Why More & More Women Are Walking Away From Marriage And Men Are the Reason

This is not a story about impatience, modern attitudes, or broken values. This is the story of what happens when an entire system stops working for one side, and that side finally chooses to leave. Women are not exiting marriage because they stopped believing in love or commitment. They are exiting because marriage, as it has been practiced in India, has repeatedly asked them to shrink, absorb, forgive, and endure without reciprocity. What looks like a personal decision today is actually a collective response to decades of imbalance, emotional neglect, and normalized inequality. This is not a rebellion against marriage. This is resistance against erasure.



Indian women are prepared for marriage as a lifelong performance of adjustment. From a young age, they are taught to be flexible, accommodating, and emotionally available. They are told that harmony depends on their ability to bend, soften, and absorb discomfort quietly. Marriage is framed as something they must “manage,” not something they are equally entitled to experience on their own terms.

Men, in contrast, are rarely socialized to change themselves for marriage. Their habits, tempers, ambitions, and silences are accepted as fixed traits. Marriage does not demand transformation from them; it promises continuity. This asymmetry means that from day one, women are asked to evolve endlessly, while men are allowed to arrive exactly as they are and stay that way.

Women didn’t just contribute to marriage; they held it together emotionally. They became the ones who remembered, soothed, anticipated, and repaired. They carried the weight of family relationships, managed unspoken tensions, and ensured emotional stability for everyone else while neglecting their own.

This labour was never acknowledged because patriarchy never considered it labour. It was labelled instinct, care, or duty. Over time, women realized that love had quietly turned into obligation, and partnership had become emotional servitude. When exhaustion replaced affection, it wasn’t because women stopped caring. It was because they were never cared for in return.



For years, women stayed silent not because they were content, but because speaking came at a cost. Expressing dissatisfaction was often met with defensiveness, ridicule, or accusations of being dramatic. Over time, many women learned that silence was safer than honesty.

Men interpreted this silence as stability. They believed everything was fine because nothing was being said. But silence was never peace. It was resignation. So when women finally leave, men describe it as sudden. What they fail to see is the long, quiet grieving that happened while women were still physically present.

Marriage protected men from emotional accountability. They were allowed to be distant, angry, or absent without consequence. Their struggles were centred. Their stress was justified. Their disengagement was normalized.

Women, meanwhile, were expected to compensate. To understand. To adjust. To forgive. This was not mutual support; it was a one-sided system designed to preserve male comfort at the expense of female wellbeing. As long as this structure remained unquestioned, marriage continued to function for men and quietly destroy women.



Financial independence didn’t suddenly make women leave marriages. Awareness did. Education, exposure, and conversations gave women language for what they had always felt. They learned that constant emotional neglect is not normal. That loneliness inside marriage is not a personal failure. That love does not require self-erasure.

Once women recognized the pattern, staying became harder than leaving. What once felt like duty began to feel like slow self-betrayal. Leaving was no longer about courage alone. It was about refusing to remain disconnected from oneself.

Women do not walk away at the first sign of discomfort. They wait. They try. They adjust more. They hope longer. Divorce usually comes after years of emotional effort that went unnoticed and unreciprocated.

Calling divorce a failure ignores the labour that preceded it. Leaving is not an act of rebellion. It is an act of self-preservation. Earlier generations stayed because leaving meant economic and social ruin. Today’s women leave because staying means psychological and emotional ruin.

What many men describe as the breakdown of marriage is actually the breakdown of expectation. They expected loyalty without emotional presence. Support without participation. Stability without growth.

Women are not punishing men by leaving. They are responding to neglect. What feels like rejection to men feels like relief to women. The discomfort men experience now is the discomfort of accountability finally arriving.

Men who listen, reflect, and evolve are not being abandoned. They are being chosen more consciously than ever. What women are rejecting is not masculinity, but entitlement disguised as tradition.

This moment is not about destroying marriage. It is about redefining it. A system that survives only by demanding female sacrifice deserves to be questioned. And a marriage that cannot exist without women losing themselves deserves to end.