My husband of almost 27 years has some peculiar notions about vacations (among other things). His idea of a good time is a week in the basement of a high-rise hotel playing bridge with strangers who smoke, slobber and cheat. Me, I like to be wrapped in hot seaweed imported from France at ruinous expense, then I want to be kneaded like dough by a Valkyrie.
That's why we sometimes take separate vacations.
Jim and I take lots of vacations together. We've toured Italy, France, England, Canada, Mexico and Australia. But from the earliest years of our relationship, we have also vacationed apart. He was a private pilot; I don't like to fly. My family in California made me insane; why should they get their hooks into him, too? Perhaps naively, I never worried that taking separate vacations was the first step on a slippery slope to separate bank accounts, separate bedrooms and... separation. I just thought that sometimes I wanted to go where he didn't and, God knows, vice versa.
Apparently, however, what seems natural and harmless to us looks dangerous and depraved to others. In a 2004 CNN interview, a private detective named David Basham said separate vacations could be a "big clue" to detecting infidelity. "Up until now, a husband and wife have always gone on vacations together," Basham said. "And then, suddenly, one or the other of them decides it would really be neat if they had separate vacations. And that usually means something else is going on."
To me, separate vacations actually seem good for a marriage. As Rodney Dangerfield said, probably only half joking, "We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations. We're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together."
Separate vacations also seem instinctive. A 2004 article in Nature magazine reported that "Mated pairs of black-tailed godwits may fly off to winter refuges a thousand kilometers apart, but can still arrive back at their breeding site the next spring within a few days of each other."
Print this page 
Send to a friend
