“The Marriage Sabbatical: The Journey That Brings You home”
Cheryl Jarvis
Perseus Publishing
2001
ISBN: 0-7382-0339-4 more info/ordering
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The marriage sabbatical?
Hmmm.
Maybe you’re just not as skeptical as I am. However, I have to admit I approached this book with skepticism. I mean, look at the title: “The Marriage Sabbatical.” Isn’t that something that people who don’t want to be married ask for – time away, more space, a chance to do my own thing?
Skepticism aside, I enjoyed this book and I began to question some of my traditional thoughts about marriage immediately. Of course, it doesn’t take much to do that. Not when for at least 20 years 50 percent of new marriages in America fail. Whatever traditional ideas and conceptions we’ve had about marriage need a serious second examination because clearly something isn’t working. Cheryl Jarvis suggests that for some individuals and marriages a sabbatical might be an answer.
Not the answer, mind you, just an answer.
The word sabbatical, Jarvis reminds us, comes from the word Sabbath – a day of rest from our labors. She defines sabbatical as a time for regeneration and renewal. There has been, she argues, no paradigm for a woman leaving home for a while for personal growth. However, that paradigm has long existed for men. The advantages of a sabbatical in academia and business are widely understood; it’s a time to develop one’s mind, focus one’s creativity; renew physically and spiritually. All of which is accepted if you’re a man or an academician.
The presumption in our society is that when we find our soul mate and marry that person, he or she is all we need for emotional fulfillment. That presumption doesn’t seem to work so well these days. Jarvis offers the marriage sabbatical as a way to satisfy some of what ails the contemporary marriage. It’s not a universal panacea, she writes, “…but it is one way to embrace both sides of life.”
The idea for a marriage sabbatical, and this book, grew out of her own conflicts between her love for her husband and children and her need to leave her husband and write. When she got married, like so many newly weds, she had never stopped to think about how much time she needed alone.
In the book she tells the stories of her own sabbatical along with those of several other women. Never was it a case of wishing to slip quietly out of a marriage or to take a lover. The women whose stories she relates serve as prime examples of how a sabbatical can serve to rejuvenate a marriage, achieve a healthy sense of detachment or provide a time for personal growth.
Many couples, Jarvis suggests, separate and divorce when what they perhaps needed more than permanent detachment was a time to be temporarily apart to regenerate and find new meanings in their marriage.
What kind of impact will this have on children?
“The real source of inequity on the home front,” Jarvis writes, “is that women are over-involved with their children.” Getting away from children, especially if those children are adolescents might be good for them and it often forces fathers to play a more active role in children’s lives at a time when a father’s time is desperately needed.
Although I approached this book with skepticism, I came away from it with the idea that a sabbatical could be a healthy answer for many families in which relationships are in need of reinvigoration and renewal.