The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

In The Three Marriages, bestselling author, poet, and speaker David Whyte asks us to think about our work, relationships, and inner selves in a radically different way-by drawing them into a mutually supportive conversation.

According to Whyte, our vows to a significant other, to our work, and to our constantly evolving self demand larger and renewed dedication as the years go by. Whyte's thesis is that to separate these marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself; that in each of these marriages, will, effort, and hard work are overused, overrated, and in many ways self-defeating. Happiness, Whyte says, is possible, but only if we reimagine how we inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding.

Drawing from his own struggles and exploring the lives of some of the world's great writers and artists-from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson-Whyte shows 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.

David Whyte is a Yorkshire-born poet and consultant who has introduced poetry into such companies as American Express, Boeing and Toyota. He is the author of the bestselling The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity as well as several volumes of poetry. He lives with his family on an island near Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest.