Whyte argues that a fulfilling human life requires three simultaneous, ongoing marriages — to another person, to one's work or vocation, and to one's own deepest self — and that the neglect of any one of these marriages causes suffering in all three. This framework reframes the challenge of work-life balance as something far more fundamental: the need to be faithfully present to all three dimensions of a man's life at once. Drawing on the lives of Wordsworth, Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Whyte explores what each marriage demands and offers. It is one of the most integrated and psychologically sophisticated treatments of masculine responsibility ever written.