A marriage vacation....sounds nice, doesn't it? Ask people who have been married a long time. Most of them will tell you the idea is terrific, and they wish they could do it. 

I mean, think of the benefits! You get to experience your youthful, single days once more, get away from the burdens of being attached at the hip to another adult for a while, and just basically do whatever you like without having to ask how your partner feels about it first. Plus, you get to do all of this with the safety net of still being technically married.

I took a marriage vacation for a whole year. Here's why I did it, and what happened during my sojourn on my own.

Why Did We Do It? A Look at the Very Beginnings of Our Relationship Will Tell You

Newly in love, and oh, so innocent!

The first question most people ask is why we did this most unusual thing. After all, you don't hear of too many couples who simply take a break from each other and don't get divorced.

To understand the "why," you first have to understand the relationship and its challenges. I mean, every relationship has challenges. Don't get me wrong. I'm not expecting my marriage to be any more perfect than anyone else's.

It's just that my particular relationship was a bit different from the start, and includes some issues other people may not have to deal with. 

First, I got married just out of college to a man who is 15 years older than me, with two wives before me, and with four kids (five grandchildren came AFTER we got married). That sets up some unique challenges of its own from the beginning. Being young and naive, of course, I thought, "Love can conquer all!"

I jumped into it without much forethought. Even my diary says so....at the time I actually married him, I wrote that I was jumping in feet first and hoping for the best on what I expected would be an awesome adventure.

Ah, to be 22 again!

Have You Ever Been in a Relationship With a Mentally Ill Person? It's Exhausting!

Second, my husband is mentally ill. He told me so when we were dating, but I didn't believe him, because he was in remission. His mental illness didn't start showing up again until we'd been married about two years. By our third year of marriage, we were in marriage counseling.

I didn't grow up in a family with a history of any mental illnesses other than generalized anxiety disorder. I didn't know how to deal with someone who, from childhood, suffered from PTSD, clinical depression, paranoia, and mild psychosis. I simply didn't enter the relationship equipped for this kind of thing. His moments of lashing out at me in tantrums that resembled those of a toddler, or becoming completely catatonic for hours at a time, were disturbing and upsetting to me.

Yet, despite these things, I loved him. It was early in our marriage, and, like many women in similar situations before me, I thought my love would heal him.

Again, I knew nothing about mental illness, and I was being pretty naive.

The One Thing That Was Almost a Deal-Breaker for Me

Eventually, after many years of marriage, I learned how to ignore most of the mental issues he brought to the relationship, and to stop taking every nasty thing he said to me personally. It usually wasn't about me; it just took time, reading books on living with someone with mental illness, counseling, and actual explanations from him for me to fully understand it.

Okay. I could live with the more unpleasant manifestations of his mental issues. Well, all except one.

The paranoia. 

The paranoia nearly drove ME crazy.

It's the paranoia that made me insist on a break, for my OWN mental health.

Having a Spouse With Paranoia is its Own Special Kind of Psychological Torture

You've got to be a STRONG person to deal with a spouse with paranoia, let me tell you. I didn't KNOW I was that strong, psychologically, until I was confronted with it. Actually, maybe learning to deal with it MADE me stronger than I was at the beginning. When you practice something regularly, you improve; I definitely improved at being a spouse to someone with diagnosed paranoia.

However, just because you learn to live with it in your relationship doesn't make it easy, no matter how strong you are. A paranoid spouse will do and say all kinds of crazy things, with little or nothing at all to base them on. 

Over the course of our marriage, his paranoia has subjected me to such "delightful" things as:

• Accusations of being interested in other men, just because I was friendly toward them
• Accusations of having an affair ALL the freaking time...if the line at the drive-up ATM or the post office is long and I'm away from home for longer than he thinks appropriate, well, I MUST have been with my secret boyfriend. After 20 years of marriage, he STILL doesn't believe I've never had an affair, though I honestly never have had one.
• Reading my diary and making notes in the margins and back pages to give his interpretation of what I've written (which means seeking out the diary's hiding place to get to it)
• Constantly texting me to see what I'm doing and when I'll be back when I go out with my friends
• Breaking into my social media accounts and reading my private messages with other people
• Throwing a fit about who I'm friends with on social media, so much so I've had to block my Facebook friends list from public view, and go by different names on other social media accounts
• Furiously digging into my past from before I met him, and questioning me on what he finds. Once, he asked me who some guy was he found online. It was a guy I dated briefly in college who became a moderately successful actor. This guy is not a friend on any of my accounts, or those of any of my connections. I have NO idea how he found him, and he won't tell me. He's not even mentioned in my diary.
• Being upset at things I did before I met him. This includes not just guys I had sex with before him, but ANYTHING I did before him that he considers "un-ladylike." He's even gotten mad at me for photos of me from elementary school where he felt like I wasn't sitting in a proper, demure manner. Heck, if my parents didn't care, why should he?

