Excerpt from The Marriage Sabbatical by Cheryl Jarvis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung proposed a different theory of psychological development, but equally relevant. Historically, our culture has suppressed what we once called “male” characteristics (power and independence) in women and “female” characteristics (emotional expressiveness and nurturing) in men. The task of the second half of life, said Jung, is to claim our contrasexual energies—in other words, to find our missing selves. To fulfill this task, “to become whole,” men who need to discover their “feminine” side are pulled inward, toward home and family life, while women who need to develop their “masculine” traits are pulled outward, away from home and family life. Although increasing numbers of women find personal power in their twenties and thirties, those who spend the first half of their adult life raising children often don’t discover this power until their middle and later years.

And finally, sabbaticals are a bigger issue for women because women have fewer role models. In the classroom, we grew up on male archetypes. The Odyssey was the world’s first story that combined wanderlust with married love, but it was the Greek hero Odysseus who traveled the world while his wife Penelope stayed at home. His ten-year sea voyage after the Trojan War was a journey of self-discovery; her ten-year wait, a model of virtue. Homer wrote his epic prose poem more than 2,700 years ago, yet the marital myth of men’s mobility and women’s rootedness still predominates on the screen. Whether the Knights of the Round Table ride into forests to search for the Holy Grail, soldiers cross continents to fight for a cause, or adventurers dare oceans, mountains, and skies just for the challenge, our cinematic history is filled with images of men leaving and returning home.

When women leave home, however, the movies tell a different story. In Fatal Attraction, when the wife leaves for the weekend, all hell breaks loose. Her husband commits adultery with a woman so deranged that she stalks him, terrorizes his family, and finally ends up dead in their bathtub, murdered by the wife whose absence started it all. In Thelma and Louise, Thelma leaves her husband to go on a two-day road trip and ends up driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon. If women who leave home aren’t punished, it’s a sure thing they’re not coming back. When the heroine of Shirley Valentine leaves her house in London for an island in Greece, she stays in Greece. Why wouldn’t she? Her marriage is stifling, her husband both tyrant and bore. When Billy Crystal leaves home in City Slickers, however, he leaves a likable and sympathetic wife and two engaging children. He not only returns, he comes back with new energy for life, for love, for work. Why hasn’t a movie been made about a married woman who leaves home and returns a stronger person to a loving family? The problem with these stereotyped images is that they shape our perceptions, and then they shape our lives.

Many of us grew up seeing our fathers go off—on hunting, fishing, golfing trips—but how many of us over forty have memories of our mothers leaving home for anything but a visit to relatives or a stay in the hospital? How many of us had a mother who went off for herself alone? Men have always had permission to leave, but of women’s leaving we have two dominant images: Edna walking into the ocean in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Nora walking out the door in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. A self submerged or a relationship severed. Either way, sinking or bailing, a permanent disconnect.

There is no paradigm for a married woman’s leaving home for a while for personal growth. There is no paradigm for a married woman’s returning at all, much less fulfilled, energized, maybe newly in love with her husband. If women lack role models, if women are suffering in marriage, if women are increasingly the ones choosing to dismantle in court what they once yearned to wreathe in ceremony, then it’s women who need to write a new script.

From The Marriage Sabbatical: The Journey that Brings You Home, by Cheryl Jarvis. © December 26, 2000 , Cheryl Jarvis used by permission of the publisher, Perseus Books.