When I called time on my 20-year marriage at the age of 49, I had no interest in becoming the poster girl for women who want to leave their husbands in midlife. Back then, in 2022, I was too busy trying to navigate how our three teenagers would take the news and dealing with moving, alone, out of the family home in Kent to a rented flat in London.
Then, last month, I wrote an article in this newspaper about how a row over stacking the dishwasher ended up with me saying to my now ex-husband, ‘I don’t make you happy, I need to leave for both of us.’
The response I got to the article was overwhelming – some people asked how I could be ‘so selfish’, others called it, ‘the midlife-crisis version of a man buying a Ferrari’. But the message I received above any other was from women saying, ‘Thank you for verbalising what I have known for years but couldn’t put into words’.
It made me realise that there are hundreds – thousands, probably – of women out there, living lives they don’t want because the idea of throwing a grenade into their respectable family life/big house/ tight circle of couple friends feels too terrifying to contemplate.
‘Walkaway Wife’ is the term coined to describe women (typically aged between 45 and 65) who choose to leave their marriage rather than stay in a relationship that no longer serves them. That was me. My ex-husband and I had met in our late 20s, married and had kids in our 30s, his career as a City lawyer soared, mine as a headhunter stalled as I took on the bulk of childcare for our three children. So far, so traditional.
When we met, we had wanted the same things: a family, successful careers, the comfortable life those generous salaries could afford. But deep down we were so different in every way. By the time I left, the love had gone and it wasn’t fair on me or my ex-husband to stay married when I was so unhappy that I had become a mean-spirited nightmare to live with. There was no big dramatic screaming match, nor an affair on either side that ended things – rather, a slow drip of domestic irritations that built up. Eventually, I felt like a caged animal.
‘Walkaway Wife’ is the term coined to describe women (typically between 45 and 65) who choose to leave their marriage rather than stay in a relationship that no longer serves them.
‘The truth is, divorce is not necessarily a bad thing for your children. You have to ask yourself: would you want your kids to live the life that you’re living?’
At 49, I was faced with the reality that I could have 40-plus years of life ahead of me and I didn’t want to end up spending them with someone I had nothing in common with any more.
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the wrong person.
I know from my own experience that women who choose to leave their marriage – and, in my case, the family home, too – will be criticised and treated with suspicion. You’ll lose friends and maybe a bit of social cachet, too. You will have to accept that compromise is inevitable, but you’ll also start to work out what happiness looks like for you. (That’s you – not your in-laws, your couple friends or the school-gate mums.)
I also know that people have questions. A lot of questions. The one I am most often asked is, ‘But what about your kids?’ Many women tell me their biggest fear of leaving an unhappy marriage is what it would do to the children, but I believe that is a crutch people cling to in order to avoid making a tough decision. It’s where I have experienced the most judgment – mostly from women – but how about we reframe the narrative? There is an assumption from other people that my children are not going to be OK. But that is a stick society has beaten us with for years to stop women moving forward. People have said to me, ‘You can be as selfish as you want about yourself and leaving your husband, but if you’re leaving your kids…’
I didn’t leave my kids. I left my husband.
The truth is, divorce is not necessarily a bad thing for your children. You have to ask yourself: would you want your kids to live the life that you’re living? Of course it affects them, it’s a process they need to go through and we thought long and hard about how to tell them. But, if anything, my children were a trigger for me leaving. I remember waking up one day and thinking, ‘Oh my god, they actually have no concept of what a truly loving, happy relationship looks like.’ I wanted them to have relationship goals – and what my ex and I had was no goal. There was no affection, no love, and I did not want that to be their benchmark for a normal relationship.
In fact, when we told the kids we were divorcing, one of my sons said, ‘Why didn’t you do this sooner? You don’t even like each other.’ And I thought, ‘You know what? He’s right.’
‘A row over stacking the dishwasher ended up with me saying to my now ex-husband, “I don’t make you happy, I need to leave for both of us”.’
Since I walked away, I have learnt a lot about how to ‘divorce well’. Yes, it’s a difficult, contentious, confusing and heartbreaking thing to go through, but I am proof that you can also get through it in a positive way. I have learnt not to hold grudges – I mean, that is like drinking poison and waiting for somebody else to die – and to never, ever, ever say anything that I will regret later.
I think the reason for the current rise in Walkaway Wives like me is that we are from a generation of women the likes of which has never existed before. We are physically so much fitter. The improvement of menopause treatment has galvanized women and given us, as the Chinese call it, a ‘second spring’. It gives you a confidence and a clarity that maybe our parents and certainly our grandparents never had. And we have all sorts of opportunities they never had – in the workplace, financially, just the fact that we’re hopefully going to live to 85 as opposed to dying at 70. We have the money and the sense of adventure to choose the life we really want.
When I ended my marriage, it was not because I wanted to be with someone else. It was because I would rather be on my own than in an unhappy relationship. As someone once said to me, ‘When being single is preferable to living how you’re living, that’s when you know it’s done.’
While I’m hardly waving a banner and shouting, ‘Hey ladies, everyone should get divorced!’, I do know that more women are looking in the mirror and saying, ‘I’ve got a good third of my life left. The first third I spent basically growing up, the next third I spent looking after kids, trying to build my career, and cooking dinner every f**king night. So, for the next 30 years, I just wanna eat crisps and drink wine on my own.’
I am living proof that this is possible, but I feel passionately that we should change the way we talk about divorce. The end of a relationship is deemed a failure, but a 20-year marriage isn’t failure. If you stayed in a job that long, you’d be given a carriage clock.
If I hadn’t left my marriage, I would still be that thoroughly miserable woman, living half a life. I also wouldn’t have met my partner of over three years. Being with the right person, someone who understands and accepts me absolutely, has been a revelation; it’s the most amazing feeling. The biggest reward is when my kids see us together and say, ‘OK, we get it now’.
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Join Kat each month in YOU for her Diary Of A Walkaway Wife – she’ll be writing candidly about everything from the impact on her children and untangling the joint finances to how she found love again in her 50s. If you have any questions you’d like to ask Kat or topics you want her to cover, write to her at editor@you.co.uk.
Hair: Dayna Vaughan-Teague.
Make-up: Levi Jade Taylor.
Shirt and sandals, Mango. Jeans, Topshop. Belt, Stradivarius. Jewellery, Kat’s own