These are just A FEW examples of what living with someone with paranoia is like. It's not easy. And, when you're constantly bombarded with disapproval and accusations of things that shouldn't matter or that you didn't do, when you're bullied into breaking connections with long-time friends who you love, it takes a heavy psychological and emotional toll on you.

What Do You Do When You've Finally Had Enough, but Don't Want to Break Up?

It was the reading my diary (and commenting on it in the pages! I mean, who DOES that?), and the constant monitoring of my social media with demands I un-friend certain people who meant a lot to me that finally did it. I already had the generalized anxiety disorder that runs on the female side of my family; I'd been getting an annual prescription for tranquilizers for years, for those times when I might need a little extra assistance chilling out. 

I started going stir crazy, with bad anxiety episodes worse than anything I'd experienced before, and had to go on tranquilizers full-time. It's been six years, and I'm still on them, though I'm trying to reduce my dose. It's hard to do when you've been on them for a while.

I would later find out my grandmother ended up on tranquilizers for nearly four decades because of issues with her husband being emotionally abusive in her third marriage (though that abuse turned out to be the beginnings of Alzheimer's in her husband, and so she stayed married to him).

I couldn't take being around him anymore. Yet, I still loved him and didn't want to break up. What I needed was to get away from him for a while.

I told him the only way to save our marriage was for me to take a break from it.

Taking a Break and It Feels SO Good

As you might imagine, he didn't like the idea, being paranoid and all. But, he didn't want to get divorced either, and I assured him that would totally happen if he didn't let me do this. Reluctantly, he agreed.

On Facebook, I hooked up with a girl I was good friends with in high school, but hadn't seen or spoken to in years. She had an efficiency apartment attached to her house and it was currently in need of a tenant. I asked if I could rent it, and she agreed.

The space was tiny, but I didn't care. The rent was miniscule, and included all the utilities, even cable and internet. Most importantly of all, it was a space of my own, away from my spouse, where I could just be me, with only MY things in MY home, with nothing I had to share with him. I got to get away from his negative and toxic vibes, which had gotten worse during the past few years leading up to this drastic move. And, it was an hour and a half's drive from my husband's place.

Negotiating the Vacation

The hardest part of moving into this new place was leaving my cats behind; it was too small for them, and they had a nice screened porch to hang out on at my husband's house.  He was happy to keep them, as he needed the company.

I made up for it by bonding with my friend's cat (to the point where she got a little jealous!), and then taking in a stray kitten, who was tiny enough for the efficiency space. Of course, he is now a huge, muscular cat, but he was tiny when I found him.

We agreed that I would spend weekends and holidays with my husband, just like I did when we were dating and lived in different towns. I thought it might actually rejuvenate our marriage to "date" like we used to. And, spending time away from each other would give us something to talk about when we WERE together.

The first night I spent in my new place, on my own, I really relaxed for the first time in years. There was no one watching over my shoulder, no one judging everything I did or had done in the past, and no one to check in with before I did anything. It was the freedom I craved.

So, How Did This Marriage Vacation Work Out for Us?

Honestly, HE is still bitter about it, but he doesn't bring it up too much. After all, it wasn't something he wanted.

But as for me? I'm SO glad I did it. It was just the thing I needed to restore and strengthen my own sanity. Plus, I got so many benefits from it.

I got to be "single" again for a while; I didn't date anyone (that was part of our agreement), but I had tons of girls' nights out with my friends. Many old friendships were re-kindled, and existing ones were made stronger for all the time we got to spend together. I got to know the friend whose efficiency I rented MUCH better than I ever did in high school, and we spent many evenings in her living room drinking wine, eating cheese and crackers and olives, and talking about those old days. We discovered so much about each other we never knew.

