Most people imagine menopause as hot flashes, hormone creams, and the nagging suspicion that you’ve suddenly become a one-woman sauna.

Fewer people talk about the other side effect that often appears around the same time: divorce papers.

Enter the meme-worthy phrase making its rounds online—meno divorce.

Like quiet quitting or doomscrolling, it’s a cultural shorthand that compresses an entire demographic trend into two sticky words.

And women are picking it up because it explains something both statistical and deeply personal: menopause is often the moment when patience for a lopsided marriage runs out.

What Is a “Meno Divorce”?

My fascination with human behavior at work has caused me to notice how hiring managers love to say, “We only care about qualifications, and hire accordingly.”

It’s a noble sentiment, right up there with “I don’t judge a book by its cover” or “I only eat potato chips in moderation.”

The problem? None of those claims survive contact with real life.

Phubbing. It sounds like a minor traffic violation, but it’s what happens when your partner checks their phone while you’re talking about your day.

And it stings—sometimes just a little, sometimes like you’ve been benched from your own relationship.

A new study in the Journal of Personality shows that how badly it stings depends on your attachment style (Carnelley, Hart, Vowels, & Thomas, 2025).

People high in attachment anxiety? They feel it in their bones. Mood sinks, self-esteem craters, and the odds of retaliatory scrolling skyrocket.

Compromise is the glue stick of love. Not sexy, not elegant, but it keeps the whole thing from falling apart.

Without it? You don’t have a relationship. You have two people running competing political campaigns under one roof.

And here’s the bad news: some folks simply can’t do it.

A new study in Sexual and Relationship Therapy shows that folks with insecure attachment styles—the worriers, the avoiders, the ones rehearsing their exit speech—are way less likely to compromise (Mozafari & Xu, 2024).

Instead, they go for one of four classics: yell, sulk, control, or ghost. Conflict resolution, but make it chaos.

Divorce kills the marriage. It does not kill the parenting.

You may not share a bed anymore, but you’ll still share a Google calendar, a dental bill, and a child who expects both of you to show up for their science fair.

That’s where co-parenting counseling comes in.

Let’s be blunt: this is not therapy to rekindle romance. It’s therapy to stop your child from being collateral damage in your ongoing feud.

The research is consistent: children don’t suffer because parents divorce—they suffer because parents keep fighting (Gottman, 1994; Sandler et al., 2020).

Which means the real question isn’t, “Do we still need therapy together?” It’s “What kind of plan—or therapy—keeps our conflict from spilling over onto the kids?”

Most people think a “good” marriage means no fights, just endless candlelight dinners and synchronized grocery lists. In reality, if you never argue, one of you has probably stopped talking.

Decades of research show that fighting is not the enemy of marriage—contempt is.

John Gottman’s work at the “Love Lab” found that couples who thrive still clash on nearly 70% of issues (Gottman, 1994).

The difference is that their fights are less about destruction and more about staying connected. In other words, the right kinds of arguments can mean your marriage is healthier than you think.

A marriage without conflict isn’t a marriage—it’s a hostage situation.

Anxiety doesn’t always start with thoughts.

Sometimes it starts with the world itself: the buzzing fluorescent light that feels hostile, the neighbor’s leaf blower that might as well be aimed directly at your skull, or the checkout machine yelling “unexpected item in bagging area.”

That’s sensory overload anxiety—when your nervous system throws a party you didn’t RSVP to, and every sense shows up loud, bright, and impossible to ignore.

What Is Sensory Overload Anxiety? (And Why It’s Not Just Stress)

Most couples argue about familiar things: money, chores, in-laws, and the occasional dishwasher mutiny.

With ADHD in the relationship, those ordinary fights can take on an extraordinary intensity.

Arguments zigzag, escalate too quickly, and often balloon into something no one remembers starting.

That’s because ADHD adds neurological complications.

Executive dysfunction makes follow-through difficult.

Time blindness makes lateness feel inevitable.

Sensory overload turns small disagreements into sirens in the brain.

And rejection sensitivity makes criticism land like betrayal.

If you argue as though these differences don’t exist, you might find yourself fighting a ghost.

Most revivals ask you to buy something—vinyl, vintage denim, another “sustainable” hoodie.

Naturism’s pitch is simpler and far more subversive: you already own the outfit. You were born in it, and it still fits.

For decades, clothing has been treated like emotional duct tape: armor against judgment, a billboard for your status, a filter for your insecurities.

The naturist revival suggests something different. The body doesn’t need a disguise. The body is the disguise.

is family nudism becoming a thing?

Not every love story ends with an explosive blowout.

More often it fades the way air leaks from a tire—slowly, quietly, until you’re startled by how flat things feel.

You wake up one morning and realize you haven’t really laughed together in weeks.

Conversations have been whittled down to weather updates and grocery lists. You’re still under the same roof, still sharing a bed, still splitting the bills—but intimacy has thinned until you feel less like partners and more like polite roommates.

This is emotional distance. It isn’t always the death of love, though it often masquerades as such. More often, it’s the nervous system’s survival strategy: a partner shutting down to cope with stress, exhaustion, or the unspoken backlog of resentments.

Love can still be present, flickering in small gestures, even when connection feels faint. Here are a few hopeful signs.

You think you’re remembering a golden moment: your toddler, grinning with applesauce on their cheeks, running toward you like a drunken Olympian.

But you’re not just remembering. You’re filtering.

And the filter was bolted into place decades ago, when you were small and depending on parents who either showed up or didn’t.

A study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Perzolli, Arcos, Kerr, Smiley, & Borelli, 2024) confirms what most therapists already suspect:

Your ability to savor joy depends on whether your caregivers were emotional first responders or checked-out landlords.

Love doesn’t usually end with fireworks.

It ends in sentences — short ones, muttered in kitchens or texted at midnight — long before anyone says the word goodbye.

Most relationships don’t explode. They erode.

Not with a dramatic breakup scene, but with a trail of small sentences, tossed off like casual remarks but carrying the weight of exit strategies.

Men and women speak different dialects of dissatisfaction. Women often voice their discontent earlier, in coded phrases that sound ordinary but mean I’m lonely here.

Men, by contrast, tend to bury their unhappiness under silence, cliché, or withdrawal until the words slip out almost by accident.

Neither side is lying. Both are saying, in their own way: I don’t know how to reach you anymore.