Why Gen X Women Stay Too Long — In Jobs, Marriages, and Situations That Don't Fit
- Michaela Kozlik
- May 16
- 9 min read
Most of us have a moment where we knew. We just didn't do anything about it for a really long time.
By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist for women in midlife & perimenopause, Illinois
Not recently. A while ago. Maybe years ago. There was a moment, probably more than one, where something in you went this isn't right. Maybe it was random Tuesday night, looking across the dinner table, feeling completely alone in a room with someone you built your whole life with. Maybe it was sitting in your car after a meeting where your idea got ignored. Maybe it was smaller than that... like a feeling you couldn't quite understand, just a hint of this is not it.
You felt it. And then you talked yourself out of it, or got busy, or reminded yourself of all the reasons you couldn't possibly do anything about it right now.
And here you are.
If you're a Gen X woman, this is probably not the first time you've done this. Staying is practically a generational tradition, we just don't call it that. We call it loyalty or being realistic. We call it not being someone who gives up.
· · ·
Where this actually comes from
Gen X women didn't learn to stay from nowhere. We learned it really young.
A lot of us were the kids who figured things out ourselves. Parents were working, or checked out, or dealing with their own stuff, and we learned fast that waiting for someone to notice you were struggling was a strategy with a pretty low success rate. So we stopped waiting. We adapted. We got good at making the best of things because changing them wasn't really on the table when you were nine.
And that skill served us well for a long time. We became incredibly capable and resilient. The kind of women who handle things, who don't make a big deal out of it, who just figure it out.
The problem is that the same skill that helped us survive a childhood of figuring it out alone is the exact same thing keeping us stuck in situations that stopped fitting years ago. We adapted then because we had to. We're staying now because adapting is what we know, we just call it by different names.
The resilience that got you through so much is the same thing that keeps you in situations long after they've stopped deserving you.
Let's talk about loyalty — because it's more complicated than it sounds
Gen X women are loyal. Like, fiercely loyal. To people, to commitments, to the version of the story where we made the right choice and it all works out. And there is genuinely something beautiful about that.
But here's what I notice in my work: loyalty is often the story we tell ourselves when we don't want to look too closely at the real reason we're staying.
Because the real reason, a lot of the time it starting over is terrifying. Terrifying, in a deep, bodily, this-is-not-safe way that has very little to do with logic.
What does starting over mean? It means admitting that the last ten years didn't work out the way you planned. It means facing the possibility that you made a wrong turn, and that wrong turn cost you something. It means grief. Real, uncomfortable grief.
And it means facing a question that is scary for women who were raised to be self-sufficient and competent: what if I can't do this?
Sunk cost — the trap that sounds like wisdom
There's a concept in economics called the sunk cost fallacy. The idea that we keep investing in something like time, money, or energy, not because it's working, but because we've already put so much in. We don't want to have wasted what we've already spent.
It sounds mature. It sounds like commitment, like not being a flake.
It's actually a trap.
I hear versions of this all the time, and I bet some of these will land:
"We've been together for eighteen years. I can't just walk away from that."
"I've put fifteen years into this company. If I leave now, what was it all for?"
"My kids are almost out of the house. It would be selfish to blow everything up now."
"I'm too old to start over in a new field. I'd be starting from scratch."
"I've worked so hard to get here. Leaving feels like throwing it all away."
"If I leave, everyone will think I failed."
Notice what every single one of those is focused on. The past. What's already been spent. Not the future, not the next ten, twenty, thirty years of your life and whether you actually want to spend them this way.
The sunk cost fallacy keeps you anchored to the version of your life that already happened. At the expense of the one you could still have.
The identity problem — when staying is who you are
Sometimes Gen X women stay not because of loyalty or sunk cost, but because the situation has become so woven into their identity that leaving feels like losing themselves entirely.
If you've been someone's wife for twenty years, who are you if you're not that? If you've defined yourself by your career for two decades, who are you when that's gone? If you've been the responsible one, the stable one, the one who doesn't rock the boat, who are you if you start rocking it?
This is genuinely scary... existentially scary in a way that's hard to articulate, so instead you just... stay.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING
Midlife and perimenopause are already doing a number on your sense of identity — the hormonal shifts, the physical changes, the way you're questioning things you thought were settled. Leaving a significant relationship or role on top of all of that can feel like too much loss at once. Like you'd be unrecognizable to yourself. That fear is valid. And it's also not a good enough reason to stay in something that's making you miserable.
What "I'm not a quitter" is really covering
Gen X women hate the idea of quitting. It feels like failure. It feels like weakness. It feels like proving all the people right who expected you to fall apart.
