David Whyteproposes that our current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic.
People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another.
In the following excerpt, Whyte suggests a more integrated understanding of our interdependent marriages with others, with our work, and with ourselves.
Each of the three marriages is nonnegotiable. They cannot be “balanced” against one another—a little taken from this and a little given to that—except at their very peripheries.
To “balance” work with relationship and with the self means we only work harder in each marriage, while actually weakening each of them by separating them from one another.
Each of the marriages represents a core conversation with life that seems necessary for almost all human beings and none of the marriages can be weakened or given up without a severe sense of internal damage.
The three marriages are eternal and internal human conversations; they can occur whether we are officially married or not, whether we have a real vocation or a terrible job, whether we have astonishing revelations about our identity or have never given a second thought to our place in creation. These three conversations occur in the human psyche, consciously or unconsciously, whether we decide to speak them out loud or hide them away. They are part of the way we pay attention to the world and part of the way we attempt to make a home in it. To ignore them is to be caught constantly in invisible, internal battles, which become a source of puzzlement and unhappiness to the personality struggling on the surface.
The three marriages are especially nonnegotiable in their early stages. Only later do we learn to put them into conversation with one another. In youth we abandon our parents to go out in the world, in love we often abandon our friends for a good while, and in work we abandon “other interests” when we start to concentrate on our vocation.
But each of the marriages must be lived out physically or imaginatively, whether we attempt to choose among them or not. I may never, literally, marry a person, and I may even hold myself at a physical distance, but like Queen Elizabeth I, keeping at bay the kings and princes of Europe, I will refuse the outer match only because I am already married to some other “kingdom.”
Equally, in the second marriage, I may not choose an actual career, but I must have some internal definition of my work even if it is the undefined, uncelebrated invisibility of parenting. In the third marriage, I may not shave my head and enter the cloister as a monk, but to have any real possibility of contentment I must cultivate a relationship with silence and with the ever new self that can emerge out of that silence. To ignore any of the marriages causes a glacial buildup in large parts of the human psyche that may easily avalanche across the other two marriages, flattening them and smothering them in the process.
Our refusal to have these conversations out loud, to take these marriages seriously, makes no difference; they will occur with our conscious participation or without it: they are foundational to human belonging. My refusal to follow my vocation to please my spouse will only result in my demanding of her, at emotional gunpoint, all the qualities I cannot garner myself through my work. She will only be imprisoned by my frustrations and the very sacrifices she may have asked me to make. The refusal to participate fully in an of the marriages, to make them overt and speakable, causes endless friction in a relationship. Not speaking about them, a couple can often become afraid of each other’s desires and eventually see each other as unspoken enemies. To speak of these marriages out loud at the very least creates a crossable frontier between the couple. Each couple stands at the turbulent edge between the surface attempt to control these other powerful marriages and the Dionysian underground energies that carry them along, trying to flow around all outer obstacles. When we attempt to stop the conversation our partner might be having in the two other marriages because of natural jealousies, we become an obstacle to the one we are supposed to “love,” and then wonder why it is so difficult to make this first marriage work in isolation.
To “love” another in the first marriage, we must love the desires that the other person holds for the other two marriages. These desires are indicators of who our partner is at the moment and who the partner is becoming. They are essential to the person’s identity, and to dismiss them or become frightened of them is to lose sight of the person to whom we committed in the first place.
We might ask ourselves, How is it possible to talk to a partner about these other marriages when I am confused and unsure about them myself? It might be difficult to track and keep up with the first marriage, but the act of creating a conversation with our partner on the subject of the other two marriages of work and self helps us both to understand the other’s struggles and, importantly, to overhear ourselves say things we didn’t realize we knew about our own lives. We become co-conversationalists in the marriage of marriages. Once each of the marriages is in conversation with the others, there can be a mutual support among them: each enlightening and emboldening the other. For instance, in the third marriage, my understanding of how I am changing at any of the big thresholds of live—moving into my thirties, becoming a parent or reaching midlife—can have a radical effect on what I want from my work or my relationship. My partner’s bold moves in life can also affect and encourage me to do the same. I start to see the relationship with my partner as not only a place of shelter and retreat from the world, but also a crucible for navigating change, a more movable center than I could have imagined myself, around which the relationship and the future can pivot.
It is instructive to note that when we talk about work-life balance we are almost always talking about the effect work has on a marriage, rather than the way a marriage can also affect work or a sense of the inner self. Perhaps because the person to whom we have committed is flesh and blood, and the other marriages can seem, to begin with, like abstracts; perhaps because there are often children involved and before their priorities we are rightly helpless. But keeping a relationship or marriage alive with a flesh-and-blood partner or even with our children almost always involves the ability to keep an out-loud conversation alive with those other two marriages of work and self, which, in the heart and mind of the individual, are not abstracts at all.
From the BookThe Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte.
