If You Leave Me Now… I’m Going To Be Absolutely Completely Fine.

In the words of Peter Cetera, you won't 'take away the biggest part of me'. Nope. Not a chance. Thoughts on a virtual pandemic of men leaving women in their fifties and why WE ARE FINE.

Lisa Dawson

Jan 17, 2026

My husband left me on Saturday 27 September 2025. I’d booked lunch at a local wine bar for the two of us to have a catch up and spend some time together as he’d been away a lot. He asked me to come downstairs after he returned from the gym and announced that he wasn’t happy, hadn’t been for some time and that he was leaving. We’d been married for 24 years and had three children, two of whom are now adults and one who is still at school. I spent the first day in shock, unable to eat, drink; only able to gasp, cry and apologise to my children profusely that this was happening to them. I felt like a fool, that he had been so unhappy and I hadn’t realised, that I was unattractive, unsexy, unappealing, a rubbish wife and that I’d done something wrong. That I’d been living a life that I’d imagined was totally happy and hadn’t known that all the time, he wasn’t. How stupid could I have been to think that he, like me, had future plans that involved us both? How could I have not known that he didn’t feel the same for me as he once did? I felt like an idiot.

My 23 year old daughter plied me with a sleeping pill and two purple gummies and made me go to bed at 8pm after discovering me sitting on the landing sobbing about how blinkered I had been to not realise I’d been living a happy life alone. The next morning I woke in a daze, unaccustomed as I was to taking sleeping aids and couldn’t function until midday (such a rookie error). But then, the fog cleared. I stopped crying. I stopped blaming myself. I realised that no, I hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t my fault. We HAD had a happy life. We laughed in each others company, we went on walks together at weekends, we went to the theatre, hosted dinner parties, rarely argued. As a family, we were rock solid. We enjoyed being together, our children actually liked spending time with us, even. We might not have had many shared interests - he had no love for my passion for interiors, art and vintage; I had no inclination towards Sheffield Wednesday, home security, massive televisions or football - but we had plenty in common. And if he hadn’t been happy for years, as he said, then why hadn’t he told me sooner? He was a strong character - he wouldn’t even stay at a party if he wasn’t in the mood. We always talked about everything. It was inexplicable to me. But he; he had felt that something was missing and no longer felt the same about me as I did about him.

By Day 2, I stopped feeling like a failure and I started to feel annoyed. I took two weeks off posting my Substack and paused my paid subscribers (as a woman who is obsessed with consistency, this made me even more irritated) so that I could action some ‘self care’ (I know, right). I told all of my friends and family that he’d left me and the only tears that fell were ones of fury. In fact, the day after he left I filmed a brand advert for Instagram, I was THAT okay. By Day 3, I started to feel weirdly liberated. I made an appointment with a counsellor because I was concerned that I wasn’t lying prostrate on the sofa sobbing all day, that my reaction was incorrect in relation to the magnitude of this life change. I started to reflect, in depth, on my marriage and all that went with it. I waited to have a meltdown, to plunge into the depths of despair, to throw myself, as predicted, prostrate on the sofa sobbing. But it didn’t happen. I filmed an Instagram advert for Flash cleaning products. I returned to my Substack routine. Life went on.

My anger at what he had done, my fury that he had allowed me to plan our future, to buy a new house with me, to believe that our relationship was as it seemed, exceeded and overrode the love that I felt for him. I still loved him, but I wasn’t prepared to allow myself to be dragged down into a pit of misery or depression that would cause my children to worry or be concerned. I wasn’t prepared for my life to become dismal by dwelling on how I could have ‘behaved’ differently, or if there was anything that I could have done to stop him doing what he did. I stopped trying to take responsibility for him and his actions and I started to think about how my life was going to look going forward. I also started to think about how my marriage had managed to get to this stage without me realising.

When I first met my husband, I was 27 and an Executive Assistant in a big American tech company. I had a good job, but so did he. We had two children, and I worked part time at the local Estate Agents, before we had another and I started transcribing audio books at home. It was a fairly monotonous job with an average wage but it enabled me to be at home with three kids. His career was rising, he was always busy, always important, always the one earning the ‘big’ money. In 2013 he was offered a job in York so we moved our family up and bought a big, Georgian house in the country. I started posting my house on Instagram and before long, I started writing a blog to sit alongside it. In 2016, I began to earn a salary working with brands to help them promote their products on social media. I started to become successful at what I was doing.

