Most people don’t quit their jobs so much as they fall out of love with them. It begins subtly. Work that had felt energizing is now routine. The sense of connection that once anchored them starts to thin. They still show up, still deliver, look entirely committed from the outside—but inside, something essential has changed. Long before anyone hands in a resignation letter, the relationship between the person and the employer has already begun to fade.
This slow unraveling is often confused with “quiet quitting,” the post-COVID catch-all phrase describing employees doing precisely what the job requires—no more, no less. Quiet quitting sparked a public conversation about boundaries, burnout, and shifting expectations for work. But falling out of love with a job is something different. It’s not a stance or a trend. It’s an emotional shift. People don’t choose it; they realize it.
Falling Out Of Love With A Job
What sets this dynamic in motion is rarely dramatic. It might be an idea that goes unacknowledged. A meeting where they hoped to contribute but were overlooked. A one-on-one that’s canceled and never rescheduled. A promised opportunity that quietly evaporates. Individually, these moments are small. Collectively, they begin to alter how people feel about the place where they spend most of their waking hours.
And this is where insights from an unexpected source—relationship science—become helpful. The most useful explanations come not from management literature but from the work of psychologist John Gottman, who spent decades studying how relationships strengthen, weaken, and sometimes dissolve. Gottman didn’t study workplaces, but the principles he uncovered apply surprisingly well because, at their core, workplaces are networks of human relationships. Projects, teams, performance reviews, and collaborations—none of them function without a relational infrastructure.
One of Gottman’s central findings was that relationships begin to decline when people stop updating their understanding of each other. Early in a relationship, curiosity is genuine. Over time, assumptions may take their place. The same thing can happen at work. When someone starts a new job, we’re naturally curious about them, as they are about us. We ask what they’re good at, what they hope to do, and where they want to grow. But over time, a routine inevitably takes over. The manager settles into a fixed picture of who this person is.
Meanwhile, the employee keeps changing in small ways that no one notices. Their ambitions drift. Their interests evolve. Nothing dramatic happens, but one day they realize they no longer feel seen. And eventually, without any big blow-up or dramatic moment, they start to feel invisible.
Saving The Employee’s Relationship With The Job
Gottman also found that healthy relationships are sustained not by big gestures, but by small moments—what he called “bids for connection.” A comment, a question, a shared idea—these micro-interactions offer opportunities to turn toward one another. Workplaces are full of similar bids. Someone offers an idea in a meeting. Someone else hints they’re ready for a new challenge. Another raises a concern, testing whether anyone is listening. When leaders respond with interest, trust deepens. When these moments are overlooked or brushed aside, people eventually stop initiating them. Disengagement doesn’t start with withdrawal; it starts with discouragement.
As the drift continues, emotional patterns emerge that mirror Gottman’s famous “Four Horsemen”—criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. In organizations, these patterns take different forms but produce similar effects. Criticism often takes the form of broad statements about someone’s potential. Defensiveness emerges when leaders treat questions as challenges. Stonewalling becomes the quiet withdrawal of employees who still perform but no longer invest their imagination. And contempt, the most damaging pattern, appears through sarcasm, dismissiveness, or the subtle signaling of who is included and who isn’t. These patterns are rarely explosive, but they are felt. And over time, people rewrite their internal story of where they fit.
A crucial moment comes when small ruptures go unrepaired. In personal relationships, repair—an apology, a clarification, a simple acknowledgment—is what restores trust. Workplaces have their own versions of repair. A check-in after a tense project. A follow-up after a meeting that didn’t land well. A manager saying, “Let’s reset.” When repair doesn’t happen, misunderstandings calcify. The person concludes not just that something went wrong, but that the relationship isn’t worth mending. At that point, the emotional departure is already underway.
Meaning is often the final hinge point. Gottman described “shared meaning” as the top of a strong relational foundation—a sense that the relationship serves something bigger than daily transactions. The same is true at work. People will push through difficult seasons if they believe in the mission and see how their work contributes to it. But when organizational values feel inconsistent, or strategic decisions contradict stated priorities, or leaders talk about purpose in a way that doesn’t match lived experience, shared meaning dissolves. What remains is a job, not a relationship worth investing in.
The Key For Leaders
This is the crucial distinction between quiet quitting and falling out of love. Quiet quitting is a boundary—a recalibration of effort. Falling out of love is an emotional separation. One is active; the other is passive. One is chosen; the other happens gradually. Quiet quitting is something employees do. Falling out of love is something they feel.
Leaders who understand this difference notice the early signals long before someone gives notice. Perhaps it’s the employee who once volunteered for new work but now quietly withdraws. Or the one who used to seek feedback but now avoids it. Or the one who once offered ideas freely but has stopped speaking up. These aren’t performance issues. They’re evidence of a relationship losing its strength.
People rarely leave for better jobs. They leave for better relationships—ones where they feel seen, heard, valued, and connected to something that matters.
Gottman’s work on couples always comes back to a straightforward practice: keep turning toward each other. Not in grand gestures, but in the small, everyday moments—paying attention, checking in, staying curious instead of assuming you already know the other person. Work is no different. People don’t fall out of love with their jobs because of one bad day; they fall out of love when no one notices them changing. The fix isn’t complicated. Managers must look up now and then and ask, “Who are you becoming?”
That question kept couples together in Gottman’s lab. It keeps employees, too.