CNN
When she was married, Carly and her husband didn’t fight much.
When things started to go downhill in her marriage, she and her now-ex turned to couples’ workbooks to try to figure things out.
“I would just prefer not to talk to him about things because it was very difficult to communicate in general,” said Carly, a mother of one child who didn’t want to include her last name due to privacy concerns.
“He was more like, silent treatment and passive-aggressive. And I feel like I probably was the same, too.”
At one point, Carly asked him to move out of their Tampa, Florida, home.
“He was like, ‘No, we’ll figure it out under our own roof,’” she said.
He moved his things into a guest bedroom in the family home and began sleeping there.
After a year in separate bedrooms, the couple decided to end their marriage. But leading up to that point, they continued living together in the same home, raising their daughter and appearing like a couple to the outside world.
“He became a stranger to me that I was still married to under the same roof in a year’s time, and then we got divorced,” she said.
Although the legal proceedings came later, the couple were already going through what’s often called a “silent divorce.”
What is a silent divorce?
Couples end up in this situation when they no longer feel an attachment to each other but continue staying together for financial or other reasons, according to Stephanie Moir, a licensed mental health counselor and certified rehabilitation counselor with Serene Mind Counseling + Evaluations, a private mental health practice in Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida.
“A silent divorce is when you’re not legally separated, but you’re definitely emotionally, mentally and almost to a certain point physically removed, too, from your spouse,” Moir said.
“It’s really something that you’re going through personally and kind of on your own — it’s not really something that’s on paper or completely shared. So it can be isolating,” she added.
It’s a common refrain that marriage takes work. “If you don’t really work on a marriage, it could really lead to that emotional disconnect where two people are just not on the same page anymore,” Moir said.
Signs you’re in a silent divorce
Realizing you no longer have common goals as a couple and an inability to see yourself “growing and expanding” with your partner is one sign you may be in or headed toward a silent divorce, she said.
“Maybe you start taking separate vacations or don’t go together to social gatherings, like birthdays,” Moir said.
Another telling sign is a sustained lack of physical intimacy with your partner, whether you’re no longer having a sexual relationship or lacking any other kind of touch with each other that was formerly the norm, she added.