By the time lockdown hit, I was doing very well in my new career. My children had got older, more independent, and I had more time on my hands to concentrate on what I loved. I wrote a book. I ran workshops. I had an online interiors course. I regularly contributed and was commissioned to write for national media, I had a monthly column in an interior magazine. As my career rose, so did my confidence. Because of what I was doing, I discovered new areas of discussion, I had more general knowledge, I became more well read, more learned, I had more opinions and, godammit, I felt GOOD about myself. After years of editing other peoples work, I started writing almost full time and I learned how to do it well. I felt better about myself than I did in my teens, in my twenties, in my thirties, my forties. I felt as though I was positively contributing to society, almost. It felt BRILLIANT. I felt happy with the way that my life was going, more creative than I had ever felt before and I had so much confidence that I felt I could tackle anything. I felt that at 54, I was living my best life. I was looking forward to renovating our new mortgage free downsized house, eventually buying a little home in Greece and cutting down our workload so that my husband and I could spend time together doing what we loved most, enjoying life in the sunshine.

And then, on Saturday 27 September 2025, my husband left me.

Four weeks after, I posted this news on Instagram to my audience. I have spent ten years talking to the camera daily, writing about my family, my animals, all the stuff; the idea that I would be able to carry on regardless without imparting this huge life change to the loyal followers who have been chatting to me for years wasn’t even an option. The response was over and above what I would ever have expected; an abundance of support and shared experiences. Hundreds of comments on the post from women who had been through the same thing, hundreds more DM’s from women with identical stories to mine. Married for multiple decades, kids get older, but their own lives get BETTER. Women who have found interests and creative pursuits later in life that have gone on to become important to them, that amplify their voices, that boost their confidence and self esteem. And then, their husbands leave them. Almost a pandemic of fleeing men, in fact.

As women in our fifties, we have been dogged by patriarchal behaviour for our entire lives. In many cases - most certainly in my own - we were brought up in families where the father was the patriarch with the ‘important’ job, the mother looked after the children and the home. Families were often reliant on the man financially, he was the main wage earner whilst the mother was the care giver.

We have battled our way up career ladders whilst men have stood at the top deciding whether or not we can sit on the same rung as them. We have tolerated behaviour in the workplace over previous decades that only in recent years has been deemed inappropriate (I can remember taking minutes at a Burton Group board meeting in the nineties and the CEO slapping my bottom as I walked out of the door), carved out successful careers despite the eternal presumption that we should be the primary carers of our offspring (‘he’s such a hands on father’. Does anyone ever say ‘she’s a hands on mother’?). But we run businesses, we create opportunities, we lead and what’s more, we fucking excel at it, a fact that is STILL a societal issue even now in 2026. I read an excellent article by Rebecca Woolf recently where she wrote about the divorce of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban:

You can do so much good, introspective, personal work on valuing yourself, no matter your age or appearance, but you’re still doing that work within a political and cultural reality whose governing logic both explicitly and implicitly devalues women. Not just devalues, but degrades - especially when women fail to conform to societal norms of behaviour, which somehow remain: be beautiful, be seen, be silent….then disappear.

I’ve had SO many discussions with friends and family about why mid life marriages break up. With women who have written to me with identical stories, women who have been happily married for decades before their worlds are turned upside down by fleeing husbands. Almost a pandemic, in fact. But WHY is this becoming so commonplace? I haven’t spoken to a single person who cannot recount stories of friends or family who have experienced similar marriage break ups at this stage of life.

