Corporate America versus Relationships

Your Nine to Five is usually Nine to Eight by the time you walk through your front door. After a long, hard day at work, you arrive tired, hungry, stressed and annoyed, to say the least. Unfortunately, you take out your frustrations on your dog, the kid(s) and/or your significant other. You barely have time to go to the bathroom, let along cook/eat a decent meal when you get home. Sometimes it's easier to just grab a bite at work, or schedule dinner meetings with co-workers or clients. You log in from home on the evening, work most weekends and the carpel tunnel syndrome from your crackberry is killing you! Sadly enough, quality time with family and friends has gone out the door...right along with your relationship.

In the beginning of your relationship, you were all about the emotional connection with your partner. However, after your partnership grew with your firm and your career (a promotion, salary increase, greater responsibilities, etc.), the connection to your other half was lost. Why is that? What is it that we always want more? Why do we let money, jobs, fame, responsibility mold us into emotionless creatures of habit? Why do we hate, yet love the infamous "rat race" of waking up, commuting to work, busting our butts to earn a dime, to leave work and arrive at an empty home and not have anyone to share our lives, earnings and experiences with, to then do it again the next day?

What is "work-life balance" and does it truly exist? I'll give you my brief definition: it's a load of BS that every HR person on the planet is trained to tout. It is working as much as you can for a company you will most likely never own, to live a (balanced), lonely life. The “balanced” part comes in because you are in fact getting paid and have some vacation and personal days to help keep you sane. Ha! What a life?! Is it possible to work in a high-pressured corporate job and have a NORMAL family life, where children’s baseball games, PTA meetings and unscheduled sexy times with the love of your life all co-exist? An incredible movie that shows how Corporate America can break marriages apart is "Man About Town." Ben Afflick plays a high-powered Hollywood Talent Agent that focuses more on his career than on his wife and then pays a pretty penny for it. Will we all eventually contribute to the rising divorce rate because our main concern is making money?!