It was about women who are over the age of 40, who instead of going through the drama, the expense, and the ordeal of divorce, have started to just walk away, back away emotionally, but did stay in their marriages. They quietly quit their husbands. And I remember reading this and thinking, I know a lot of women who are doing this. Watch this.

**Handey** (1:51)
Women are quietly quitting their marriages.

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (1:54)
That's the headline of the Big Cut article.

**Handey** (1:56)
That's got everybody talking.

**SPEAKER_8** (1:58)
So I just learned about quietly quitting your marriage. That is a new term to me. But I do understand it because there is a something significant that is happening once women turn 40 and up, that they're like enough is enough.

**SPEAKER_9** (2:13)
Did you see that article about women quiet quitting their husbands? So instead of getting a divorce, they're just like emotionally checking out of the marriage and keeping the rest of their life intact. It is genuinely shocking how many men are so passive and just like self-consumed that they don't even register when she has totally withdrawn.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:32)
I've seen a lot of talk on this app about women of a certain age who are quietly quitting their marriages. They're staying married, but basically they're like, forget you, I'm doing me.

**Oprah Winfrey** (2:42)
Well that's the summary.
Monica Corcoran Harel is the journalist who wrote that article for The Cut. Monica's here. Where did the idea come from?

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (2:53)
It was so interesting. I was on a call with my editor, and she said, we're doing a package on midlife divorce. Do you have any ideas like people fighting over custody or how you preserve your money?
And I actually whispered to her, what about women who are divorced but not divorced? And she said, what are you talking about? They're secretly filing for divorce? And I said, no, they're acting like they're divorced, but they're staying married. Because I had heard women, you know, I'd go out for a girls' night and nobody was in a rush to get home, or women were saying, I'm going away on vacation. And I'd say, what about your husband? He's not coming. Or I just found that husbands weren't coming up as often in conversation. And I realized these couples were almost like it reminded me of toddlers when they're in parallel play. They're playing with toys next to each other, but they're not engaging.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:43)
Yeah. And you wrote about this. I was so struck in the article when you wrote that your mother didn't speak to your father for a year and he didn't notice.

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (3:53)
It's so shocking. And I was a kid and I remember sitting at the dinner table and my mom would nudge me past the salt. My mom uses a lot of salt. Her blood pressure is through the roof.

**Oprah Winfrey** (4:03)
Yeah.

**Monica Corcoran Harel** (4:03)
And I was like 10 years old and I would pass it to her. And I understood that something was going on, that they weren't getting along, but I didn't realize that they hadn't talked in so long.