Marriage has a retention problem

When a heterosexual couple breaks up, who wants the split? That depends. Among the unmarried, rates break down almost evenly between women and men. But when the couple is married, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be the woman who wants the divorce. A 2017 study found that while women initiate about 70% of divorces overall, the figure climbs to roughly 90% among college-educated women.

That’s even more striking because college-educated couples have lower divorce rates overall (meaning they're less likely to divorce). But when they do divorce, it's a woman initiating the split almost 100% of the time. Within shouting distance, anyway.

And while the statistics may not be new, the conversation about them is. An entire media subculture has sprung up around women leaving marriage. All portray divorce as a wise and liberating, if not costless, choice — a rational response to an institution that’s failing women.

There are the podcasts, like How Not to Suck at Divorce. The Instagram accounts, like Hillary Livingston and Bethany Page’s Sincerely, Divorced and Taylor Winds’ mom.lawyer.divorced. The books, including Miranda July’s All Fours, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, and Scaachi Koul's Sucker Punch.

Perhaps most popular and visible are the Reels and TikToks, many of which play separation and divorce for laughs. One recent Facebook $META video depicted the content creator Tara Cannistraci, clad in widow’s garments, pretending to weep over her stove. “This is where he never cooked me a meal,” she wails. A few shots later, she’s in her bathroom, staring mournfully at the toilet, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex: “This is the handle he never even used!” Sometimes men are in on the joke, too.

Together, all this amounts to something like a collective accounting of why women, particularly those with the financial and social power to leave, are opting out of marriage in such disproportionate numbers. Some “quiet quit,” staying in a marriage because the switching costs are high, but knowing their hearts are no longer in it. And some pull the trigger, whether in anger, sheer fatigue, or something like joy.

Women's stories as missing exit data

“So many women are married to ‘good men’ where the marriage only works as long as they remain the default babysitter,” Lyz Lenz, a widely followed author and journalist, said in an interview with Quartz. “The moment that stops, the marriage blows up.”

Understanding this fact about their marriages, Lenz said, “is almost more exhausting and terrifying for women than just continuing to do labor.” Yet women are leaving marriage anyway — and she would know. The memoir she wrote about her own divorce, This American Ex-Wife, hit The New York Times bestseller list upon its 2024 release.

So the phenomenon of women leaving marriage is increasingly visible and public, though the exact historical forces that brought us here remain under-discussed. Social science researchers have acknowledged since at least the 1940s that women overwhelmingly initiate divorce in heterosexual marriages, in part because a significant share — to this day — involve abuse and what the sociologist Evan Stark called coercive control.

Divorce rates spiked in the 1970s, following the greatest gains of the women’s movement — and have since fallen, even as rates of marriage have fallen, too. Even so, traditional media coverage has tended to follow a familiar pattern of handwringing, Lenz said — handwringing that recycles decades-old claims that feminism is hollowing out marriage, and that effectively echoes pointed attacks from the far-right.

It’s an old script that hasn’t been updated for the 21st century. Certainly, it fails to explain why women are leaving marriage now. The most sweeping expansions of women’s legal and economic autonomy — access to credit, workplace protections, and reproductive rights — happened decades ago. If anything, the current era is better described as one of retrenchment rather than liberation. Whatever is driving today’s exits, it's not a sudden new wave of feminist freedom. 

In short, you can’t explain a 2026 phenomenon by pointing to 20th-century milestones. To do so is to ignore the mounting contemporary evidence. And that evidence isn’t in textbooks. It’s in your phone, in your feed, right now.

So why not consider the flood of new firsthand accounts as exit data? If almost 100% of voluntary departures from a Fortune 500 were college-educated women, it would likely trigger EEOC scrutiny, board investigations, shareholder revolts, McKinsey called in — maybe even the CEO getting grilled on CNBC. The problem would almost certainly be assumed to lie with the institution itself.

That’s how organizational health is typically evaluated. Lists of the “best places to work” routinely assess parental leave, flexibility, and support for caregivers, recognizing that retention depends not just on pay, but on how livable an arrangement is over time. Even in the post-Me Too era, many companies still openly tout their ability to recruit and retain female employees, treating women’s willingness to stay as a marker of institutional legitimacy.

Marriage, however, has rarely been analyzed this way — though this lens offers far more explanatory power than abstract debates about feminism, and helps account for why “emotional labor” and “mental load” increasingly inflect conversation about heterosexual partnership. Applied here, workplace logic shifts the question from ideology to what is actually happening inside kitchens and bedrooms across the country. College-educated women, who earn more on average than any other group of women in the U.S., are also the most mobile participants in the institution, making their exit patterns a revealing proxy for marriage’s overall attractiveness as a place to commit labor and time.

‘A sh—ty deal’

And today, women are “more likely to see how marriage is, quite frankly, a sh—ty deal,” Cindy DiTiberio, author of the divorce-focused Mother Lode newsletter, told Quartz. 

