Your Spouse May Be Planning to Divorce You — And You Don’t Know It
It’s time to wake up and tune in to you and your marriage before it’s too late.
Right now, your spouse could be sitting next to you on the couch, planning to divorce you. She may be planning to do it in the fall, after the holidays, or in a couple of years. I know this because I have spoken with hundreds and hundreds of people in that mindset, and I have been in that mindset myself.
Typically, women are the drivers who seek high-quality intimacy, and they warn their partner to up their game, change their toxic behaviors, and at least illustrate what the problem is and how untenable it is.
“I don’t know how much longer I can handle this.”
“If you don’t get your shit together, I’m out.”
I said: “I’m barely hanging on.”
My husband knew the issues. Every single one. His future divorce became inevitable when he was completely unresponsive to my repeated requests. I eventually got the picture that he had no intention to do any of it. When he did one last truly cruel act — cutting my allowance by 6 percent because I voted for Bill Clinton, I said to myself, “That is not love, and you, sir, will be divorced by the end of the year,” and we were.
For the record, my ex was a workaholic surgeon whose income rose exponentially every year. Money wasn’t the issue; control and punishment for being myself were. I was a housewife with two small children and was wholly dependent on him. That was another decision I made after that marriage: never be at any partner’s mercy for anything ever again. It took me a while to get myself to that point. I went to graduate school and had to get licensed, but I finally made it, and what a great feeling it was. Being able to care for yourself if you need to leave is a must-have in a healthy relationship. If you haven’t checked that box, I implore you to do it now.
Apparently, my scenario is very common. There are millions of men whose wives complain, and many of them are planning to divorce their non-responsive partner. These divorced men walking don’t take their wives’ warnings seriously. After our divorce, my husband said, “I heard your warnings, but I never thought you’d leave.”
About that, I realized that my ex had been a talker and promised the moon but delivered moondust. People with narcissistic tendencies often believe everyone is like they are—a big mistake. I can’t remember very many promises to me that he ever kept, and I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. As for me, I mean what I say and say what I mean. If I tell you I am barely hanging on, it means you have limited time to do the things you have promised you will do, or I will be gone. And so, I was.
So that you know, nothing is more meaningless than a promised action that never comes to fruition. The person who counts on these things considers them unpaid bills. The attempted bill collection will take the form of nagging or silence. Either way, unmet promises are a major factor in people’s divorce decisions. The lesson: don’t promise or agree to things that you likely will not do. That delay tactic, which works in the moment, will not serve you in the future of the marriage.
Men
Most men unhappy in their marriage suffer deeply, but silently. Not wanting to cause disruption, they engage in endless internal debates about their misery and the courage needed to leave. Years pass. They delay confrontation for many reasons: children, finances, legal battles, conflict, drama, and ordeal.
“Next summer might be a good time,” he thinks, but summer passes.
Now and then, his wife tosses him a helpful lob.
“Do you think we should do something, or at least talk about our relationship?”
“What do you want to talk about?” he says, shriveling into his hole as his anxiety level rises. He had his chance, but he was just too anxious to do it.
Les Misérables.
Millions of people are miserable in their marriages and are doing absolutely nothing about it. They fight viciously, silently resent, cheat, do every aggressive or passive-aggressive thing they can, except for getting the professional help they need.
I talk to people who want to divorce so badly they can taste it. Many are having affairs.
“The affair is my crutch,” they claim, not seeing that those who cheat lack the courage to face their issues directly, a telltale sign of emotional immaturity. Instead, they choose to endure misery and, feeling justified as victims, indulge in infidelity.
As my friend and fellow writer P.D. Reader shared in a recent guest spot on my podcast, The Truth About Your Relationship with Dr. Becky Whetstone, she says men who cheat are always “extremely immature” and the other woman “always has low self-worth and is very stupid.” Not a great combo for success. P.D. has been the other woman herself, and after her experience, she devoted over 10 years to studying infidelity and curating writers who explore its many facets. Find her publication, Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship, here.
