Abstract

This study reconceptualizes adult learning as an emotionally embedded and survival-oriented process emerging within conditions of invisible caregiving inside marriage. While adult learning theory often assumes agency, choice, and deliberate reflection, little attention has been given to learning that unfolds under sustained responsibility and constrained support. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this study examines the lived experiences of married women in urban Thailand who function as primary caregivers despite limited practical and emotional assistance from their spouses. Data were generated through in-depth interviews, field notes, and reflexive journaling and analyzed interpretively to illuminate processes of meaning making over time. Findings reveal that learning did not occur through discrete transformative moments but through gradual emotional regulation, adaptive endurance, and the quiet reconstruction of self-understanding. Participants developed tacit competencies in anticipatory planning, relational stabilization, and affective self-management, although such learning remained unnamed and socially unrecognized. By foregrounding caregiving as a site of experiential knowledge production, this study challenges dominant models of transformative learning and extends adult learning theory beyond contexts of autonomy and visible change. The findings call for a more context-sensitive and gender-responsive understanding of learning as it unfolds within everyday life under structural invisibility.

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