It’s far quieter in my couples therapy office than you might imagine. But it’s not the peaceful kind of quiet of a couple at ease; it’s the kind that tells me partners have been quietly quitting their relationship long before they booked their first session.

What most of them don’t know is that I’ve been there myself. I quiet quit my own first marriage years before the divorce was final. It wasn’t intentional. At the time, I genuinely believed I was doing my best to prevent things from getting worse. But now I can see that my instinct to avoid conflict — the way I sidestepped discomfort, swallowed my feelings, and tried to keep the peace — played a significant role in our marriage ending.

I’ve always been outgoing, assertive, and extremely vocal, but inside my marriage I struggled to name what I needed. I doubted myself and second-guessed my reactions. And when I finally worked up the courage to express a complaint, the response I got often seemed like proof that speaking up made things worse. So I began to self-silence. I didn’t want to start fights or create more tension. Staying quiet about my feelings and needs seemed like the best choice. But what I couldn’t see was that avoiding the problem was becoming the primary problem. I couldn’t see how I was abandoning myself in the process.

This is the pattern I recognize so clearly now in the couples who sit across from me. Quiet quitting isn’t a dramatic event. It’s a slow, insidious slide into disconnection. It shows up in the feelings you talk yourself out of having, the needs you convince yourself are unreasonable, the moments you choose not to speak up because you don’t want to rock the boat. You think you’re protecting your relationship, but in reality you’re retreating from it. You stop coming forward with vulnerability. You foreclose on curiosity and stop bringing energy to the partnership. You stop making bids for connection. And emotional distance grows not from one dramatic rupture but from hundreds of tiny unspoken moments that slowly erode your bond.

By the time many couples come into my office, they’re sitting with years of accumulated silence. On the surface they may be arguing about money, sex, parenting, or infidelity, but beneath those issues, the real problem is that avoiding conflict has led to resentment, disconnection, and loneliness. Conflict feels dangerous, especially when you were never taught how to work through hard moments in a healthy way. When you don’t have the tools or the emotional regulation to stay grounded during conflict, avoidance seems like the safest option. It feels protective. It feels like you’re doing the right thing for the relationship.

The trouble is that these avoidant moves — the ones designed to prevent further hurt — end up creating more distance instead of safety. Avoidant behaviors are the coping strategies we use to manage discomfort, fear, and vulnerability, but they only pull partners farther apart. They’re often well-intended, but they lead to the very opposite of the connection partners want.

Here are a few of the most common avoidant behaviors that lead to quiet quitting in relationships:

Sweeping frustrations under the rug

This is one of the most common forms of avoidance. You minimize the moment or tell yourself it isn’t worth mentioning. But without acknowledgment, there can be no repair. Small hurts accumulate and turn into resentment. Quiet quitting often begins here, in the everyday irritations that go unaddressed.

People-pleasing and appeasing

Women in particular are conditioned to prioritize harmony over honesty — I like to call it “Good Girl-Itis.” We’re often praised for being selfless and putting our needs last. We say yes when we want to say no and carry the emotional load for everyone around us. We think we’re being noble and cooperative, but we’re really self-abandoning. Our choice to prioritize others and swallow our feelings and needs is rooted in fear and avoidance. When you mute your internal voice, you disconnect from your own needs, which means you inevitably disconnect from your partner as well.

Criticizing and blaming

Criticism often masquerades as “expressing yourself,” but it’s actually another form of avoidance. It allows you to express frustration without ever revealing the vulnerable truth underneath. It’s easier to point out what your partner is doing wrong — or isn’t doing — than it is to say you feel lonely or unimportant. Criticism blocks intimacy because it prevents you from sharing the deeper emotional truth that would create connection.

Victim Volcano Syndrome

Some people hold everything in because they’re terrified of conflict or convinced their feelings are “too much.” They shove their reactions down, tell themselves it’s not worth bringing up, and try to be easy-going, until the pressure inside builds so high it has nowhere to go but out. When the eruption finally comes, it’s intense, even disproportionate to the moment, because it carries months or years of unspoken hurt. The blow-up becomes the focus instead of the silence that created it, and both partners are left confused and overwhelmed. This pattern isn’t really about anger; it’s about avoidance.

Outsourcing Needs for Connection

When emotional intimacy starts to feel out of reach, many people turn elsewhere without even realizing they’re doing it. They pour their energy into their kids, work, hobbies — anywhere that feels safer and more accessible. These relationships can be meaningful, but when they start replacing emotional engagement with your partner, they become a quiet form of retreat. You get your connection needs met everywhere except the relationship that needs them most, and the distance between you and your partner grows.

All of these behaviors share a common thread: the disconnection begins internally. Quiet quitting starts when you lose touch with your own inner experience. It starts when you override your instincts, silence your feelings, diminish your needs, and tell yourself that conflict is too risky.

The antidote isn’t bigger fights or dramatic confrontations. It’s what I call Self-Connected Communication. This means turning inward before turning outward, finding clarity around what you feel, identifying what you truly need, and speaking from that grounded place. When you approach your partner with emotional regulation and vulnerability, you create conditions where repair, connection, and emotional intimacy can thrive.

Quiet quitting is preventable. Not through grand gestures or sudden reinventions, but through consistent, honest engagement: addressing frustrations early, being transparent about your inner world, introducing novelty and shared experiences to bring energy back into the relationship, and building regular rituals of repair. Relationships rarely end because of one catastrophic event. They unravel through a thousand small moments where connection could have been nurtured and wasn’t. But those same moments, when approached with honesty and courage, can help bring a relationship back to life, and in many cases lead to a stronger connection than you ever dreamed possible.

Welldoing's Alice McGurran interviewed Colette Jane Fehr about her new book The Cost of Quiet: How to Have the Hard Conversations That Create Secure, Lasting Love: