Poet David Whyte evokes three crucial marriages in our lives: to our Work, to our Self, and to an Other.

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 person, in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, a discrete individual alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.

In The Three Marriages, he argues that it is not possible to sacrifice one relationship for the others without causing deep psychological damage. Too often, he says, we fracture our lives and split our energies foolishly, so that one or more of these marriages is sacrificed and may wither and die, in the process impoverishing them all. Whyte looks to a different way of seeing and connecting these relationships and prompts us to examine each marriage with a fierce but affectionate eye as he shows us the importance of cherishing all three equally.

Drawing from his own struggles to achieve this goal as well as exploring the lives of some of the world’s great writers and activists—from Dante and Dickens to Joan of Arc, from Austen to Dickinson—Whyte reveals that our core commitments are irrevocably connected. Only by understanding the simultaneously robust and delicate nature of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he maintains, can we create a real portrait of what makes us tick and a real sense of finding a place in the world.

In prose at once lyrical and inviting, Whyte investigates some ripe ideas for bringing a deeper satisfaction to our lives, “a deeper, almost poetic perspective… a slightly more dangerous but more satisfying sense of self than one defined by ideas of balance.”  

David Whyte is the author of several books, among them Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity and River Flow: New and Collected Poems.