Patrick Cabe wrote:
> ...or "separate vacation??" Or "trip home to mom?" Or
> "reassignment away from home?" Seems like there are lots of euphemisms for
married
> persons living apart for more or less extended periods of time, some
innocuous,
> some not so innocuous. (Is the original question vacuous?)
The story I saw on the Today Show was actually a bit more well
thought out than that. The first example discussed was of a woman who got an
offer to work (teach, if I remember correctly) overseas for three months.
Circumstances meant that her family couldn't come with her. Her husband
encouraged her to take the opportunity, as a chance to explore a direction
that the circumstances of her marriage had prevented her from exploring
earlier.
I don't remember the details of the other story (I didn't think the
piece was very interesting, and I was reading my email at the time), but I'm
fairly sure that it was equally innocuous. Neither story struck me as a
sabbatical away from a marriage as much as simply a spouse taking an
opportunity that meant extended physical separation from the spouse/family.
I would have expected a separation motivated purely by a need for a break
from the marital situation, but that wasn't it at all, as far as I could
tell. My suspicion is that the writer got this phrase in her head ("marriage
sabbatical") that would sell books, and hoped that the reader wouldn't
notice how hard she had to push to fit the fairly mundane anecdotes into
that mold. It seems like a little ado about nothing. I'll wager that once we
stop discussing it here, we never hear the phrase again.
Either way, though, it was clearly not merely about trial
separations or anything else likely to end in a permanent end to the
marriage. The woman in the first story talked mostly about how it made her
value the normal day-to-day circumstances of her marriage more.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