Some couples spend their lives that way, decades married, and decades avoiding one another. I knew a couple in San Antonio who had been married for 52 years and lived in a retirement home. She lived on one end of the facility, and he on another, and they never visited one another. They were serious Catholics and felt there was no other way.
Some hope for a miracle that will benevolently release them from their marital entrapment. I have talked to dozens and dozens who have death fantasies, also called widow fantasies, about their spouse. Most people don’t volunteer it, because they would be too ashamed of themselves, but sometimes I ask, “Have you ever wished your spouse would just die?” Their eyes light up, and when I remind them they are in the no judgment zone, they often confess. I do understand those fantasies personally. There were times in my past when that would have saved me from so much.
These death fantasies are a coping mechanism and way to imagine mental escape and, ultimately, freedom from what seems like an inescapable problem (It isn’t). The death fantasy is soothing because it is guilt-free freedom, except perhaps for the guilt a person feels for having that fantasy in the first place.
One man I interviewed for my dissertation research, the topic was about how people in long-term marriages decide to divorce, said that when his wife was late coming from anywhere, he would smile and say, “Maybe she was in a car accident. Could I be so lucky?”
Death fantasies are common because they would solve every concern. “No lawyers, no drama, no judgment, no guilt, I get all the money, the kids, the stuff, and I get extricated from hell while receiving tons of sympathy, to boot.”
Is this not pitiful? The fantasy signals you are avoiding issues that need attention. Recognizing these signs is the first step toward taking action and changing your situation.
You are not trapped.
Many spouses tell me they feel trapped in their marriage, but I remind them, “You are an adult with options; you have not been kidnapped, tied down, or jailed.”
“Well, it feels that way.”
“I get it, but the next question should be, ‘What are you going to do about it?'”
Adults are responsible for managing their happiness, period. It is our job to organize our lives in a way that brings us peace and enjoyment. Every marriage needs a back door, so if it becomes unhealthy and unfixable, you can remove yourself to a healthier place. Unless your spouse literally locks you up, you are not trapped and may leave at any time. Perhaps you need to look at yourself and ask, ‘Why do I choose to stay in a relationship that feels like I am in a trap?’
You have not been abandoned.
So your spouse is avoidant, dismissive, and doesn’t value quality time as much as you do? That is unfortunate, but if they aren’t actively working to be more secure attached, it is what it is. What are you going to do about it so you can live in peace with an avoidant? Adults cannot be abandoned unless they are unable to care for themselves.
Still, people in these situations often tell me they “feel abandoned,” but they are not, and I am hoping for the day when adults stop using this term to describe their marriages.
Yes, children can be abandoned because their life stage dictates that they are dependent on adults for their survival. But a healthy adult can and should tend to their own mind, body, and spirit needs, whether in a relationship or alone. When I studied with the late, great Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, almost 15 years ago, she told us, “No adult should be taking care of another who can and should be taking care of themselves.”
Can you take care of yourself when you don’t get what you want in your relationship? I hope so.
Emotionally stable adults can stay stable regardless of what is going on, and even when things are awful for them, they usually can rebound pretty quickly. Regaining equilibrium quickly is the resilience that mental health professionals so value in human beings, because it is a telltale sign of positive outcomes, or not. The healthiest, emotionally resilient human beings are survivors and can keep moving toward positivity and light.
In the end, emotional adults avoid tales of victimhood, unless they really and truly had no power whatsoever to protect themselves from another, as in family violence, felonious crimes against others, and other aggressions by seriously mentally disordered individuals, like malignant narcissists and psychopaths.
The Divorce that Feels Sudden, Isn’t.
A divorce that lands like a bomb on one person was a slow leak for the other. The leaving spouse did not wake up one morning and decide. They arrived at the decision the way you arrive at the bottom of a staircase — one step at a time, over months or years, until there was nowhere left to go.
