Photo Frazer Harrison
The Cut, a women’s magazine, reported on an apparently growing trend among married women who are not ready to pull the plug on their failing marriages. Instead, they build up walls and fill their homes with resentment.
They are calling this the “silent divorce.” The stories featured in the piece, including the author’s own account of watching her parents struggle in a loveless marriage, are nothing short of depressing. While some of the women who spoke to the outlet obviously decided they no longer wanted to work on their marriage, in other stories, it was the husband who pulled away first.
One woman, who asked to go by a pseudonym, Tanya, admitted that her decision to silently separate from her 20-year marriage largely stemmed from their terrible communication.
“Whenever we had an argument about the imbalance in our relationship, there was no repair. Once my kids grew into teenagers and I didn’t have them hanging around my neck anymore, I became so touch hungry,” Tanya said, adding that when they made attempts to repair the communication through couples counseling, her husband would tell her she was being too demanding.
“So I withdrew,” Tanya said. “At night, I would put the kids to bed and go in my closet and play the accordion for hours.
I was utterly prepared to demonize the author, and what I thought would be her solution for these women. I fully expected her to tell them to cut and run. Why stay in an unhappy marriage while you still have life to live? But I was happily surprised to see that, despite the example her mother had set for her, she had chosen a different path.
Honestly, it’s pretty simple. From Day 1 recognize that there’s absolutely no option for separation/divorce. Then you’ll always find ways to work things out, knowing there’s no escape clause. https://t.co/Mx82XDz8PU
— Eric Sammons (@EricRSammons) November 26, 2025
The author’s mother loathed her husband to such a degree — like just for being around — that she spent large swaths of their marriage ignoring him. He was oblivious to her rage. Eventually, her mother and father divorced. And now, almost 40 years later, when she asked her mother what she wished she had done differently to avoid the divorce, she admitted her fault in the communication breakdown.
“Wives and husbands need to talk more,” the author’s mother said. “I’m sorry I didn’t do that with your father. We never shared our true feelings.”
Good marriages need constant communication. It doesn’t always have to be verbal. Sometimes, reaching out physically can repair broken bonds between a husband and a wife. But the moment you let resentment or distance into your marriage, you create a situation almost impossible to overcome. Subconsciously or not, the two sides become entrenched, and neither is willing to make the first move to end the fight.
There has been growing online discourse about how to prepare for a marriage that lasts through all of life’s ups and downs. Good, constant communication is obviously the best way to build a sturdy foundation. This takes time to get right, but you have to constantly keep trying. However, I think it’s equally, if not more important, to enter marriage with a certain mentality.
My husband and I agreed early on that we would approach our marriage similarly to a battle. “It’s us against the world,” he would always remind me when we’d get into an argument. As simple as it sounds, he was right. There are so many issues and outside relationships you have to deal with as a couple that, if you do not tackle them as a united front, you’ll end up like these women, depressingly alone in the back of their closets, wishing for a different life.
Divorce doesn’t have to be an option. No broken marriage is unfixable; none of the marriages written about in the article deal with abuse, and those situations aren’t what we are talking about here. And while they all had different scenarios or excuses for choosing silent divorce, it is evident that they had allowed the death of their love to occur.
