The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

The essential understanding is that although work can so easily become a prison, if we follow that essential light which feels at times as if it was born with us and accompanies us on our way, there can be a way out of those shades of the prison house that begin to close upon the growing boy or girl.

To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

The main premise of the book becomes also its final conclusion: We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life.

This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means

The first marriage stands alone in the human imagination as one of the great primary commitments of an individual life. But it is also a metaphor for all the other commitments we must make, and its spoken vows are a representation of all the unspoken promises we make, especially with those other two, equally untamable marriages, with our work and w

when advertised for sale, they are always worn in situations of extreme timelessness—climbing a rock face, flying a plane, sitting with your son—as if by their purchase we will be absolved of time and no longer besieged by its swift, uncaring passage.

No real long-term satisfaction is possible in work without treating it as something much larger than a series of jobs. I must find, pursue and commit to my vocation as I would to another person in marriage or relationship.

Perhaps the most difficult marriage of all—the third marriage beneath the two visible, all-too-public marriages of work and relationship—is the internal and often secret marriage to that tricky movable frontier called ourselves: the marriage to the one who keeps changing at the center of all the outer relationships while making promises it hopes to