I first heard about separate vacations about 20 years ago and I was shocked. My friend said separate vacations enhances a marriage.
It sounded to me like a bitter statement from a bitter man about a marriage in trouble.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “If anything enhances a marriage, I am for it.”
“Growing up, I did not know of a couple that took separate vacations.”
“Most [married] people don’t get much time together. They’re busy paying bills, etc. If there is a finite amount of time called vacation time, wouldn’t you want to spend it with your spouse?”
“Isn’t associating joy and fun with being away from your spouse a problem? ‘Yeah, the best week of the year was the week I didn’t spend with my wife.'”
“Marriage is not bettered by doing your own thing.”
“Because it is so hard to find vacation time in the average home, particularly in that 10-25 year time of raising children, that whatever you can do to excite the marriage is better.”
“To take the precious time of vacation and to focus on someone else, it’s not wise.”
Dan calls. “My wife insisted I take three vacations overseas without her. I took one with her sister who’s a flight attendant.”
“I hated the idea of going on vacation alone and all three vacations were curtailed as quickly as I could. Not being able to share the experience with my wife was a damper. Not being to share it with her was not 50% of the enjoyment of being on vacation with her.”
“The idea of going on a cruise without my wife. It would be no fun.”
“It is so easy for a marriage to lapse into non-exciting routine. If you have that one week a year for fun and excitement and adrenalin and passion and new places, it is better to take it with your spouse. It’s a booster shot for one’s relationship.”
“I would make an exception for when a parent takes time with a child.”
I live in an Orthodox Jewish community. I don’t know people who take vacations. The couples I know will take the kids to a relative’s place for a Jewish holiday or a bar mitzvah or the like, but almost nobody I know goes to Hawaii for a week. Only single and generally secular people do that. My religious friends don’t have as much spare money as my single friends and everything they do is within their religion. Judaism provides so many opportunities to be part of a community, whether in celebration or in mourning or just plain solidarity, that there’s not much space left to go on a vacation. If there is a vacation, it’s more like a Jewish retreat, such as a Chabad summer camp (where the wife and kids will go and the husband will come up when he can).
