Try shortening your status message AKA your message to opponents. See if that helps.
Ending Vacation Status

The message you have is "thinking about life, the universe, & everything.".
The message works on the profile page. 50 characters
Too long on the online settings page. 46 characters.

That did the trick, guys. Thank you very much.
Not a very clear error message. If it had said "shorten your status message", that might have helped. lol. Also, I wish that support staff had told me this. I asked them several times why this was happening.
But, problem solved, I know where to go from now on! Thanks again.
This is getting pretty frustrating, because it's the third time it has happened. The last two times, I have emailed support, and after a day they ended vacation status for me, but they have not fixed the problem.
Whenever I try to "un-pause" my games -- in other words, come off of vacation status, I get the following error message:
Oops?! We noticed the following errors in your form:
Message for opponents must have at most 50 characters
It happens no matter which browser I use. It's frustrating because customer support doesn't bother to fix the problem, they just un-pause my games for me. But that doesn't fix the problem for next time.
The other issue is, it eats into vacation time that I would not be taking, because, for example, right now my games are still paused, yet I'm ready to play.
For reference, this is the webpage with the issue:
http://www.chess.com/home/echess_settings.html
Thank you for help that anyone can give. This is still the best chess site on the web.