THE MARRIAGE SABBATICAL

A couple married 23 years takes a relationship break—with rules—for one year while the husband travels South America and the wife learns silversmithing in Santa Fe.

Nicole Elswick is 47 and just plain tired after raising two kids, running a house while her husband’s career climbs ever higher, and getting through the pandemic. The last thing she wants to do is go on a motorcycle trip/surfing beach vacation during her husband’s one-year job sabbatical while her kids are studying abroad. Jason, 51, a successful publishing executive, was supposed to take the trip with his best friend, but Charlie died unexpectedly and Jason expected Nicole to step into this trip of his dreams. One night at dinner with the neighbors, they heard about a so-called Five Hundred Mile Rule, where spouses each can have sex with whomever they’d like once they are that distance from home, no questions asked. The next morning, when Nicole tells Jason she doesn’t want to go on the trip even though their departure is imminent, he balks because he won’t be able to have sex for nine months. (The fact that the trip as originally planned with Charlie would presumably have been sex-free isn’t mentioned.) Nicole suggests they follow the rule, Jason agrees, and they both set off on their separate year of adventures having agreed to no pregnancies, no diseases, no falling in love, no sharing of details. This book reads as if it were written on a predictable outline, to a premise that could have appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column (which is name-dropped in the book). It hinges on the ideas that after a few decades of marriage, complacency and routine among the well-to-do breed waning interest and that sex as a physical act is (or can be) separated from love.

A story that tries to be cutting-edge but is surprisingly chaste and dull.