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Too Busy to Read?
I’ll Read the Book, So You Don’t Have to!
THE THREE MARRIAGES: REIMAGINING WORK, SELF, and RELATIONSHIP
by David Whyte
plus a Valentine's Day bonus!
If you don't know who David Whyte is, you are in for a treat. He is an Irish poet who probably makes more money than any other poet because most of his work is done with corporations. He gets called in to teach workshops that end in the participants creating poems of their own. In this way, teaching them to think with images, metaphors, and language, he teaches them to think and envision “outside of the box.” in order to stretch themselves and grow in solving problems.
He is much in demand in the workplace. He writes prose and poetry about our relationship to work, in all it's aspects.
Three Marriages is not just about achieving a work-life balance. It goes 'way beyond that. He writes about the similar types of commitments that must be made in work, self, and relationship and the rewards from doing so. He also writes about how achieving life's milestones of fulfilled adulthood, peace, and meaning came only come from taking on the joys and tremendous responsibilities of each.
The one marriage that usually gets ignored, he says, is our marriage to the Self. I think we all have our own experience of this. Our days become so filled with work and relationships, that our Self gets seriously depleted.
Here are his observations and solutions
Marriage to Another
The act of marriage is an act of faith and ac act of courageous imagination, as much as it is an already established fact.”Most of us only grow during a marriage or a work-life sweeping self-examination” even though we commit to all these things before they happen at the wedding itself.
Our attempts to make a first marriage work carry the imprints of our parents' marriage, whether good or bad. Our “default” settings during times of stress or conflict lead us into the patterns of the Adapted Child, a young entity who was reacting just as our parents might.
Changing our behaviors and cognition's into our authentic Adult takes a lot of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Combine that with our partner's exact same patterning and we are left with at four parents and two Adapted Children in your marriage.
It is noisy, chaotic, and not productive. We want, yearn, and strive to belong, as human beings. The lessons of marriage are read very early into the textbook of a child's mind.
The shift into the Adult responsive and moderate behavior helps us bring our truth and the love that we desperately want into the present. This is called intimacy.
Marriage to Work
I was at a training for the Relational Living model I use with couples. It was made up of couples and therapist observers. The floor was sectioned off into quadrants that had to do with how we saw ourselves. All of the therapists quickly ended up in the Upper Left Quadrant which was then explained as those who were over-identified with work to hold up their self-esteems. This quadrant is not unfamiliar with a lot of us, I think, and Three Marriages addresses this specifically.
How can we not be over-identified to work? That is like trying to get into recovery from over eating. Food, like work, is always there “Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself most easily perhaps than find yourself.”
However, work and our relationship to it touches on almost all the same issue as marriage and when it is going well, becomes a source of pride and self-esteem that is truly unique.
Imagine work as a constant conversation between our Real and False Selves. Work that I think is authentically me and has noting to do with me. It brings out the best and worst of us and runs a gamut from stimulation and creativity to dull and repetitious.
Just finding work with meaning is not enough. “Our sense of dedication to work is one we inherit, take on and ultimately test against our own experience” We test out the truth of our own expectations of ourselves and the reality of the work at large. We can do our best work, often, in the times of wrong direction, in that we follow the dictates of our most grandiose or our less-then sense of Self. Great work can come out of the day-to-dayness of seemingly ordinary pursuit, just as a great marriage must rest on the foundations of day-to-day routine.
In it all, the conversations must not stop. There is no end to it, nor should there be. It is the foundation that keeps us going to the next level.
Marriage to the Self
“Perhaps the most difficult marriage of all”--this third marriage beneath the two, visible, all too-public marriages of work and relationship.”
The Self is an ever-fluid, ever-evolving foundation. When it is imbued with healthy intimacy—truth plus kindness, then Self is adjusting all the time from the influences of the first two marriages. Sometimes we are in the Real Self and sometimes, the False, If we remain committed to the feedback from the trial-and-error of the other two marriages
then we can stay on the right track even when we think nothing is germinating at all.
Like the other two, great things can emerge from a seemingly dull period. The conversation between you and all three marriages must continue even with no known answers.
Getting caught up in the necessities of the other two, we may neglect our Self and lose our most primitive and powerful instincts that we need for survival, even in its most complex sense. The further we get from the internal, the more we lose our Authentic power. The Self is at the intersection of all three marriages.
The constant conversation goes something like this--”is this reality that I am seeing or just my perspective of reality? Is this coming from the shaky yet heady expectation I would like to follow or is it coming from the solid foundation of that which I know to be true? Am I in the falseness of relentless of harsh self-criticism or in the familiar Adulthood of the other two marriages?
Ironically the answer can come from silence. Achieving a gap between the constant conversation comes through mindfulness; staying in the present moment. listening for instinct, and a commitment of lifelong kindness to ourselves. Practicing this can lead us back on track, to “equanimity, roughly meaning to be equal to things, to be large enough for the drama at the intersection in which we have found ourselves.
EXTRA VALENTINE'S BONUS
I first encountered David Whyte in person at a therapist's convention. He is kind of the therapists poets, not only because of the themes he explores, but the workshops he offers are about how to more powerfully connected to our clients. He is all about the language.
I call him the “McDreamy” of poets. He is very handsome with perfect, full hair. He speaks beautifully with a lilting Irish accent, full of passion and from the heart. He recited this poem about his long-term marriage, to his wife (who was sitting in the front row). I know if she had been me, he would have gotten lucky that very same night!
The Truelove
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
walking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water,
calling to them,
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimate in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,
so that I when we finally step out of the
boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don't
because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don't want to any more,
you've simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across the territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
Feel free to read this poem to your Significant Other on Valentine's Day.
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