Work and Life: How Work Influences All Else

Jock is a film producer whom I’ve worked with for years. He’s married to a partner at a PR firm, Lise, who works 80-hour weeks. One of their two boys is moderately autistic and may never live independently.

During the pandemic, Jock was at home, as were the kids. Lise retreated to her computer, leaving the domesticity to Jock. He referred to himself as a house husband who happened to produce movies.

When the family finally moved to the country, Lise took the office with her. She still works 12-hour days and starts calling China at 6 a.m. Jock says “Lise is here but she isn’t.”

When Jock came to see me, he’d ramped up his drinking. That is, without the usual professional constraints, it had become a problem. Lise warned that she’d throw him out and divorce him if the drinking didn’t stop. But when she was away on travel, he relapsed. When she called one night, he was passed out on the couch. When she returned, she insisted that he leave. He returned to their apartment in the city.

Now they’ve been separated for several months. He speaks on FaceTime with the boys every day and visits some weekends. He’s sober—more or less. “Look,” he said, “I had too much of the kids, and now I don’t have enough. Either way, it’s stress.”

Worse still, when he visits, his wife rejects his affection. “According to her,” he said, she doesn’t have the time or interest to work on it.’”

I asked about what he hoped might happen. He said that he loves his kids and thought it was better that they all be together. But then he paused, and said, “It’s hard when your wife doesn’t want you.”

Of course, marriage is hard enough when you’re raising typical children. Atypical kids add a new dimension of responsibility. So we spoke about whether Lise’s obsession with work might have been her response to (retreat from) the stress of her son’s disability. We spoke about whether rejecting Jock was a type of displaced guilt, since he had accepted the responsibility of raising their son, however imperfectly. I said “The stress and the guilt have been there for a while, but now they’re greater. They’re out in the open when, before, they were kind of repressed.”

They appear to have crossed a line.

So Jock is living apart from his wife and kids. He said that even though they loved each other, it was— at least for Lise—an “abstraction,” a memory of how they once were. “That was before the kids and the partnership.” He said that “I guess this pandemic crystallized everything. She wants a lover, not a family with responsibility. She was too busy to care,” he said, “and I made it easy for her.”

Jock was pretty sure that nothing would help, and that it was probably just as well. I asked if he thought this was okay for the kids. “No, but what’s the choice?

Jock is now reflecting on the different philosophies that he and Lise have towards the place of work in one’s life. It’s part, he says, of moving forward—that is, towards another relationship with someone who has a compatible lifestyle. He observed, “I have to go back to first principles. Without that, I can’t see my way towards the long haul.” What he means, is that he wants to understand how much a possible mate values a relationship over the thrill—the self-affirmation—of a top-tier career. Before his experience with Lise, he didn’t know he had to think about such things, but now he does.

Just knowing that he has to make this effort, is progress.

Before Lise, Jock did not know how to be self-protective in important aspects of his life; now he has learned. He is trying to put into practice what he learned.

“Work” is not just about the person working; work affects other people, especially those with whom we are intimate. Even more broadly, how one works can profoundly affect other people.

The situation between Jock and Lise is complicated. Their respective work commitments fell out of sync. She withdrew from her family into work; he had to cope with work while trying to care for the family. An atypical child made things even more difficult. What matters now is whether, after what is likely to be a divorce, Jock can pick up the pieces of his life.

We started talking about how, with a new person, he’d go about ensuring (or trying to ensure) that their attitudes towards work would not likely diverge. Jock is attracted to strong, successful woman and, before he had children with Lise, he thought he’d found the perfect match. Now, however, he realizes that how someone calibrates work with the rest of their life will affect their compatibility. Work is that central to who we are but not its sum and total.

Moreover, it’s not just that someone might work twelve hours a day, but whether work may become an instrument of emotional withdrawal. That’s hard to know. But you can listen to how someone talks about work. If they seem to find their identity in work (“I live to write,” “I live for being a surgeon”), then maybe you need to think twice. If a person is so wrapped up in work that they can’t understand themselves without it, then making room for anything or anyone else may seem like a threat. What interested Lise most was herself, which she defined through her work.

While a partner can be strong and successful, they can still be emotionally committed. They can still be there for someone else. It’s hard, but millions of people do it. Jock told me that his experience with Lise made him question his feminist bona fides. “Would I really have done better,” he asked, “if I’d married someone with an ordinary job?” I said I didn’t think so. Lise was definitely high-powered, but that wasn’t the issue. She chose a kind of total immersion in work over her other responsibilities. She was immersed in herself.