It’s tricky to find a divorce lawyer right now because they are very busy.
20,000 Australian couples have ended their marriages in the past two years, the highest number in more than a decade. There’s nothing quite like spending months locked up with your significant other during a pandemic to shine a blinding light on the state of your relationship, is there. No wonder there’s been a spike in the number of couples calling it quits.
But what if you don’t want to quit? What if you just want some marriage-long service leave… a few weeks or even months to lift yourself up and away from the daily grind of your relationship and have time to recharge and maybe do some personal development... pursue a project… expand your horizons?
What about if your vibe was less, I hate you and more… “I love you but I don’t want to see you for 6 weeks”?
There’s a name for this: The Marriage Sabbatical. It’s the break you have from your marriage when you don’t want a divorce, you just want a bit of a breather. Alone.
I accidentally had a marriage sabbatical this year and it was outstanding. More about that in a moment.
British journalist Celia Waldron did the same and she recently wrote about having “six weeks away from my husband and my marriage” after she and her husband found themselves in different countries for work over a prolonged period. The fact that she is Piers Morgan’s third wife (how is six weeks enough?) doesn’t detract from the fact that she credits it with reviving their 12 year relationship.
"It was very good for both of us," she wrote in The Telegraph. "We didn't have problems before, it was nothing like that, but it's been a long pandemic hasn't it."
Oh yes. Yes. It has been long. So very… long.
The practice of having a break from your long-term relationship might be so hot right now but it’s not entirely new. Couples have been taking marriage sabbaticals for centuries and in 1999, a best-selling book was written on the topic called The Marriage Sabbatical: the Journey that Brings You Home - the idea being that absence makes the heart grow fonder and also the genitals.
When Celia Walden was reunited with her husband after their time apart, she says, “I just found it so exciting when we saw each other again, it felt like the early days of our marriage or even the early days of dating and I loved that.”
My husband and I have been married around 20 years and we have three kids. We have worked together for 15 of those years and, like every couple, we spent an unnatural amount of time together during covid.
We’ve been together for more than half our lives and that’s a really long time to have to compromise on every single aspect of day-to-day life, from what to have for dinner to how many blankets are on the bed, whether to sleep with the window open and what’s the point of a throw cushion.
On top of that, starting and growing a business is hard yakka; while working together is excellent in many ways, it’s also taken a toll. So when Jason decided to take a work sabbatical earlier this year, I was supportive. Keen to chase some sunshine during a very rainy winter, he spent quite a few weeks up in Queensland, fishing and hanging out with some mates. We really enjoyed this time apart although it made a few people around us nervous, namely my parents. “Is Jason… coming back?” my mum or dad would ask, trying to sound casual. There was also gossip at work. Were we splitting up? Had Jason moved out?
I think if a marriage is in trouble, spending a chunk of time apart can be fraught. Would not recommend unless you need a trial separation in which case call it that and be honest about why you’re doing it.
A marriage sabbatical, though, is quite different to a trial separation. Mostly because it’s a proactive step in your relationship not a reactive one. And even though we took it more accidentally than proactively, it worked a treat for us and I think we will make it a regular thing.
Since we are so very different (I have ADHD and am prone to chaos, he does not have ADHD and is prone to organisation), we clash constantly over small things which grow into big things when you’ve clashed about them every day for 25 years.
I like windows open, music on, dogs on furniture, many pillows and throw blankets dotted around and lots of natural light always. He likes dogs on floors, low light, air conditioning, different music and clean surfaces.
There is a lot of compromise involved in marriage and no matter how much you love someone, that constant compromise can wear you down. Having some space to recalibrate without constantly having to take someone else’s wants and needs into account was glorious and relaxing for us both.
I ate biscuits in bed and stacked the dishwasher in the most inefficient way possible and it was deeply restorative.
It’s also worth noting that since marriage benefits men more than women (every study shows that married women have more stress, less sense of mastery and lower self-esteem than single women while married men are healthier, happier and live longer than single men), so do marriage sabbaticals. Basically, the positive effect they have on women is amplified compared to men.
Listen to Mamamia's daily news podcast, The Quicky. In this episode, we speak to world renowned relationship expert Esther Perel on the rise of marriage sabbaticals. Post continues after.
So, for the curious and the desperate, here are my 3 Rules For A Successful Marriage Sabbatical in case you’re keen to try one.
1. No touching other people’s genitals.
Couples who are thinking about a sabbatical from their marriage are likely to be on a spectrum of relationship health ranging from ‘content-ish’ to ‘on-the-rocks’.
If you are blissfully happy in your long term relationship, why are you even reading this. It’s not for you. Go be smug elsewhere and stop making the rest of us feel inadequate.
A marriage sabbatical is not explicitly designed to reassess whether you want to stay married - although that may well come of it. It’s more of an emotional holiday. A reminder of who you and your partner are as individuals.
In all the articles I’ve read about it, not one of the women interviewed expressed any desire whatsoever to have a fling during their sabbatical. “Hell no,” said one. “The whole point is to have some space from all that and just sleep alone in a bed!”
Involving anyone else in your sabbatical is not recommended. Remember: the idea is to refresh your marriage, not blow it up.
2. It’s tricky if you have young kids.
Marriage sabbaticals are more difficult for women to take because we carry the bulk of the caregiving roles in our society. Studies overwhelmingly show that in families of two working parents, women still put in longer hours with children and household tasks.
The reason it worked for my husband and me is that our kids are older. When he went up north, sure, I had a bit more ferrying around to do but generally, our kids are pretty self-sufficient which is crucial. If one partner goes on an adventure and the other is left with more work to do at home, it’s a recipe for resentment which is not at all refreshing. It’s corrosive.
One way to do it is to go halves. One of you takes some time to go away and then you swap. The key is that nobody feels bitter.
3. Someone has to go somewhere.
It may sound obvious but you can’t have a marriage sabbatical when you’re both still living in the same house. The reason our marriage sabbatical was accidental is because as co-founders who work together, my husband had to leave town and be away from me in order to get a break from work. Probably, we should have had some clearer boundaries and I shouldn’t have called him to talk about work most days but oh well, maybe next time.
At the end of our sabbatical, Jason and I were at a work function together, holding hands, which is something we don’t usually do at work. I didn’t even notice but a colleague remarked on how happy we looked. It’s true. It had been so long since we’d had the space to miss each other that it did feel like a reconnection. It still shits me that he thinks he knows the best way to stack the dishwasher and to be clear, the niggling issues of our relationship are not solved.
A sabbatical is not a magic bullet. But ironically, for us, time apart was a highly effective way to reconnect. Mostly because I remembered to get all the dog hair off the bed before he came home.
