How to Examine Your Marriage and Your Life

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A lot of people fall in love outside of their marriages. Some have affairs. Some leave their wives or husbands. But not a lot of people are Agnes Callard.

Agnes did something really unique. She fell in love while she was (seemingly happily) married with two children. She told her husband. They got divorced—sharing a single lawyer—and it took under three weeks to split.

And then? Then they all moved in together. To repeat, Agnes lives with her husband, her ex-husband, and their combined three kids. And by the way, they’re all philosophy professors at The University of Chicago.

The cherry on top is that she talks about all of it. A lot. And with radical openness and honesty—including in an unforgettable profile of her in The New Yorker titled “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.”

Perhaps you hear all of that and think: This woman is a nut. Or at the very least a little zany.

I beg to differ. There’s something about Agnes. Whether it’s a result of her worldview, her predisposition, or her vocation as a philosopher, that gives her a tremendous ability to float above any situation—including the most intimate and personal—and philosophize it.

When Agnes writes and speaks openly about the experience of falling in love while married, and about how it unmoored her understanding of relationships and expectations, she helps the rest of us make sense of the most universal topics and experiences. It is an unusual gift.

These experiences and her reflections on them all became fodder for her upcoming book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, where she says we are not asking ourselves important questions—about how we should live and how we might change.

Today on Honestly, I ask Agnes: how and why she turned her life upside down for love, how she knew it was love, how she examines her own marriage, how we can all live like her hero Socrates, and how an examined life can benefit us all.

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for an edited transcript.

The meaning of love:

Bari Weiss: What is love?