Marriages do not end suddenly or from a single event. Instead, they decline in stages: disillusionment (I’m unhappy!), erosion (My unhappiness is serious and could lead to divorce, but I don’t want a divorce), detachment (the only way to cope is by spending more time away from my spouse), then a final breaking point (I can’t be with someone who just did that), and, ultimately, the end. The spouse quietly preparing to leave is usually well into the detachment stage. They may have fought for the marriage before, but have stopped as it nears its end. Hope is lost, they accept change, and privately envision life without their partner. The fantasies of divorce and separation are fully active. Here’s what many spouses who face a marriage crisis wish they’d known: detachment is quiet. It does not announce itself. It is silent and still.
“Why didn’t someone tell me my marriage was dying?”
“They probably tried.” I might respond. “Maybe they weren’t direct or loud enough, but at some point, they decided you weren’t seriously responding to their concerns, and when a person decides that, it is the marital death knell.”
Why do you miss it?
You missed it because sometimes, especially with dissatisfied husbands, the initial warnings were subtle. “Here we go again,” he might say, or, “Do we have to have this conversation right now?” Often, my clients describe retreating emotionally, acting as if their spouses are invisible – that’s the detachment stage.
Your spouse told you they were unhappy, but they were passive-aggressive about it, which I do not condone. Emotionally mature adults can have difficult conversations.
I can’t forget a man I worked with a couple of years ago who took up a wild and passionate affair with a woman from their church after being married to my client, Janet, for 34 years. The other woman shamelessly went up to my client at church after the affair was exposed and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take real good care of him”
When he reached a certain point of misery in his marriage, this man moved out of their house and to their farm and refused to deal with his wife in any way for 18 months. Then his desperate wife found me, and I was brought in so they could finally have a conversation.
Never once did he tell his wife how unhappy he was in all the years they were together, so much so that she thought he was very happy in the marriage. He never said he was struggling. Nothing.
“She should have known,” he said. “I stopped doing some of the things I used to do.”
So you expected her to deduce from your behavior that you weren’t a happy camper,” I said.
“I guess that’s right,” he said.
What a mess, and it all could have been averted with direct and transparent communication about the unhappiness he was dealing with.
If you have been, or are in, a marriage that is deteriorating on the seething watch of a silent sufferer fantasizing about divorce, you probably noticed shifts or changes. Still, you didn’t understand why they were taking place. You may have thought it was the language of small grievances, and perhaps you heard it as background noise or normal marital issues. You were busy. You figured every marriage has friction. You assumed it would work itself out.
While you labeled their unhappiness as routine — told yourself “it’ll get better,” or “we’ll work on it” — they logged every neglected request, every “now isn’t a good time,” every cold shoulder. Each offense filled an invisible ledger you never knew existed. By the time you focus, they’ve already closed the account.
The sign almost everyone misreads.
Most people think the dangerous moment in a marriage is when they fight, especially the really ugly confrontations when a person’s desperate exasperation melds into an unedited moment of truth. It isn’t, and, ironically, when I meet people, and they find out I am a marriage therapist, they often brag to me that they don’t have fights in their marriage or that they’ve been married 30+ years, as if that is meaningful data. It actually tells me almost nothing.
At least if you are fighting, you can be sure your partner cares. Conflict is engagement. The truly dangerous moment is when the fighting stops — not because you solved anything, but because one of you gave up.
In the final days of a marriage, the partner planning to end the marriage is disconnecting, breaking their attachment, and dismantling their ideas about who you have been in their life. Once on the front burner, you are emotionally being put in the attic, or will soon be given to Goodwill.
When your spouse stops complaining, stops asking you to change, stops bringing up the same three issues that used to start every argument, you might feel relieved. Don’t. That silence is not peace. That silence is the sound of someone who has stopped believing you will ever hear them. They’re not Fighting because they’ve made The Decision they agonized over for so long. The rest is just details to be sorted.
What quiet divorce-planning looks like.
It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a spouse who suddenly has their own life — new friends you’ve never met, a gym schedule, a renewed interest in their appearance, a phone that’s always face down. It looks like new financial independence: a separate account, a credit card in their name only, a sudden interest in household finances they never cared about before. It looks like emotional logistics — long talks with a sister or a friend, a quiet meeting with a lawyer “just to understand my options,” a strange new calm.
None of these things alone proves anything. People join gyms. People make new friends. But when several of them show up together, in a spouse who has also gone emotionally quiet, you are not looking at a phase. You are looking at preparation.
I returned to graduate school in 1991 to pursue a master’s degree in communication, preparing for a career as a single mom. I didn’t tell my husband that was my primary driving force. He told me years after our divorce that looking back, he could see that I was preparing to leave. You can notice your partner’s preparations now and stop the marital deterioration before it is too late.
The window is real, but it’s closing.
Here is the part I need you to hear, because it’s the part that matters. A marriage in the detachment stage is not dead. It is in serious trouble, time is ticking down, but trouble is not the same as over. I have watched couples come back from this. I have also watched couples wait three months or even two weeks too long and lose the chance entirely.
The window closes when the leaving spouse moves from “I think I want out” to “I’m out, I’m just handling the logistics now.” Once they’ve made the internal decision and started executing it, your options narrow fast. Saving a marriage is so much easier at the beginning when disillusionment is new and unfolding, rather than waiting until it is the last straw. The earlier you act, the more marriage there is left to save.
What to do if you see yourself in this.
Don’t panic, and don’t pretend. Neither reaction will help anything. Panic makes you grasp, beg, obsess, and surveil, which only confirms to your spouse that you still don’t understand the problem, and is guaranteed to drive them further away. Pretending lets you keep sleepwalking while the clock runs out.
Instead, get honest and get curious. Ask your spouse a real question, then stay quiet long enough to hear the real answer. Not “are we okay?” — they might go into an avoidant stance and say, “Fine.” Stay with them until you know they are being candid about how they feel. Ask: “Have you given up on us?” And then brace yourself, because they might tell you the truth. This moment is critical, and you must push for a solid answer, refusing to settle for anything vague.
If they do confess to their serious struggles in the marriage, that truth is not the end. It’s the first piece of real information you’ve had in years. You can work with the truth. You cannot work with a marriage that you’re only pretending is fine.
If you recognized your own marriage somewhere in this piece — if your stomach felt a stab at “the Fighting (or communication) stopped” — that drop is worth listening to. It usually means you already know something you’ve been refusing to look at.
If you are reading this with a knot in your stomach.
If the truth of their marriage struggle is revealed, it is the exact moment my work is built for. I help couples in crisis figure out where they actually are — and whether there’s still a marriage to save — before the window closes for good. If you think your spouse may already be halfway out the door, don’t wait for the folder on the kitchen table and a dramatic announcement. Once those words are spoken, it is extremely difficult to revive a marriage. Book a Marriage Crisis Consultation, or start with my book, I (Think) I Want Out: What to Do When One of You Wants to End Your Marriage.
Knowledge is power. Dealing with thoughts and feelings head-on is the way.
Work with me.
If any of this hits close to home, don’t sit with it alone. Reach me directly at beckywhetstone@gmail.com, or find more information at www.marriagecrisismanager.com. The best first step is a 90-minute Marriage Crisis Consultation, where we cut through the fog and figure out exactly where your marriage stands and what your real options are. From there, most couples move into one of my two-month Marriage Intensives — focused, structured, no-nonsense work designed to turn a marriage around while there is still a marriage to turn around. And if you want more of this kind of straight talk about love, marriage, and the things nobody says out loud, subscribe to my new podcast, The Truth About Your Relationship with Dr. Becky Whetstone, on Substack and YouTube.
Find me. I’ll tell you the truth.
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