Hacking Your Relationship with Time Together

There was a day in graduate school when one of my fellow students and I went to lunch in the student union. While sitting in the corner with steaming plates of pepper steak, she said, “Do you realize that every single professor in our program has either never been married or has been divorced?” We went down the list of names and recognized that she was exactly right. Since she and I were both in longterm relationships we wanted to last into the future, this discovery disturbed us. We spent the rest of our lunch talking about why relationships might be difficult to maintain in academia and what to do about it. As I’ve moved from graduate student to tenured professor, I’ve had similar conversations with others. It’s a topic that’s often on many people’s minds.

Whether relationships are more difficult to nurture within academia than outside of it is something for other people to argue for or against. I do know that there are unique factors that challenge many of us. The realities of the job market mean that some couples will have to make a tough decision whether to move together across the country for a job that may or may not work out. If both partners are academics, they may struggle with maintaining a long-distance relationship or one person giving up one job to live daily with the other person as she or he takes another job elsewhere. I have seen several other couples in distress when the academic needs to spend all weekend grading or producing scholarship while the non-academic wants to spend that same time running errands or just being together.

My partner and I celebrated our fifteen-year anniversary last November (we’ve been legally married for four years but think of ourselves as committed long before the state labeled us as such). People often ask us how we’ve done it, and it’s a question that makes us incredibly nervous. One of the first posts I wrote for ProfHacker was about not comparing yourself to other people. To continue that argument, I think it’s very tricky to compare your relationship to other relationships, too. What works for one couple does not work for others. My partner and I have been to many parties where we heard one spouse say something to another that obviously did not bother them but would have been a huge issue for us. And while we have been together for awhile, we know that there is no guarantee that we will be together in the future, and we do not intend to offer ourselves as examples to anyone else.

That said, there is one thing we do that we feel has played a significant role in keeping us close, and it’s something other people we know do, too. We schedule time together each week to do nothing except just be together. For us, it’s a Date Night every Friday where we go out to a movie and dinner. We’re pretty committed to this idea, and people in our lives know it. If anyone has a party that night, we either skip it or show up after our private time together. If there is a work event for either of us, we might go to it or we might not (but that’s pretty rare for us on Friday nights). If one of us is out of town, we don’t do it, of course, but we both note that missing it makes each of us incredibly uneasy. There was a time when we started running other errands while we were out, but that started adding stress to the night. We would feel rushed, and that is not the point of the night. After a few tense evenings, we made a rule that we would not run any errand on this weekly night out. Instead, our goal was to be together with as few expectations as possible. We’ve been doing it consistently since we bought our first house together in July 1996 (we keep a list of the movies we see, and the list goes back that far). This ritual has become one of the most important things we do together.

This is a simple hack that I think I first heard about on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and I hear it on similar shows now and then, too. Not everyone can spare time each week, so some do it monthly. And this idea doesn’t just work for couples. I knew a single mother in graduate school with three children, and she set aside two hours each weekend to do something specific with one of her kids. For the fourth weekend of the month, she’d take that time for herself. There are also people who set aside time each year for a weekend away with their best friends. No matter what kind of relationship you are trying to maintain, the principle is the same: this set time is meant for us and only us, no matter what.

As a child of divorce, I do want to make it clear that the end of a relationship is not always a bad thing. As much as my parent’s divorce hurt at the time, I look back and understand it was the best thing for all of us. And I have several single friends who prove that you do not need a spouse to be happy. Of course, most of these people do have deep relationships with their children, parents, or other friends and family. It’s not always a relationship with a partner that we need to fulfill us, but we do often need to make an effort to maintain whatever relationships are important to us.

What works for you? What is the one thing that you do to keep your relationships strong and secure? As always, let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user nhighberg]