I don’t know if you are young enough, or have daily access to people who are young enough, to have come across the concept of “quiet quitting”?
Originally, it applied to jobs and meant the practice of fulfilling your professional duties, but no more. No unpaid overtime, no volunteering for extra projects, no bubbling enthusiasm. Just work, boundaries and home in time for tea.
Now the concept is expanding. Now you can “quiet quit” your relationship. It is generally applied to marriage or similar long-term investments (with the short ones, obviously, you can make a great big noisy fuss and storm out, and that is part of the pleasure of short-term relationships) and it means emotionally withdrawing, lowering your expectations, and increasingly cultivating a life lived separately from your partner or spouse.
Oh, my sweet little babies. Just as “quiet quitting” your job is actually called “working for a living” instead of “finding your bliss”, and what you are in fact doing is rediscovering the ancient concept of doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay instead of embracing exploitation, what you have described in the domestic sphere is not “quiet quitting” your relationship. This is enabling it to survive. You have rediscovered the similarly ancient practice of conserving energy. Marriage is not a hundred-yard dash. You have to find ways of ensuring you can stay the course.
To put it succinctly (in a wholly therapist-unapproved manner, but I will do you a lot more practical good, and more quickly): a successful marriage – I’m not going to keep saying long-term relationship because we all know what I mean – is built on repression. No partnership can survive two people giving constant free rein to their feelings and desires.
If I started indulging every feeling I have every moment I have it while trying to run a household with a husband, a son, two cats, a failing oven and debatable dishwasher, the whole thing would fall apart.
You have to learn when to express yourself and when not. Because every time you express yourself, it requires other people to pay attention – to interrupt their time, their tasks, their cup of tea, whatever it is, and devote some portion of their resources to dealing with you. And however infinitesimally small those portions are individually, they add up. They deplete the other person and abrade the patience and the affection upon which the smooth and pleasant execution of daily life depends.
Most feelings, you see – and hold onto your hats, young folk – aren’t important. They are as thistledown on the wind. Let them go. Let them breeze past you. Don’t give them house room. And certainly don’t clutter another person’s mental space with them.
Marriage requires people to be adults. Marriage is made up of millions of little things, lots of medium things and a few big things. Everyone has to learn how to distinguish between all of them and to allocate appropriate responses in both degree and kind. You have to learn to repress all the little ones. And most of the medium ones. Then you both have plenty left in the tanks for coping with the big ones.
Most successful marriages have one person who is good at this – to whom it comes relatively naturally, and if female, will also have been nurtured by a lifetime of sociocultural messaging. Yes, you may find yourself a little bit unhappy, a little bit lonely, a little bit overly distanced from your family and fellow man but again, over the long haul, it will work out.
Very successful marriages, however, comprise people who have both mastered the skill of sorting emotional wheat from chaff. These are basically unicorn marriages and I wouldn’t bother hunting for one or trying to create one yourself.
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No, aim for this: a marriage in which you take turns at emotional incontinence. A relationship in which when one person is up, the other person is allowed to be down and vent his or her rage and frustration at every little thing (well, perhaps still not quite every little thing – there are, honestly, so many little things). And in which you exist on a delightful carousel, rather than miserably locked into an unchanging dynamic in which one of you never has an unexpressed thought or uncatered-for whim and the other has no choice but to absorb all the buffets and blows this produces.
The idea of quiet quitting anything has its roots in the absurd excesses and expectations we have of various venerable institutions like work and marriage in this absurdly excessive modern age. We are told that work must be meaningful and fulfilling and that we must devote ourselves to it either because it is or – more untruthfully and poisonously – that it will become so if we do devote ourselves. Nonsense. Work is supposed to enable you to live. That fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay thing should be your best hope, and anything else a bonus.
Marriage, your partner: they are not supposed to provide ceaseless, shining happiness. Life and humans are not designed that way. They are supposed to provide the level of comfort and joy that enables you to look back over however many years spent with them and say: yes. On the whole, that was better than being without them. And for that you both need to have repressed quite a few natural responses along the way.
This is not being untrue to yourself. This is not quitting. This is maturity. This is perspective. This is success.
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