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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Lucy just made possible friends with two little girls, but the girls are more enthusiastic so far than she is. Joy, 5, and Hope, 6, just moved in with their grandmother on my street. I didn’t know this, but while Lucy and I were walking, I heard a tiny voice from the darkness cry out, “Hi, doggie!” It took me a minute to figure out where the voice was coming from, but once I did, their grandmother, Rose, came out onto the porch and gave the girls permission to pet Lucy, which delighted the girls. Joy said she wasn’t allowed off her porch since she had socks and no shoes. Lucy was shy, but allowed them to pet her a bit, while the girls marveled about how soft she is. I hope Lucy will let them be her friends. It’s a joy to see how far Lucy has come since she came to live with me. She’s nothing like the “special needs dog” who I was told would never get close to anybody.

I’ve never taken YouTube very seriously as a publishing platform — not enough to do anything more than post the occasional random video — but I’ve started laying a foundation for doing more with it in the future. I created and uploaded some simple branding to my longstanding YouTube channel this weekend and I’ll be doing more in the future. The channel has only about 300 subscribers, so if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it if you’d subscribe. As with all things on social media, subscriber counts and views help me to get future content seen more easily by others. Click here to visit the channel.

Don‘t appeal to any piece of paper or any tradition as the source of your freedom. You don’t have “constitutional rights.” You have natural human rights. If you appeal to a document as the source of your rights, you are admitting that politicians can come along and amend your rights at any time. A right is yours because you are a human being, but it means nothing if you don’t have the means and the willingness to defend it. The sad truth today is that almost all of us are at the mercy of politicians who ignore our natural rights — and they get away with it only because they have educated our fellow humans to believe we have no legitimate choice other than obedience. Rebellion without the ability to win is insane — so don’t make this argument to police, politicians or judges — but it costs you nothing to come to a clear-eyed understanding today of what your rights really mean and where they come from.

Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

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