“Married men experience better physical health, receive more emotional support, benefit economically (called ‘the marriage premium’), perform less domestic labor, get a personal household manager,” DiTiberio said. “Meanwhile, all these benefits to men have a cost to women. Women are burnt out, less physically healthy because they are shouldering the lion’s share of childcare and home maintenance (5.5 more hours of housework per week than men), make less money (due to the motherhood penalty), and carry the mental load. This has been true for years, but people are finally saying the quiet part out loud.”

The pandemic proved to be an inflection point, DiTiberio said, with COVID-19 stripping away the buffers that had made many marriages workable — or at least tolerable. Lockdowns forced couples into close quarters, one partner Zooming behind a closed door and the other fielding interruptions, managing meltdowns, and keeping the household running. 

Under these conditions, unequal divisions of labor and emotional load suddenly became impossible to ignore. At the same time, the pandemic delayed exits — courts were closed, childcare vanished. When restrictions lifted in 2022 and 2023, divorces followed, often not from dramatic implosion but from exhaustion and disillusionment. The wave of divorce books, videos, and newsletters rising to prominence now isn't coincidental.

Still, it’s the saying part that’s new, not so much the asymmetry. Sociologist Jessie Bernard wrote in 1972 that “there are two marriages in every marital union, his and hers. And his is better than hers.” Research confirms that the pattern persists today, with married men reporting higher relationship quality than married women, while men and women in non-marital relationships report similar satisfaction levels.

But none of this is necessarily a death knell. “Obviously if they love their husbands and there remains enough shared love and goodwill to make changes, women will try," DiTiberio said. "But many men are not willing to give up the privileges of their current station, at least not without a lot of bellyaching and boo-hooing. And that s—t is not appealing.”

On the other hand, she said, “divorce can actually feel like a forced rebalancing of the scales for women. Finally, they think, you’ll see what it feels like to not have anyone at home cushioning your ability to work unheeded.” Upon separating, she said, women experience relief, a lightening of the load. In this, DiTiberio echoes research that finds that married women are more task-burdened than single mothers.

Divorce as a better deal for women

Still, this reframing — divorce as a response to a bad deal, rather than some symptom of broader societal collapse — is precisely what critics resist, said Tia Levings, author of the bestselling memoir A Well Trained Wife, which examines marital dynamics and domestic violence within American evangelical culture. “By casting divorce as a shameful thing, the data is minimized,” she said. “The divorce itself is blamed for any painful fallout, rather than what contributed to it.”

In Levings’ view, educated women are not immune to bad or even abusive marriages — but they are more likely to recognize and respond when a relationship has become incompatible with dignity and selfhood. “Education isn't a perfect shield,” she said. “Educated women find themselves in abuse, too. They just have access to the muscle memory and neural pathways to know they have options and can figure things out.”

That same impulse helps explain the explosion of media devoted to contemporary divorce. “Real talk, whether married or divorced, at least drops the mask,” Levings argued. “It helps women deal with the reality of their situation, instead of feeling stuck in magical thinking.”

Now that the mask is dropping, it seems, the chorus of marriage-leavers is growing — as if entire corners of the internet have become a kind of Glassdoor referendum on the institution. In corporate America, mass departures force institutional change; whether marriage will follow suit, or whether it will simply continue losing its most educated participants, one exit at a time, remains an open question.

Marriage losing its aspirational status

In the meantime, the slowly emerging result is, arguably, that marriage is losing its aspirational status. It’s now functioning less as the claim to maturity and respectability that it once did, and more like an arrangement that invites questions like “why?” and “really?” If having a boyfriend has lost its cultural cachet, how much more scrutiny does a husband invite?

For Lenz, as for Levings, such a shift is the outcome of truth-telling. And if not an inevitable one, then at least an explainable one — which is more than the handwringing articles ever do. 

“It’s like that Muriel Rukeyser line — if women actually told the truth of our lives, the world would explode,” Lenz said. “There are so many women still in their marriages who aren’t fully telling the truth about what their husbands actually do, because they’re still married. They’re posting on Instagram like, ‘Oh, I really love him, he’s so great.’ Meanwhile they’re on vacation and he’s drunk by the pool shouting about DraftKings by 10 a.m.”

Even in good marriages, she said, self-deception becomes part of the work — one more element of the mental load. “I didn’t tell my best friends of over twenty years the full reality, because I was ashamed and embarrassed. How could I have chosen this? How did I not negotiate chores better? How did I not do this better?”

Eventually, Lenz said, the effort of holding those contradictions becomes unbearable. “At some point it’s just too exhausting.” The abstract, old-world victory of staying gives way to the concrete, new-world victory of finding a better situation. “And then you’re like, ‘I’d rather be a ‘failure’ and free than successful and trapped — and unable to even relax on the couch at night.’”