Holly Wainwright

A lot of these people will have been through raising kids to a point at which they're not so desperately involved and bonded by that activity anymore.

So that gives you a new like sort of space to be apart from each other literally.

And people who kind of – they like each other fine, not all the people in this article do –

But they're kind of like, I'm just done with pretending that I want to watch your TV shows and I want to listen to you talking about golf or whatever it is.

I want to live my life now.

And that is an incredibly common midlife experience.

And I interviewed this woman for the last season of Midlife.

Monique Van Tulder, she had written a book called The Grown-Up Gap Year.

And her story wasn't typical because, you know, there was a certain amount of privilege involved that she was able to literally leave her marriages for a period of time.

But what drove her to that point was all the things I just said.

Her kids had got to a teenage point where she'd kind of got them through the HSC and they were still living at home, but they didn't really need her.

Her husband was not abusive or awful or anything like that, but he was very caught up in his job and his life and his stuff.

And she was just like, oh, I'm just done.

And so she left for three months and went to live somewhere else and went to travel around and waited for them to notice, basically.

Waited for her husband and sons to kind of go, oh, like...

Where's mum?

Where's mum?

And it took them a while to notice.

And then she said when she worked her way back to the relationship, which she did, she said the marriage and the relationship has never been better because they've kind of re-established boundaries and rules that pushed her to that point.

But what was interesting to me is over and over again in that conversation she kept saying men need to understand that to avoid an expensive divorce they need to X, Y, Z. And I think that that's a large part of this is very often men are blindsided in midlife.