If you need vacation from spouse, maybe you married wrong person

By David McElroy · June 11, 2019

I’ve heard variations of this story three times over the last month.

About three weeks ago, a friend told me he was taking a vacation to relax. I asked where he and his wife were going.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “That would defeat the whole purpose. I can’t be myself around her. Me and some guy friends are going to Colorado.”

Another situation was a wife who admitted she can’t wait for her husband to leave town every time he goes on a business trip. The third was a guy going on a family vacation — with his parents and siblings — and leaving his wife behind, by mutual choice, because they don’t enjoy each other’s company anymore.

I sometimes hear people say it can be healthy to spend time away from a spouse. I’m not sure I agree that it’s ever positive, but I’m certain it’s negative if you’re doing it because you simply can’t stand to spend time with the person you married.

If you need a vacation from your spouse, that’s a sign of something disturbing. Maybe you’re married to the wrong person.

I know that people can have “successful” marriages that look very different. I just know that the patterns I see from other people don’t look anything like what I want.

You see, I want to be married to someone who wants to spend time with me, not someone who looks for opportunities to be away from me. I want to be married to someone whose company and presence I enjoy — someone who I will be eager to spend time with as much as possible.

I want a family in which we like each other and work hard at growing together in ways that make us want to be together more often, not ways that make us want to leave each other behind as soon as possible.

Most of the marriages I see are very toxic, both in big ways and small ways. A lot of people accept that as normal for a marriage, especially after two people have known each other for a few years, but I think that is a very dysfunctional attitude.

It’s possible for two people to think they love each other — and to be infatuated with the idea of one another — but never really like the other on a deeper level. What’s more, some relationships are so shallow — so devoid of deeper substance — that the two people don’t even know how much they dislike each other until they’ve been together long enough to feel trapped in a cage.

I want a real partnership, not a cage in which I’m trapped with someone who doesn’t like me.

A lot of the marriages I see should have never happened. What’s more, most of the people I know who get married aren’t emotionally healthy enough to marry anybody. If you’re not emotionally functional enough — and if your spouse isn’t emotionally functional enough — it doesn’t matter how well things start. The relationship will end badly.

The guy who was going to Colorado to ski with friends came back a few days ago. He told me enough about the trip for me to know he’s still an overgrown child in the emotional sense. People like that aren’t going to be happy with anybody — and they’re not going to make anybody happy — because they care about nothing but their own gratification.

People like that — whether it’s you or your spouse — will leave a trail of hurting people behind you. Broken relationships and divorces can be bad things, but dysfunctional togetherness is another kind of danger and misery which is far worse.

Sometimes you have to fix yourself — and then start all over somewhere else.

Of course, if you move on without fixing your issues — and without learning to mate with an emotionally healthy person — you’ll make the same mistakes all over again. It’s your choice.

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The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

If you have children, it’s important to deal with how they might be feeling as they react to the fears of COVID-19 as the danger grows. There’s a lot of fear among adults right now, but children are even less equipped to handle fears they sense from adults around them. My friend Josh Whitman has experience doing a lot of things and one of them is school administration. Josh and his wife are raising two young sons of their own in a Birmingham suburb, and he’s been thinking a lot for the last few weeks about how this societal fear affects children. He’s written a short article giving some wise and insightful tips with concrete steps you can take to help your children during this time of crisis — things which might not have occurred to me — so I highly recommend it.

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