Why is everyone talking about ‘marriage sabbaticals’ right now?

Love is one thing but marriage – the long and happy kind – certainly another.

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part,” George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface of his 1908 play, Getting Married, which advocates for democratising divorce laws.

It wasn’t until women grew financially independent and no-fault divorce became a reality that divorce became commonplace – and a wellspring of artistic inspiration.

Taking time out from a marriage comes with risks, as a selection of new books explores.Credit: Wodicka/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Now, another option presents itself: the marriage sabbatical, an emotional-growth odyssey that is having its moment in fiction and memoir. What if, for a few weeks, months or even a year, a woman could enjoy a midlife Rumspringa, a break from her wifely duties and her quotidian existence?

Leah Fisher tried it.

At age 60, the long-time therapist had had enough. Her husband, Charley, was consumed by work and little else. “Over the years, I tried to influence him by means of eloquent explanations, polite requests, and fervent pleas; also by nagging, criticising, and periodically having nasty meltdowns. None of it resulted in change,” she writes in her new book, My Marriage Sabbatical. Then, her father died and both children left home.

“Thoroughly walloped, I grew accustomed to living with a tamped-down mood, capably doing whatever each day required while feeling just a little sad and making the best of long evenings,” she says.

On one of those evenings, Fisher came across an advertisement for a short-term Berkeley rental, not far from her home in California. She rented it for a little over a month, the first step to opening her marriage – and life – to something new.

She yearned for adventure. Her husband did not. So Fisher set off on her own, temporarily.

My Marriage Sabbatical: A Memoir of Solo Travel and Lasting Love is a record of Fisher’s exploration of travel and personal growth, visiting Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Cuba, Bali, Java and Colombia. It’s some journey, full of risk and volunteer work.

Fisher, who is a marriage counsellor, took Charley along on a few trips, and there were other, regular reunions in Arizona. But Fisher also told Charley that he could see other women in her absence. That changed when Charley announced that he’d formed an emotional attachment to another woman and said he would like to see her. Surprise: Fisher realised that she wasn’t as open to open marriage as she had believed.

Her therapist pronounced: “This is the stupidest plan I’ve heard about in a long time!” So ended the sexual experiment, but not Fisher’s leave-taking for solo travel or her irritation with her husband when they were together. “We’ve gotten sick of each other,” Fisher informed Charley before setting off on the final leg of her sabbatical. “No,” he replied. “I think we’ve gotten lonely for each other.”

Eventually, Fisher sees the value of both her flawed relationship and her time away from it. “What neither Charley nor I realised when we agreed to be apart for a year,” she concludes, “was that we were in the process of reconfiguring our marriage. We were experimenting with a different version of matrimony, one that was flexible and spacious enough to support independent dreams as well as those we shared.”

The unnamed narrator of Miranda July’s wildly popular – and divisive – novel All Fours makes Fisher’s real-life marital pause seem positively Amish.

July’s heroine takes a road-trip detour from her marriage and motherhood to plumb her sexuality, identity and appetite for interior decorating. Her plan is to drive across the country. Instead, she spends $20,000 refashioning a motel room a few miles from her Los Angeles home while panting after incongruous lust objects.

Divorce, in the narrator’s view, is for ordinary folk. “Rumours began to swirl around Harris and me – most people thought we were getting divorced,” July writes. “This made me irate. ‘Divorce only reinforces the supremacy of marriage!’ ” True, but only if you decide to wed in the first place.

The narrator is too rarefied to be in something as pedestrian as a conventionally constructed marriage. By the novel’s end, she has a girlfriend, her husband has a girlfriend, and whatever remains of their union is quite different but better, with less suffering.

“The exhausting formality that had been there since day two had simply lifted like a depression, a cloud of steam, and what remained was a pair of old kids who knew each other very well,” July writes.

Readers tend to adore All Fours or wish to fling it against a wall. July’s ambition is impressive and her plot often inventive, but this is one self-absorbed, careless and tiresome heroine, whose bio shares much with the author’s. Still, July’s book, a finalist for a National Book Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a bestseller that continues to spark conversation on the eve of its paperback publication.

People (that would be women) want to talk about what’s wrong with marriage and share, sometimes to the point of TMI, about creative ways to fix it. See also last year’s More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, by Molly Roden Winter, a married non-monogamous Brooklyn mom, and Ada Calhoun’s recent novel, Crush, in which the protagonist’s husband (inspired by Jessica Fern’s 2020 book, Polysecure) suggests the couple flirt with other people while keeping those rings on their fingers.

Jessica Stanley’s forthcoming novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, doesn’t waste any time catching this zeitgeist. Her protagonist, Australian Coralie, announces her intention to take a break from a 10-year relationship with Englishman Adam in the second paragraph. “If she didn’t love, she was half a person. But if she did love, she’d never be whole,” Stanley writes. “Mother, writer, worker, sister, friend, citizen, daughter, (sort of) wife. If she could be one, perhaps she could manage. Trying to be all, she found that she was none.”

The couple live together, have children together, but never wed. It only feels like they have. So this is more of a relationship sabbatical. As domesticity starts to crush her, Coralie craves not a room of one’s own but, this being London, a flat.

It’s a newfangled separation. Coralie returns home nightly for an hour to kiss the kids. Adam enjoys conjugal visits at the flat. Consider Yourself Kissed, what Coralie and Adam always tell each other, is delightful in parts but also an extended tease.

As Adam becomes increasingly insensitive and self-involved (he is a political journalist, after all) and Coralie finally takes that break from their partnership, it arrives in the book’s closing pages and for what appears to be a matter of days. Time may heal some wounds, but does it happen this quickly?

Marriage – or relationship – sabbaticals may be a novel solution to revive a relationship. Based on these books, the best ones come with a full menu of benefits.

The Washington Post

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