The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
Product Description
A radical, “crystalline” (Elle) approach to integrating our work, relationships, and inner selves from the bestselling author, poet, and speaker.
The author of Crossing the Unknown Sea and The Heart Aroused encourages readers to reimagine how they inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding. Whyte suggests that separating these “marriages” in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself. Drawing from his own struggles and the lives of some of the world’s great writers and artists-from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson-Whyte explores the ways these core commitments are connected. Only by understanding the journey involved in each of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he says, can we understand how to bring them together in one fulfilled life.
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
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David Whyte’s THE THREE MARRIAGES: REIMAGINING WORK, SELF AND RELATIONSHIP is read by the author and provides a pointed discussion of how to bring balance and a deeper satisfaction to life. Rethinking work, partnership and inner self is part of the formula: the focus on ’secret vows’ made between all make for an involving survey.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
The Three Marriages is an easy read and worthwhile. Not as worthwhile as the title might imply, but worthwhile. It has some good illustrations about committment and some untentional (unbeknownst to the author) illustrations about not-quite-so-completed committments. The idea is that people can be (and need to be) loyal and completely committed to more than one thing and/or person at the same time, and do not need to slight one for the other.
Someone made a comment about a political speech that it was, “A corporal of thought accompanied by an army of words.” This book illustrates something to the converse. It is a king of thought accompained by an inadequate army.
It should be read, as Sir Francis Bacon might be paraphrased, “Not for argument, but to consider.”
Rating: 4 / 5
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
David Whyte weaves the stories of Dante and Beatrice,Robert Louis Stevenson,Jane Austen and others to illustrate the interconnections of relationship with self, work and marriage. I used to think these worlds were separately spinning spheres but each is informed by the other with the relationship with self providing the clarity for the others. Whyte takes the idea of work life balance and turns it on its head to get us to someplace where we understand connection. It can be dense to read at times but he has done a great job of breaking the book up into chapters, sections and reviews at the end of chapters to capture the salient points.
I highly recommend the book to gain insight into personal relationships(I was wondering why I was stuck in a lousy job and a lousy relationship), to discuss as a work group or to discover with a loved one.It would also be a great book group discussion.
Also discover (or rediscover) how poetry can put into words these complexities, particulalry David Whyte’s poetry which can be found in other of his books.
Rating: 4 / 5
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
In ‘The Three Marriages’, author and poet, David Whyte says, “Most marriages are dynamic, moving frontiers, hardly recognizable to the participants themselves, moving frontiers that occupy edges of happiness and unhappiness all at the same time.” (pg. 241). This is the kind of intelligent and useful insight one finds throughout Whyte’s most recent book. What is unique about this statement, and many of the ideas developed in this work, is that you could apply this idea to any of the three marriages, the marriage to another, the marriage to one’s work, and the marriage to oneself. I believe this is a unique and very helpful way to imagine the relationships in our lives. It is not a question of balance or choosing, but a question of seeing each of our ‘marriages’ as love affairs in their own right, with all the ups and downs one experiences in a love affair with another person. The way that he illustrates his ideas is not only through is own life experiences, but through the lives of great writers, spiritual teachers and ordinary brave people, such as Jane Austen, Dante, Emily Dickenson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pema Chodran and JK Rowling to name a few. This makes for a lively, interesting and adventurous read. In the final chapter, “Not a Question of Balance: A Marriage of Marriages”, he gives us some new ideas about how we can bring it all together. I won’t spoil any secrets, but leave it to your own enjoyable read.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship