"Every Divorced Woman I Know Is Happier."

The Quiet Quitting Of Marriages.

Quiet quitting has always been a dumb narrative when assigned to work, because it just means doing the tasks you were assigned and not going above and beyond. For millions (possibly billions) of people before we started using that term, that approach to work was pretty normative. After all, if you want to pay me $40,000 to do 18 tasks and be a therapist to my teammates, well, I’ll probably do six of those 18 tasks until you can get that up to $70,000 or more. (That discussion varies based on how close you are to revenue generation, yes.) So, in the context of work, it’s generally a dumb narrative brought on because business journalism is driven by “clicks” and “arbitrary deadlines” and “buzzwords of the moment,” so people feel they need to crank something into the content ecosystem even if it’s generally meaningless content. Hey, maybe we can put an ad for a stand-up mixer next to it.

But now think about “quiet quitting” in the context of marriage, which I would sadly argue is normative in a lot of marriages. You spend x-amount of time with a person and certain behaviors of theirs, you realize you can’t control or change them (try as ye might), so you become resigned to them. Maybe that’s about cleaning. Maybe it’s about going to the bar Sunday for NFL when he claims to be working. Maybe it’s about sex. (I’d argue that’s the thing it’s about for a lot of people. More on that here.)

On marriage, I recently keep coming back to this opinion piece and specifically this section: