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[smurfette]

Hi all,

Like many of the posts here, mine is also to vent some fear/frustration and seek some constructive opinions from those who may have gone throught the same thing.  I hope this topic isn’t getting old, but I have a slightly different version from the 2-body problem, in that I am the academic and my husband is in the medical field.  I’m sure someone here is or has been in a similar situation. 

I am getting nervous about what’s coming up for us this year. I am in the sciences and have just started the second year of my post-doc. I came to my present west coast location because my husband was starting medical school here and tuition would be cheaper and so our debt smaller.  Luckily, I got a post-doc at his same university after finishing my dissertation.  Now, he is graduating in June and I will be finishing my post-doc then too.

So the plan, which sounds sub-optimal at best, is that we will both be applying for jobs (me for faculty positions and he for 5-year medical residencies) in the northeast, or near major urban areas in the Midwest, in hopes of at least ending up within driving distance.  That was the best we could do, because we both want to keep our careers going, and I am not willing to take a 5 year break. But—do I want a 5-year long-distance marriage? (there are no children involved, at least).  If I do not get a job, I will move with him to city x and keep looking, but even that would be temporary in that I could move again the following year if the right job appeared.  But I want to avoid moving with him and adjuncting, assuming I even get an adjunct job in a new city. I did that for a semester already before my post-doc. Psychologically too, I already trailed him out here the one time, and that was really hard for me (to move jobless).  Essentially, I know the kind of research I want to do, the kind of teaching job I want, and I am so ready to do it!

The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible for us to coordinate our searches. I won’t even go into how the residency “matching” process works, which many of you may know about anyway, but suffice it to say that the timeline doesn’t exactly follow our academic search timeline and there isn’t much choice involved in the process for him after a certain point.  I have decided that I will be applying for VAPs too, because at least if I end up in a different city from him, it gives me a year to try to find something closer.  We’re also considering some sort of spousal hire if it comes to that—if a university really wants him a lot, maybe they can find a soft-money position for me in the appropriate dept.

On the bright side, we are very supportive of each other’s work and goals, etc., and we can communicate openly about this.  One thing that has taken me by surprise has been the sheer lack of support I have gotten from the spouses of his classmates who I thought were in the same shoes as me.  I thought I’d get support from other wives, but moving is a non-issue for them, because they plan to follow their husbands and not work. They think my husband and I are nuts to even consider living apart for a year or more. Well, at least I have this board! Is anyone else going through the same thing?

[aristotelian]

Is a residency really a 5-year sentence?  Perhaps one option would be, if you land a post-doc in a city to which your partner hasn't applied, he could transfer after one year.  It would suck for him to have to apply again, but probably worth it for you to be together.

Alternatively, you could go to your teaching job but stay on the market until you find a job in your partner's city.   

I don't envy your situation!

[smurfette]

Thanks for the reply. I hope I'm not coming across as overly negative! But 5 years is actually a conservative estimate-- it may go up to 9 years (not all in the same place, necessarily, but at least 5 in the same place).  Yes, we have considered a possible transfer for him.  I think it's hard but can be done.   I'm not applying for a second post-doc (for many reasons), but I'm certainly considering VAPs.

[doctormommy]

Well, I guess I'd recommend that you find a faculty job wherever you can, your husband find his residency wherever he can, and just try not to panic too much until you actually start having tough choices to make. I know residencies and faculty positions are both hard to find, but I think (though I don't know) that your husband will be more mobile than you after his residency. It's great that you are both so supportive of each other. I'm sure you'll be fine after 5 years apart. This will be the toughest phase of your career and probably his, so just think of it as a bump in the road.

I do know one academic/medical couple who have been very successful, she's the med and he's the academic. They're both pretty senior and VERY well respected in their fields. The guy actually did most of the childrearing and actively mentors postdocs and junior faculty who are trying to raise families and has been a terrific role model for a lot of people struggling with the work life balance.

[spork]

Smurfette, you have my sympathies.  I was in almost the exact same situation.   I timed my dissertation defense to coincide with her med school graduation.  I trailed her to her residency, which involved a major cross-country move.  As luck would have it, I found a VAP that lasted 2 years and a tt position at a different university after that; both jobs were a 2 hour drive away from her residency location.  So we had it better than many.

Living apart, even only for just the weekdays during the fall and spring, combined with her complete focus on medicine, doomed our relationship.  I thought she would be less job-centered after residency, but she wasn't, and at that point living together full-time did not help.  I'm sorry if I sound so depressing; I'm not saying a relationship is impossible, it's just very, very hard given the culture of medicine.

Your husband will be medicine-oriented, rather than relationship-oriented, for a good part of that first 5 years.  His call schedule will mean you will literally not see him awake for days, unless you visit him in the hospital (I remember many lunches and dinners there).  I suggest that the two of you seriously discuss how he can focus on you during his limited off-work hours whenever the two of you happen to be in the same location.

For those forumites who haven't seen what medical training is like, residency is a nation-wide, competitive process. The goal for any medical school graduate is to get into the best program possible, and no one knows where they'll be going until late spring of their final med school year.  So there's no way Smurfette will be able to look for a position nearby until after that date -- almost impossibly late for a position that starts in the fall.

Feel free to send me a message via this discussion board if you would like to discuss your situation further.

[velvetelvis]

I do know one medical-academic couple that made it work.  She hung around for part of his residency, then got a job and he followed.  The key is talking about the career options and life options as if they are one, and realizing what's best for both of you.

VE.

