PEOPLE sometimes take trips for deep reasons. They're turning 50 and feel compelled to see Florence; they've just recovered from an illness and want to trek in the Himalayas; they're divorcing and need to escape the anguish.
Psychologically motivated trips like these are, in a sense, gambles with life. The transition or crisis makes people more willing to free themselves from routine, feel in a heightened way or make life changes based on events on the road. They are my favorite kinds of trips.
I took one a decade ago, and it changed me. I was in the middle of an ugly divorce, and my life was changing, but into what, I did not know.
I couldn't find the threshold and didn't want to walk through the door. Then my parents offered to send me anywhere I wanted to go. I was jobless, childless, husbandless and couldn't think of a reason to say no, so I took a divorce trip, the polar opposite of a honeymoon.
I've heard of women who have gone to swinging singles resorts in the Caribbean after a divorce. One, a beleaguered single mom, came home from such a place on Haiti, having danced every night until dawn with several men who seemed interested in her. She did not get involved but felt more attractive to the opposite sex afterward, no small gift.
"Travel can help you get away from the scene of pain," says Harriet Lerner, a psychotherapist and author of "The Dance of Connection" (Quill, 2002). "This is especially important because it's normal to have crashing self-esteem after a divorce."
A friend of a friend went to a Caribbean island in the throes of divorce and slept with a Frenchman she met on the beach. On the plane home, she wondered what in the world she had been thinking, given the dangers of sexually transmitted disease.
Marilyn Mason, a Santa Fe, N.M., psychologist and author of "Seven Mountains: Life Lessons From a Climber's Journal" (Penguin Putnam, 1997), says it's dangerous for disenchanted lovers to travel because they might meet someone who looks better than the spouse back home, thereby precipitating divorce. West L.A. psychotherapist Marion Solomon, author of "Narcissism and Intimacy: Love and Marriage in an Age of Confusion" (W.W. Norton, 1989), says people who feel devastated by divorce should not travel to find someone new. "They have to be careful," she says. "If they think whoever they meet is going to be a lifelong partner, they might be disappointed."