My privacy was restored. I took my diary with me to the new place, and changed all the passwords to my social media accounts he knew about, and my emails, so he couldn't hack into them anymore. Whenever I wanted to go somewhere or have someone over to visit, I didn't have to ask anyone else, and I didn't have to be concerned about incessant texting to check in, or him eavesdropping on our conversations.

I was right about us having more fun together when I stayed with him on weekends and holidays. We did things we hadn't done in years, like playing miniature golf, trying new restaurants, shopping together at the mall, and watching movies and TV shows together in bed. In fact, it was during that period that I got him to binge watch the entire series of "Lost" with me (I'd been addicted to it in its original run, but he hadn't watched it with me at the time). 

It WAS almost like dating again. We actually appreciated each others' company when we were in it. That was something our marriage lost long ago, and being apart brought it back. That was pretty cool.

What Happened After the Marriage Vacation?

Obviously, we didn't stay on a permanent marriage vacation. That WOULD have been a divorce, or a permanent separation. One of his female friends has been married for 30 years, but hasn't actually seen or spoken to her husband in about 20 of those. Staying apart would have been something like that, and that's not what we wanted at the time. 

A little over a year after we began our break, with my nerves and sanity restored and stabilized, and the vacation chilling out his paranoia for him quite significantly (since he knew it was what drove me away), I found a reasonably priced house a few blocks from the efficiency I was renting. It was large enough we could both live in it and essentially divide it into almost a duplex, with only a shared living room and kitchen. 

We got the house, with the understanding that I wanted to keep up some degree of separation of our personal lives, just not as stark as during the vacation. Having some space to be myself, and freedom to do what I liked without accusations of adultery were, and still are, pretty important to me.

We'd already had separate bedrooms for the entirety of our marriage, so that part wasn't a big deal. Our first day in the new house, he and his youngest son built a wall separating "my half" from "his half." Since he used to be a professional carpenter in his 20's, the wall looked damn good, like it was always part of the house. There was a door in the wall, and that was our door into each other's worlds.

We began a new marriage together, with new understandings and expectations that worked for both of us.

Has it been perfect since then? No. I mean, he's still mentally ill, and has his issues, and his moments that make me just want to get in my car and drive away from him forever. But, it IS better than it was before the vacation. We would have been divorced long before now if I hadn't taken that break.

Conclusion--What Would YOU Do?

I'm interested to discover if anyone else has tried something like this. If so, did it work for you, or did it lead to divorce? It's not something I've really known anyone else to do, other than my husband's friend with the spouse with whom she has no contact.

As for us, it was necessary, at least for me. HE would have been happy continuing with things as they were, but everyone has their limits of what they can handle, and his paranoia got to a point where it caused me to reach mine. I HAD to do something about it, and the break was my solution.

It made me a lot happier, and much more willing to try living with him again. I enjoyed his company more, for the most part. Most importantly, I didn't feel like I was losing my mind anymore after just a few weeks of living alone in that efficiency, and that feeling and surety of my own mental and emotional strength has continued. I'm stronger than I ever was before, and I love that. It's such a feeling of empowerment to know I can make those kinds of tough decisions and put my own well-being first.

You know what they say....you can't save the person on the crashing airplane beside you until you save yourself. That's kind of what I did here, and it was totally the best decision I could have made at the time, and in the circumstances we were in.

We still have issues in our marriage, and we've discussed getting divorced since the break. Sometimes, I really want to, so I can enjoy the lifestyle I lived on the break all the time. Other times, I feel guilty at the thought of throwing him into the wild on his own, since he depends on me financially. I mean, I love him and don't want him to be unhappy, you know?

Maybe we'll stay married, and maybe we won't. But, one thing is certain. That break was the best thing we could have done, whether he believes it or not. It was a drastic, but necessary step in our relationship, and we're both better off for it. If nothing else, we learned to respect each other's wishes and boundaries a lot more than we did before, which is important in any relationship. Even if we divorce one day, we'll now always be friends.

The break saved us.

Oh, and that stray kitten I took in while we were on our break? The one who I named George? My husband insists to this day that, since we already had two cats together during the break, he feels like George is a kid I had during an affair and then asked him to raise as his own. Which is kind of funny.

And, though he may not like to admit it, he loves George anyway.

George. He really is a masculine boy, despite the bow tie the creative groomer gave him. :)

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