Intimacy and Career: Do these two exclude each other? – PART 1
Do you choose intimacy & relationships, or career & work? I chose to address this topic because it has been one of the most frequently asked questions I have heard in all my years of teaching, personal training and advising others — how can we bridge these two major segments of our life that seem to be almost antagonistic?
Very often our aspirations for our professional life and career seem to push out the possibility to be truly happy and fulfilled in our intimate relationships. And on the other hand, when we choose to pay attention to cultivate intimacy and happiness in the relationship, it seems like we basically need to sacrifice our career, at least to a certain degree. One of the two, but often both, are sacrificed as time passes, without us really noticing.
The problem, in fact, begins in our consciousness that creates this disparity between success in the workplace and happiness in the couple relationship. The former is designed so that it almost opposes happiness by definition; it is serious and efficient, and we behave in a corresponding way. In intimacy though, we’re not looking for ‘efficiency’ – we cannot judge a relationship on the same criteria.
The Intensifying Factor
As well as the above, in recent times we have a new intensifying factor: the work space and the intimacy space start to mingle as many people get more and more used to working from home – the ‘couple-space’ got invaded.
When the ‘office’ is in the living room, there is only a wall or door between the office and the bedroom where we have our most intimate experiences. How can we deal with the idea that in order to act professionally we need to separate the office and work attitude from the home and relationship attitude? Can we just make the switch as we cross over the threshold in between the two? It seems that we cannot.
This close proximity very much intensifies the inner conflict between intimacy and career, speeding up the process of degeneration of relationships. A sad fact is that usually, by the time we have figured out that something is going wrong in our relationship, it’s already very late.