So instead, you reframe staying as strength, commitment, and being someone who follows through.
And sometimes staying is the right call. Sometimes the relationship needs work, not an exit. Sometimes the job is hard right now but worth sticking out. Staying is not always wrong.
But.
There's a difference between staying because you've chosen to and staying because leaving feels impossible. Between staying because you still believe in something and staying because you can't imagine what comes next. Between staying as a conscious decision and staying as the absence of one.
Leaving something that doesn't fit you is not quitting. It's finally telling the truth about what you actually need.
The perimenopause factor — why this all comes to a head in midlife
If you're in your forties or early fifties, there's something else happening alongside all of this: perimenopause.
And one of the things perimenopause does it make the things you've been tolerating feel intolerable. The patience you had for situations that weren't working starts to run out. The ability to suppress what's true for you, in service of keeping everything stable, gets harder and harder to sustain.
A lot of women experience this as a kind of "crisis" — suddenly nothing fits, suddenly they can't make themselves stay comfortable in situations that used to be manageable. But another way to look at it is this: perimenopause is burning away the capacity for self-betrayal. It's making the cost of staying too long impossible to ignore.
That's uncomfortable. It's also, potentially, one of the most useful things that's ever happened to you.
What it actually takes to go
I'm not going to tell you leaving is easy. It's not. And I'm not going to tell you that every situation that doesn't fit perfectly is worth blowing up. Life is complicated and so are the decisions in it.
But I will tell you that most of the women I've worked with who finally left, said some version of the same thing afterward.
I wish I'd done it sooner.
Not because everything immediately got easier. It usually didn't. But because the version of themselves that existed on the other side of the leaving felt more like them than anything had in years.
Getting there usually required support that helped them understand why staying had felt so necessary, what they were actually afraid of, and what it would mean to make a choice that was truly theirs.
That's what I do. And if you've been circling the same decision for a while, sometimes the most useful thing is a concentrated stretch of time to actually work through it, which is why I offer therapy intensives alongside regular sessions.
You've stayed long enough.
If you're ready to figure out what's actually keeping you there, and what it would look like to finally choose yourself, I'd love to talk.
KEEP READING
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if I'm staying for the right reasons or just because I'm afraid to leave?
Honest question, and there's no clean answer. But here's a useful one to sit with: if fear were completely off the table, if you knew for certain you'd be okay financially, emotionally, practically, would you still stay? If the answer is yes, that tells you something. If the answer is an immediate no, that tells you something too. Fear is real and legitimate, but it's worth knowing it's a factor in your decision or if it's making the decision for you.
I've been in my marriage for over twenty years. Isn't leaving at this point just giving up?
The length of time you've been somewhere doesn't determine whether staying is right. Twenty years of investment is real, and the grief of ending something that long is real too. But twenty years also doesn't obligate you to twenty more years of the same. The question is if the next chapter of your life is something you want to spend in this relationship. That's worth looking at honestly, ideally with support, rather than answering it with "but we've been together so long."
I feel like perimenopause is making me want to blow everything up. How do I know what's real?
This is one of the most common questions I get from women in perimenopause. Perimenopause doesn't create dissatisfaction from nothing, but it does lower your tolerance for things that weren't working. Think of it less as perimenopause making you irrational and more as perimenopause making you honest. The feelings are real. Whether every impulse needs to be acted on immediately is a different question. This is exactly the kind of thing worth unpacking in therapy with enough time and space to look at it clearly rather than reactively.
I'm worried about what people will think if I leave my marriage / job / situation.
Of course you are. You were raised in a culture that had very specific ideas about what women were supposed to do and be and stick with. The fear of judgment is real, and pretending it is not doesn't help. What's also true is that the people whose opinions are shaping your life choices are not the ones who have to live your life. And most of them, if you're honest, are not thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are. They're busy with their own version of this exact same thing.
I'm in my late 40s. Is it really realistic to start over at this point?
Yes. I know that sounds like a therapist thing to say, so let me be specific. The women I've worked with who left situations like jobs, marriages, cities, entire life structures — almost universally describe the years that followed as the most themselves they've ever felt. Not easy, not without grief and difficulty. But theirs in a way that the years of staying weren't. You have decades ahead of you. The question is what you want to do with them.
Do you work with women outside of Chicago?
Yes — my practice is 100% virtual, and I work with women throughout all of Illinois. That includes Chicago and the surrounding suburbs — Evanston, Oak Park, Naperville, Wilmette, Hinsdale, Glenview, Barrington, Lake Forest, Highland Park — as well as women in Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Champaign, and anywhere else in the state. We meet wherever you are.
Comments