The Third Thing

When my sister and her boyfriend visited me in the studio a few weeks ago, she said I looked completely blissed out, all flushed cheeks and smiles. And I was. Of course it reminded me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 classic “Flow”, which explores how you reach this blissed-out state through losing yourself in a task, artistic project or mundane activity like washing the dishes. My mom lent me the book long ago and it’s still resting on my bookshelf. I’ve been meaning to dig into its very, very small type. But maybe I don’t need to read the book, because I already understand what it means to reach that zone. It seems a bit counterintuitive to analyze the state, although I’m sure there are eloquent nuggets in the book.

I think I’m lucky in that my boyfriend also knows this “flow” state with his own work. When we are at home both working on our projects, and slip into each other’s zone to give a peck on the cheek then slip back to our own private worlds, I’m incredibly contented. It’s taken me a long time to realize that to have a ”third thing” in our relationship is a sanity-booster, whether it’s our own projects we discuss with each other, or tennis, or playing terrible versions of Billy Joel songs on the piano together, or even our obsession with the Wire. The poet Donald Hall coined the phrase and describes third things as “essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.”

I’ve had to mature from too much dependency on my partner to fulfill my every need to knowing third things can bring us a shared flow, joy and sanity, and that also I have a ”secret garden” in my art and my other relationships, but a secret place that I can share with him because he is my family now. 

* Donald Hall writes on the third thing in his book The Best Day, the Worst Day, chronicling his marriage to Jane Kenyon–you can read the excerpt here.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990