This article originally appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Oregon Humanities magazine.
A few months ago, my fiancé sits me down and says, “I don’t think we’re going to work out anymore.”
He presents many pieces of evidence, but it boils down to one main thing.
Work has come between us.
“I feel like if you loved me enough, you would move down here,” he continues.
‘Down here’ meaning Sacramento from Portland. Meaning I yank my budding career as an English teacher out of my current high school and transplant it to the fallow employment of California.
I thought it was reasonable for me to spend another couple years building relationships and honing my skills at one school. He saw it as insensitivity and my lack of dedication to “us.”
I find myself mouthing a well-worn defense: “It’s easy for you to ask me to give up my life here. You’re in medical school and conveniently can’t leave.”
As someone raised to live by Calvinist standards that equate vocational success with personal salvation, my work is important to me.
It’s my identity as a representative of knowledge and literature, as a trusted caretaker of children, as an agent of change.
And sometimes, work never stops. There’s always emails to send, phone calls to make, curriculum to write, essays to grade, meetings to attend, strategies to develop; Dostoyevsky and Faulkner and Coleridge and the rest of the Western canon to read and review.
There’s a great satisfaction in all this self-imposed struggle. But is the satisfaction of struggle greater than the satisfaction of connection?
It is more common to hear that, as in my case, a relationship breaks, yet the work of each partner remains intact.
I don’t know any stories of lovers leaving their occupations in the name of love. Is it easier, or at least more reliable, to fulfill our sense of self through tasks and accomplishments than through connection to another person?
Today, in this age of privilege, when we can create our own identities and choose our professions--how do we decide how much of life is our work? What do we sacrifice in our work for the rest of our lives? Or should the real question be, what do we sacrifice in the rest of our lives for our work?
The archaic laws of the division of labor don’t apply anymore. But often, labor all too easily still divides us.
