When Monica Kennedy booked the trip to the Amalfi Coast, she was hoping the time in Italy would save her marriage. It was 2017. Monica lived in a nice house in Connecticut in the United States. She worked as a clinical paralegal at Yale Law School. She’d been married for over 20 years. Her adult children had gone to college. In her spare time, Monica taught yoga classes and spent time with friends. On the outside, her life looked perfect.

But the cracks in Monica’s decades-long marriage were deepening. Beneath the surface, Monica was unhappy and her relationship was breaking down. “We had been married young, and we had two kids, and they were grown… and our lives were just going in two separate directions,” Monica tells CNN Travel today.