Staying in an unhappy marriage for the children feels noble. But what are they really learning about love by watching? An honest look from Illicit Encounters.
It’s the line that ends a thousand late-night conversations with yourself. Things aren’t right. They haven’t been right for years. But the children are eight and eleven, and you’d walk through fire before you’d put them through anything. So you stay. You tell yourself it’s the selfless thing. The grown-up thing.
And on the surface, it is. Keeping a home steady, keeping bedtimes and birthday teas and the school run intact — that’s love, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But there’s a quieter question underneath it, one most parents never let themselves ask. What are the children actually watching?
Because they are watching. Children are extraordinary readers of a room. They don’t need to hear a row to know that something’s gone flat. They notice that Mum and Dad don’t touch in the kitchen anymore. They clock the careful politeness, the separate evenings, the way the temperature drops half a degree when one of you walks in. Long before they could name it, they feel it.
Claire from Stockport put it better than we could. She’d stayed eleven years past the point she knew it was over, certain she was protecting her daughter. Then one evening her daughter, then sixteen, said something that stopped her cold. “I’m never getting married. It just looks like two people being disappointed in the same house.” Claire had given her girl a stable home. She’d also, without meaning to, shown her exactly what to expect from love. And it wasn’t much.
That’s the part the “for the kids” logic tends to miss. We imagine we’re protecting them from the pain of a split. But we rarely consider what we’re modelling in the meantime — what a marriage looks like, what affection looks like, what a person settles for. Children don’t learn about relationships from what we tell them. They learn from the one they grow up inside, watching daily, absorbing every silence.
None of this is an argument for blowing up a family. Far from it. Plenty of marriages go through long, cold winters and come out the other side warmer than before, and a rough patch is not a verdict. The point is gentler than that. It’s simply that “staying for the children” isn’t automatically the noble choice it feels like at two in the morning. Sometimes it’s just the frightened one wearing a nicer coat.
So what’s the alternative, if leaving isn’t on the table — and for so many people, for a hundred sensible reasons, it genuinely isn’t? Often it’s something quieter and more honest. It’s admitting the marriage may not be the source of everything you need, and deciding what to do with that knowledge. Some people pour themselves back into the relationship and find a flicker of what was lost. Some find a friendship, a confidant, a bit of attention that reminds them they’re still a person and not just a parent and a payslip. And some keep the home intact precisely so they can stay — while quietly finding warmth elsewhere.
There’s no medal for misery. The idea that a parent must be unhappy to be a good one is one of the most stubborn lies going, and it serves nobody — least of all the children it’s meant to protect. A parent who feels seen, wanted, a little bit alive again tends to be a better parent. Warmer. More patient. Less likely to snap over spilled juice because the real frustration is sitting somewhere else entirely.
David, a member from Bristol, said the thing that changed for him wasn’t dramatic at all. He’d found someone to talk to, nothing his children would ever know about, and the difference showed up at the breakfast table. “I stopped being a ghost at my own kitchen counter,” he said. “My kids got more of me, not less.”
So if you’ve been telling yourself you’re staying for them — and you might well be right to stay — it’s worth being honest about what they’re learning in the meantime. Are they watching two people who’ve made peace with a quiet life? Or two people slowly going cold, calling it sacrifice?
Your children deserve the steady home, yes. But they also deserve to grow up around someone who remembers what it feels like to be wanted. Sometimes looking after yourself is the most parental thing you can do.
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