The Journey That Brings You Home

The Marriage Sabbatical
by Cheryl Jarvis

(Page 2 of 2)

Modern interpretations give the word a deeper dimension. Theologians have defined the Sabbath as spirit in the form of time, a day of re-creation or reconnection. One Jewish scholar believes it is intended to be an invigorating experience, focused on human fulfillment. With its theological underpinnings, the concept spread to the secular world: If God needed to rest from the work of creation, then surely mortal men and women needed to rest, too. In 1880, Harvard University became the first American institution to grant sabbaticals to its faculty. While today the practice is most widespread in the teaching profession, sabbaticals can be found in journalism, medicine, law, government, and business. The connotation has remained essentially the same over the last hundred years: time off from daily routines to develop intellectually, focus creatively, renew physically. The parameters, however, have changed considerably. Sabbaticals today are accelerated, shortened, and variable. One college offers them after just three years; another offers faculty development leaves over six-week short terms. Some companies require that sabbaticals be spent on social service. Others urge employees to go after a dream. A paid sabbatical in business typically lasts four to six weeks.

Yet in marriage — one of the world's oldest institutions, one of life's greatest challenges, a relationship which can be as emotionally intense as any job, which even conventional wisdom calls hard work — there is no development leave, no ritual rest. It may not be coincidence that in biblical times the land was to lie fallow every seventh year and that the average length of marriage at the time of divorce in this country is 7.4 years, making "the seven-year itch" more than a catchphrase. What would happen if we looked to nature and let our marriages rest for a while in order to regenerate? What would happen if we took time out for an invigorating experience, focused on human fulfillment?

Sabbaticals have actually been taking place in marriage under other guises for centuries. In the Middle Ages, wealthy married women who wanted time alone retreated to convents. In Victorian times, the treatment for hysteria, a psychiatric condition characterized in part by excessive anxiety, was a sea voyage, a long journey, a move from town to country — anything to stimulate the nervous system. Among the prescribed treatments for neurasthenia, a mental disorder characterized by inexplicable exhaustion and irritability, was separation from family and familiar surroundings. Water-cure establishments, sanitariums, and other retreats proliferated during this era.

No wonder these illnesses were considered predominantly female. No wonder they were overdiagnosed. No wonder they were found only in the middle and upper classes, those who could afford a retreat or sea voyage. No wonder these "treatments" usually brought relief. Getting sick was one of the few acceptable ways women could get time for themselves.

Today, many marriages have built-in separations from commuter jobs, travel-dependent professions, military service, and company relocations. When a man gets transferred and his wife waits a year to join him because she's putting the house on the market or when a man takes a few months to follow his wife, who has moved to a new position in another city, whether they are conscious of it or not, the relationship is getting a rest.

But what about couples whose jobs don't provide such opportunities for renewal? What makes a sabbatical an idea worth examining today is our longer life expectancy and its corollary, a longer marriage expectancy. At the turn of the century, few people lived to see all their children grown. Most people were dead by fifty. Today at fifty, we have another thirty years to go. At the same time that we're looking at a longer and healthier life span than any other time in history, we're having fewer children and, therefore, spending fewer years raising all of them. We're also living in a society that's changing faster than we are. A world in which people can, or must, reinvent their lives at forty, fifty, and sixty is a world in which marriage for life becomes an increasing challenge. With the rise in gender equality has come another cultural shift: a revolution in marital expectations. How many of us enter marriage expecting our spouse to be our lover, best friend, parenting partner, recreational companion, and spiritual soul mate? That's a lot of psychic weight to place on one relationship — given that nearly half of all couples divorce, more weight than it apparently can bear. A time when many are wondering how to make their marriages thrive over a long stretch of years is a time to examine sabbaticals in marriage not as pathology but as promise.

A marriage sabbatical is as relevant for men as it is for women. The more men I talked with, the more I struggled with focusing only on women's journeys. But while the emotions are universal, cultural realities and expectations are not. Four specific realities make taking a sabbatical a bigger issue for women than for men.

Marriage disproportionately benefits men. Pioneer marital researcher Jessie Bernard said it in 1972, and both male and female researchers say it today. Married women suffer more depression than married men — twice the rate, in fact, over the last three decades. When compared to their single counterparts, married women have more stress, less sense of mastery, and lower self-esteem. Married men, on the other hand, are healthier and happier and live longer than single men. A study led by social psychologist Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal found early warning signs: Newlywed women think about death more often than the middle-aged and the elderly, while newlywed men think about it the least. The Victorians anticipated that women's health would decline after they married, and it was this belief, historians say, that fueled the rise of sanitariums and water-cure retreats. What was assumed in the nineteenth century, researchers proved in the twentieth: Marriage carries greater health hazards for women than for men.

A sabbatical is a greater issue for women because it is harder for women to leave. In spite of men's increasing involvement in family life, women still outnumber men in all caregiving roles. Studies overwhelmingly show that in families of two working parents, women still put in longer hours with children and household tasks. When a child of two working parents gets sick, it is still the mother who most often stays home. Women spend significantly more time than men taking care of elderly relatives, and this time is destined to increase. An American working woman today can expect to spend more years caring for an aging parent than she will for a dependent child. And as women themselves grow older, they are more likely to take care of their husbands than their husbands are to take care of them.

Sabbaticals are also a bigger issue for women because of psychological gender differences. As behavioral psychologist Carol Gilligan theorized in her groundbreaking work In a Different Voice, women are conditioned to be more relational than men and while men develop their identity through separation and autonomy, women develop their identity through relationships with others. Because women are raised to invest more in relationships, because their sense of self is organized around affiliation, it is psychologically more difficult for them to move away from the relationships in their lives.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung proposed a different theory of psychological development, but equally relevant. Historically, our culture has suppressed what we once called "male" characteristics (power and independence) in women and "female" characteristics (emotional expressiveness and nurturing) in men. The task of the second half of life, said Jung, is to claim our contrasexual energies — in other words, to find our missing selves. To fulfill this task, "to become whole," men who need to discover their "feminine" side are pulled inward, toward home and family life, while women who need to develop their "masculine" traits are pulled outward, away from home and family life. Although increasing numbers of women find personal power in their twenties and thirties, those who spend the first half of their adult life raising children often don't discover this power until their middle and later years.

Copyright © 2002 by Cheryl Jarvis. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Cheryl Jarvis is a freelance journalist whose writing has appeared in national publications, including the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan. She is also an adjunct instructor in journalism at Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis, where she lives with her husband.