When “Having It All” Becomes “Wanting a Divorce”

Four years ago, I lay awake staring at the ceiling as my husband slept soundly. Where self-critical intrusive voices had once dominated my 3-to-4-a.m. angst hour (Did I embarrass myself at that party?), now there were new questions: Why have I been working so hard for so long? Why, when I’ve given so much, haven’t I given any thought to what I want?  

For my entire adult life, I’d dedicated myself to being kind, patient, and supportive. Bosses often said they wished they could clone me. In love, as in work, I’d taken pride in being low maintenance and low needs. Throughout my 15 years of marriage, I’d handled the lion’s share of logistics and made most of the money. But in my mid-40s, I realized that the reward for being ultra-responsible isn’t a gold star. Rather, it was even more responsibility.

One day, driving alone in my car and upset after an argument with my husband, I suddenly felt that I had compromised enough for a lifetime. I began screaming on the highway. When I started yelling, I found it hard to stop. That was the summer I asked for a divorce.

Getting divorced felt very off-brand. I’d written a whole book, and three Modern Love columns, about finding ways to stay together, about how noble it was to try. To stay married felt like a key measure of my goodness, consistent with never missing deadlines and keeping the fridge stocked. I championed self-sacrifice for its own sake. But a consolation once I abandoned that core value was to learn that other women my age were hitting the same wall.

Generation X produced millions of women who sublimated their own wants and needs like it was their job. We tolerated a lot in order to avoid doing what so many of our generation’s parents did: blowing it all up in apocalyptic, Kramer vs. Kramer-style divorces. In many cases, we were simultaneously the caregivers, the breadwinners, the household staff, and we tended to play the part of the stereotypical straight man, the foil, the adult in the room.

What I’ve found in the past several years of talking to other women of this generation is that, in middle age, many of us begin to question our pride in the ability to over-function at work and at home. We’re no longer so sure it’s true what they told us—that we were lucky we could be anything, which somehow came to mean that we should do everything—and do it all perfectly, with minimal support.  

Dr. Deborah Luepnitz, a psychotherapist practicing in Philadelphia, once told me, “What I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. They feel guilty for complaining because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.”

Read More: I Got Divorced. But My Family Is Still Whole

We also weren’t supposed to have the bad manners to point out how much we did, or how much we did without. It seems telling that men and women lie—even to census takers—about their incomes if the woman in a heterosexual couple makes more; both inflate the man’s earnings. “Women who earn more than their husbands,” economist Isabel Sawhill told me, “actually do more housework in an effort to compensate for their higher earnings and the psychological drama involved.” Sawhill conducted a study on this in 2015 but says, “I doubt the situation has changed a lot except more women now earning more than husbands and perhaps feeling a bit less uncomfortable about it with less need to compensate.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a lot of women had been working and tending to others without any real break for as long as they could remember—through high school summers, while nursing children or caring for ailing relatives, long past the point of burnout—and yet, felt that they were never doing enough. When the pandemic blew everything up, situations that seemed intractable (the need to go to the office every day, for example) suddenly proved surprisingly tractable. And if those supposed non-negotiables could change, why couldn’t the whole shape of our lives? And if it could change, why not make it more consistent with who we want to be in the world rather than what would be most convenient for those around us?

Asking these questions often has real consequences, whether it’s a career change, a move, or the end of an unfulfilling relationship. A middle-aged woman’s awakening doesn’t inevitably lead to divorce—in fact, plenty of women I know had post-pandemic reckonings that resulted in stronger unions—though perhaps it’s telling that 69% of divorces are initiated by women, and the median age for a woman facing a first divorce is 40.

And yet, sometimes it can be hard for us to give ourselves permission to prioritize ourselves when we’ve spent so much of our lives making way for others. A friend in Denver, a fellow empty-nester, told me that she’s thrilled by a recent career change and loves being back in school, but is plagued by the fear that she’s asking for too much: “Can I still be loved if I’m authentically myself? When does the feeling of needing to shrink myself down go away?”

In October, my best friend of 40 years, Asia, and I took her 13-year-old daughter, Izumi, to one of the last U.S. stops of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. As Izumi glued sparkles in a heart shape on her face with eyelash glue pre-show, I asked Asia, a therapist, what she was seeing in her clients our age. She said, “Women in their 40s are saying, ‘I did not work this hard to not get to do whatever the hell I want. Don’t ask me to do everything and then not expect me to want everything.’ People might call that a midlife crisis. I’d call it a coming of age.”

That night with Asia and Izumi at the Superdome, the three of us stood as if each song were the National Anthem. We were surrounded by 65,000 other women in rhinestone cowboy boots, homemade lyric t-shirts, and sequin dresses. Afterward, as we spread our accumulated friendship bracelets out on the bed in my hotel room, there was a conversation about whether Izumi should have to go to school in the morning.

“I think you have straight A’s so you can do whatever you want,” Asia told her.

I agreed. She’d worked hard and she’d earned the right to sleep in after her first concert. That’s true for the generation of women now in midlife, too. We worked hard. Now’s the time to ask ourselves what we want.