[nancypants]

I can relate as well, and while it doesn't suck any more than a traditional two-body problem, it sucks in a different way.  I finished up writing my dissertation in another state from my campus so I could live with my fiance (who became my husband during the diss), then I moved with him to another state for a residency, where I finished my diss and found a postdoc.  We both finished at the same time (my postdoc and his residency) and had to go on the job market at the same time.  The timeline of his job search ended up being much sooner than mine - he had to respond by Thanksgiving, whereas many of the deadlines for my apps hadn't even happened yet.  He ended up taking a great job which he loves, and I found a one-year VAP in our new town (I ended up not getting any job offers, incl a heartbreaker of TT job I interviewed for in our new town that would have been perfect), but I still feel like I'm trailing him.  Living apart isn't an option for us - we've done it before and now we have a toddler, so I feel like part of me is giving up my career. I love what I do and desparately want to be an academic, but even more than that, I want to live with my family - I love them and they love me, and it makes me happy to be together.  It depresses me fairly often, all that I feel I've given up  for him, but the reality is, our level of grad school debt means we need his salary, so if only one of us has a "real" job, it has to be him. 

I'm sure you're already aware of this, but you really need to realize that it would be extremely difficult to maintain a relationship on weekends alone, since he will be working MANY weekends and evenings, and there's a pretty good chance that he won't know his schedule for a block until a 2-3 weeks before a new rotation starts, so planning ahead is pretty tough too.  It takes a lot of conscious effort on my part to channel my resentment of our lack of time together (and we live together) towards my husband's job rather than my husband.

Depending on where the academic jobs are and his specialty, it can also be tough to find a job for your spouse later - if it's a small college town, the only hospital might not be hiring or the medical malpractice issues in a particular state may be really problematic.

Theoretically, it is possible to transfer a residency, but it's pretty rare, and people often have to repeat an intern year (ugh) if no upper level residents have left (which opens up a need in a program).  Not really something you can reliably bank on, though the chances are better if you're in a city with many residency programs.

Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who gets a job first - sometime this fall, so he can try to match where you are (isn't the deadline sometime in February?).

[spork]

I forgot about the malpractice issue -- certain states had a big red X through them, and I didn't bother applying for jobs in those states because my spouse couldn't afford to work there.

[gilda]

Just curious.  Which states are the ones that rate big red X's?

[smurfette]

Thank you all very much for your responses!  Much appreciated :)

I agree that the weekend relationship is not ideal, since he probably won't have free weekends much (he's going into surgery).  We do have a good track record of long-distance in the history of our relationship. We've spent many months apart (5 months, 7 months, another 5 months) during a lot of my fieldwork in another country. And we've also lived apart (not within driving distance) while engaged. It is not fun, but it is doable. 

I do worry that this situation is different, not because we are actually married now, but because of what Spork mentioned about the all-consuming world of medicine. We already had a rough patch with that during medical school but managed to pull through. So I am very aware that the work they have to do consumes them, not only physically in terms of long hours and no sleep, but also the emotional intensity of it-- people dying, etc. And my husband is very sensitive, so he absorbs a lot of that.

I guess the best we can do is keep applying and see what happens. He already has some interviews lined up, and they are in or near places where I have applied for jobs. I guess the one step at time thing is going to have to work!  My main fear is following him somewhere jobless. I know myself, and that situation has made me resentful.  Yes, that is my own issue, but I also need to not put myself in a situation that makes me unhappy...

[abuflletcher]

There are really all kinds of 2-body problems and once you add in children it can turn into a "multi-body" problem with no hope of a perfect solution for everyone.

I work in Japan.  My wife of 25 years and my three children (16, 18, 20) have lived in southern Cal for the past two going on three years.  As things are, I can spend from 3-4 months a year with my family.  This is hardly ideal but I've come to realize that it may be a better situation than for many academic couples/families here in the US.  When we add in what the kids need, it looks like if I were to take a tt job in the US, I'd probably end up living on my own in some far away state (paying for a second apartment when I currently have free housing provided by my Japanese university).  And I'd guess that I'd probably have less time for the family on the tt than I currently have living in Japan (with a tenured position).   Oh, and as I've mentioned in previous posts, I'd be earning something like $20,000 less (and I am the major income earner in our family) -- and probably not even getting to teach a single course in my specialty area.

My wife has a basic factory job (which she likes) but could probably find similar work in many many places.  But thank god for the insurance that her job provides because my Japanese insurance isn't any use.  In fact, during my sabbatical leave in the US every major US medical insurance group turned us down (history of epilepsy) and we were paying thousands of dollars for "special plans."  Then my wife gets a minimum wage job in a factory and suddenly we are all insured under one of the same HMO's that had previously denied our application just a month earlier.  Talk about bitter irony.  So even though we don't desperately need the income my wife earns, we do desperately need her medical insurance.  Of course, that would be one problem solved by me obtaining a tt job in the US.  But then I know we wouldn't be able to afford to live in Southern Cal long term and yet this is where the "kids" are at home.

And of course something like a third (or possible more) of the illegal immigrants in the US have families back home that they haven't seen at all in many years so I can't feel too oppressed in my current situation.

[spork]

So I am very aware that the work they have to do consumes them, not only physically in terms of long hours and no sleep, but also the emotional intensity of it-- people dying, etc. And my husband is very sensitive, so he absorbs a lot of that.

Like you I was absent for months at a time while doing research and my significant other was in medical school, and for us these periods apart did not seem to be problematic.  She did her thing and I did mine, and we both regarded school as a temporary thing.  What did turn into a problem was her work during residency and afterward intruding into all aspects of her (and therefore much of my) life.  This probably sounds like griping, and in a way it is, but we ended up not functioning as a couple when we could have been -- either it was the demands of her work or she had to escape the demands of her work in ways that did not include me.  Her time was precious, ours wasn't.  This is why I mentioned the need to discuss with your husband how he will focus on the relationship when he doesn't have to focus on work.