I’ve thought about this a lot and it is certainly generational. We finish education, we find jobs and then often, we have children. Sometimes we don’t. But often we do. And then, often but not always, we take on the role as chief caregiver, organiser, coordinator, cleaner, chef, laundry washer, holiday booker, social secretary, animal feeder, gardener, decorator, ALL THE STUFF whilst the husband works and continues to contribute financially. We are the first to be called if a child is sick at school, we know when Parents Evening is, we take the kids to the dentist, we make appointments for them to have their jabs and take them to the doctor if they don’t feel well. Alongside all of this, we work jobs, whilst battling to get the right hours to suit our family lives. We manage juggling these jobs with all the things that we juggle at home. We manage, we cope, we survive on little sleep and then, we come out of the other side. Much stronger than we were when we went into it - capable, multi tasking, consistent machines who can manage homes, families and day to day life. On the other hand, our partners happily continue throughout with their own job roles. Often, we work around them. Now, I’m not saying this happens in every partnership - I know it doesn’t - but it certainly happens A LOT in this demographic.

Then, when our children reach their teens and become more independent, we women start to reclaim our lives. This sounds a little dramatic, but anyone whose child hits an age where they can get on a bus and you don’t have to get in the car to ferry them around will know that it’s a game changer. Not having to ‘put them to bed’. Know that you can leave them in a swimming pool or they can jump in the sea without watching them and worrying they are going to drown. Reading a book all day on holiday. Going out for the evening without having to get (or pay for) a babysitter. We reclaim the things that we enjoyed prior to having kids, but we are stronger and more capable than we were before so it feels sweeter. This new stage of life is GOOD and the fact we have endured parenting chaos for years make it feel even better.

So we start taking time for ourselves. Whatever that may be - exercise classes, cold water swimming (NOT me, but you know, it’s popular), book groups, hobbies, mini breaks with friends, self care (nails, treatments that make us feel good), writing, reading, art classes, all the things. Sometimes, we start creative businesses working in areas that we love - I have lost count of the amount of women on my social channels who have gone down this path. We are confident in ourselves, we don’t hesitate to try new things because, hell, if we can bring up children and juggle IT ALL in a constantly changing society then we can do ANYTHING. This is fact. It is a rare occasion that you hear of a woman having a ‘mid life crisis’ despite the fact we also have to navigate menopause and all that shit. Because mid life, for women, can be the most satisfying and enlightening stage of our lives.

And this is where we differ from men. Men plateau, often in the same career that they’ve had for years, whilst women are on an upward trajectory. They have rarely done ‘the juggling’. We no longer need them so much financially or for child rearing emotional support, we have hobbies and interests outside the partnership and quite frankly, we give far less fucks about ANYTHING than we did when we were younger. It’s outrageously liberating. For the women. Possibly not so much for the men. To get through this time of life as a partnership, it requires emotional awareness, adaptability and commitment. No one can claim to be the same person that they were in their twenties, and this is a fact.

When we marry, we hope that it will last the course. We hope that we’ll stay together forever and that our lives won’t veer off track. Sometimes people fall out of love, for whatever reason, and that happens. But as women, we are allowed to blossom, we are perfectly at liberty to discover new chapters of growth as we age without fear that we’ll damage the egos of fragile men. Women in their fifties are stronger now than we ever have been - we bloom, we expand our horizons and we grow; we don’t shrivel up and start buying elasticated waist trousers and comfort shoes from the back pages of the Daily Mail as soon as we hit mid life. But the silent assumption remains that this generation of women are ‘past their prime’. In discussion with my friend last week, she raised the fact that Noel Gallagher is lauded for the fact that his partner is the same age as him, which should apparently be celebrated due to the fact that majority of men his age have headed towards partners decades younger. I mean, seriously. WTF.

I have never felt as comfortable in my own skin as I do at the age of 54. I am filled with confidence, lacking in any type of FOMO and give no fucks about minutiae. I did not expect my husband to leave me, not for one second. But he did and now, I need to get with the programme. My dreams of a mortgage free house, lighter workload and a little house in Greece have been whacked on the back burner, but I am still looking forward to my future. It’s a different future than I anticipated, but GOD, the unexpectedness of what it may hold is really exciting. I am at ease in my own company, financially independent and this next chapter of my life is mine for the taking. I may no longer be an ‘other half’ but I’m sure as hell a whole. If you leave me now? I’m going to be absolutely, perfectly fine. And that’s a fact.