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.
This is an interesting argument because on the one hand there is the whole "You are not your job.". While on the other hand, you are incredibly lucky to find an occupation that you sincerely enjoy. Most people do not seem to ever find that career that keeps them relatively happy on a day to day basis.
ReplyDeleteAnd there is the root of the problem. If you leave this career you have spent a huge amount of your life working at to go be with someone. Who is to say that the hole that is left won't end up destroying your overall happiness and the relationship you were trying to take to the next level.
I think your happiness with your career and accomplishments are incredibly important when it comes to your happiness in the rest of your life, and it's very difficult to determine at what point sacrificing that for the love of another will be a positive rather than a negative.
It all comes down to how much you value your career versus your relationship and those values differ from person to person. Unfortunately it's never black or white.
I have a tendency to lean towards the career rather than the relationship, but I think I have an aversion to risk and change.
Also, I can't think of any in particular, but i'm sure there are love stories where the soldier becomes a farmer or a criminal goes straight for the love of a woman.
And stop grading my writing, I didn't spellcheck this :P