Vacation may save your marriage

It is a steamy summer day in the middle of vacation season, and the beach — whether on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod or Sanibel Island — is packed.

Couples — some a few years past their honeymoon but still sporting its glow, others creased from decades of togetherness — play in the sand, splash in the surf, slather each other with suntan lotion and toast with freshly mixed margaritas.

Which of these pairs are secretly trying to save their marriage?

Couples deal with relationship woes in many ways — from denial to outright war, and every fraught emotion in between. But for some, egged on by couples’ therapists and travel agents, the best way to address a rift in the marriage — and to see whether it can be healed — is to take a last-ditch vacation, maybe a beach getaway or a road trip a deux.

For the lucky ones, it works.

Just ask Tom Slook, 46, and Suzy Stauffer, 49, from Glen Mills, Pa., just outside of Philadelphia. In an 11th-hour effort to save their 20-year marriage, Slook booked a five-day cruise to Cozumel, Mexico, in December.

Sparks — the good kind — flew. Shortly after returning to shore, the couple called off the divorce mediator. “We realized we wanted to come home together,” he said.

For others, not so much.

Humorist Dan Greenburg insisted on taking his wife, Nora Ephron, on an African photo safari in 1972, even though she said they would probably split. When they returned home, she asked for a divorce.

“But I took you to Africa!” he said.

Yes, she said, it was a wonderful time. But she still wanted a divorce.

Harriet Lerner, a psychologist and author of “Marriage Rules: A Manual for the Married and the Coupled Up,” said she had noticed an increase in patients taking such “save-cations” in the past few years.

She links the rise of these trips to belt-tightening in the wake of the Great Recession.

“A divorce can be much worse economically than going away for a few days together,” said Lerner, who is based in Lawrence, Kan.

DESTINATION: TOGETHERNESS

With time ticking toward a breakup, troubled couples are planning one final, against-all-odds vacation in a desperate play to snatch romance from the jaws of divorce. Honeymoon? Babymoon? Call it a Hail-Mary-moon.

Jaclyn Sienna India, co-founder of the Sienna Charles Travel Agency, said that more than 10 of her upscale clients had approached her in recent months to plan a Hail-Mary-moon, a notable increase for her boutique firm, which has offices in New York and Palm Beach, Fla.

“If you can’t get it together in the Maldives or Bali, then where can you?” she asked.

Or, for that matter, Iceland.

That’s where Michelle, a graphic designer from New York, and her banker boyfriend, Joey, flew in November on a mission to salvage their four-year relationship. (The couple asked that their last names not be used to maintain their privacy.)

“We were absolutely in a bad place,” Michelle, 30, said.

Their travel agent, Dane Steele Green, suggested Iceland as an active destination where they would not just sit on a beach and bicker for six days.

The pair spent five days scaling glaciers, an ocean away from the pressures of home. Midway through a trail ride, Michelle, who had not realized she was allergic to horses, began wheezing and felt her eyes puff up. Joey, 34, sprang into action, lifting her off the horse, rushing her back to the hotel for a shower and tracking down antihistamines.

Michelle said his gallantry, along with a mesmerizing night under the Northern Lights “and some champagne to take the edge off,” rekindled the magic between them. “We became like magnets — but right-side-up this time,” she said, laughing.

On the plane back to New York, they recommitted to staying together. Although, she noted wryly, “I still don’t have a ring on it.”

A similar rekindling took place for Slook and Stauffer, who wooed each other with couples massages, snorkeling larks and plenty of sips in the ship’s martini bar. She was ultimately won over on a backcountry ATV excursion, which was similar to a trip they had taken on their honeymoon in Costa Rica.

“It reminded me of us as a couple,” Stauffer said.

But the cruise wasn’t all margaritas and conga lines, Slook cautioned. “You have to go with the expectation that it’s not going to be your best vacation ever — that you’re there to work,” he said.

Finding your own island of reconciliation is not as easy as it sounds. Do you pick a place built for passion and sunset walks on the beach? Or a place brimming with enough perilous zip-lines and shark dives to bond you for life?

Lerner emphasizes that wherever the destination, at least one partner must have a genuine interest in salvaging the relationship. Also: “No nagging, complaining, criticizing or blaming,” she said.

DOWN THE WRONG ROAD

Hail-Mary-moons can have downsides, of course. David Frost, a psychologist and assistant professor at Columbia University who studies long-term romantic relationships, warns that these trips are often quixotic and can easily backfire.

“It’s highly unlikely that a vacation can be a magic cure-all — it might only be a temporary Band-Aid,” he said.

Even worse, he added, the forced closeness might cause relationships to suffocate and implode.

That might explain the do-or-die vacation that Melissa Evans took to salvage her 12-year marriage in 2011.

“I was doing everything I could possibly do to win him back,” said Evans, 41, a corporate marketer from southern Vermont.

The couple checked into a sumptuous hotel in Cancun, Mexico, and spent happy moments paragliding, swimming and beachcombing. But as they lounged on an oversize cabana bed, she gazed at her husband and felt the connection between them evaporate.

“It was one of the saddest moments of my life,” she said. “I was trying to be as easy-breezy as I could on the trip, but my heart was shattering.”

They fought on the drive home from the airport. Six months later, they separated. The divorce was finalized in January.

Indeed, these trips might be better labeled sink-or-swim.

Karen Schaler, the author of “Travel Therapy: Where Do You Need to Go,” took a last-chance vacation herself six years ago, chartering a 45-foot catamaran in the British Virgin Islands.

She and her boyfriend docked at the luxurious Peter Island Resort, surrounded by honeymooning couples and breathtaking ocean vistas, but Schaler felt herself floundering.

“The more romantic the trip got, the more I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I am in the right place with the wrong guy,’ ” she said. A few weeks later, the pair split for good.

And then there are times when a Hail-Mary-moon is intercepted. Jessica Chafetz, 36, a dietitian from Bellmore, N.Y, is still aghast about a last-resort cruise to the Caribbean she took in 2008 with her husband of seven years.

The cruise was booked a year in advance, but she and her husband decided to forge ahead anyway, in part because their best friends — a couple also having troubles — were coming.

Big mistake. “My husband and my best friend kept disappearing together,” Chafetz said.