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[lihtox]

I'm wondering if anyone can point me to an online support group for academic couples in the "two-body problem"; it seems to me that, if anyone should have a forum, it should be us.  :)  (Hey moderators, how about one here?)

While I'm here, I might as well fish for sympathy.  :)
My wife is a biological researcher who is finishing up a post-doc; she does research with mice and needs the facilities of a university to do her research, and she's not interested in teaching.  I'm a physicist who is good at teaching, not so interested in high-powered research although I would like to have interactions with physics majors from time to time.  I've been adjuncting for the past 2-3 years while my wife finishes up her post-doc, and now we are both on the job market for TT.

So far I have gotten a great amount of response; I sent out about 50 applications and I've had 11 phone interviews with one campus invite so far.  Some of the interviews were with really appealing SLACs.  Unfortunately, it would be difficult for my wife to plop down in some random location and continue her research.  She, on the other hand, has gotten a great offer to work at a midwestern research university; unfortunately, there are no SLACs within an hour's drive of this school which have a physics major, so that I would have to choose between a) teaching at a large university (probably teaching mostly introductory classes with 150 enrollment...I've never dealt with such a large class before and their very existence makes me angry) and b) teaching service classes in a small school or community college, never having the opportunity to teach students who are actually hooked on physics.  Choice c), getting a tenure-track position at the research university, is unlikely as my research program has been stagnant for the past couple of years.

Hardly the worst case of "two-body problem" in the world, but it's ours.  :)

[spectacle]

If you get a forum like this going, I'll be on board. We're on the market for the first time (painting and film theory are our fields) and things are looking grim - we're resigned to probably having to spend at least a year apart.

[msparticularity]

I've gotten a nice offer from a Midwestern SLAC that I love, and am negotiating for half-time teaching for my husband, who is a writer/visual artist. It's not workable for us without some kind of income for him, and our needs seem fairly modest to me - we don't want TT or even full-time for him - but it is still pretty stressful, waiting to see if this will work out. So yeah, much sympathy to everyone else with these issues!

[secretweapon]

Ms P, let us know how you get on.  If I find myself in the same position I was wondering if I should just try to negotiate for part-time teaching for SO.  Of course, we'd love TT, but I wonder if this is so unrealistic that I shouldn't bother bringing it up.  Unless, of course, I get an offer at the school that's in the middle of nowhere and doesn't offer any other work opportunities for SO.

[dr_stones]

I never solved my two-body problem, so I have no sympathy left to give. 

Good luck. 

[chalee]

I can certainly commiserate. My visiting position in my husband's department is ending this year. I'd been holding out hope that they might convert to a TT because the prof I replaced may not return. But I just discovered that when they hire for the replacement, they will do a national search this time and that the new person will be positioned to be converted to TT because the EEOC process was followed. I won't be eligible to apply for the temp position again since I've already held it, so the odds that I could be re-hired as TT at some point are even longer now, what with a new "inside candidate" coming in. Very frustrating.

Looking back on our experience, I think one mistake we made was not sitting down, looking realistically at the situation, and figuring out whose career ambitions should come first and organizing our search accordingly. We took a kind of "lets see what happens attitude," he went out on the market first and got lucky, and then I did a "local" search for the next two years in the hopes that somehow we could both have TT positions and stay in the same area (we have kids). Now we're kind of rooted here and I'm less "marketable" (horrible word) than I was. I've continued to publish, so I could make one last run at the market in a national search, but even if I landed a job, I'd have to ask him to sacrifice several years of hard work toward tenure in his position and face huge professional and financial uncertainty. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying, OP, is you and your spouse may need to have a hard conversation about whose career needs get met and who will have to adapt. Good luck to you both.   

[zhimbo]

Good God I'm glad I fell in love with a non-academic. Even the non-academic two-body problem has its issues, as every move we make I'm worried about my spouse finding a satisfying job, knowing it's my screwy career that keeps uprooting us. It's worked out OK so far, but there's at least one more move coming up.

To think that's the far easier version of the two-body problem!

I can only offer a virtual beer, pint of ice-cream, or your own choice of comforting food or beverage.

[tenured_feminist]

Willingness to compromise on job types, locations, primary fields, lifestyles is useful. Patience is useful. The ability to channel frustration into productivity is useful. Good, completely honest, and constant communication with your partner is essential.

It's a tough row to hoe. Welcome to the big garden. May you find a mutually agreeable plot where you can both be employed and happy.

[englitprof]

Willingness to compromise on job types, locations, primary fields, lifestyles is useful. Patience is useful. The ability to channel frustration into productivity is useful. Good, completely honest, and constant communication with your partner is essential.

TF is absolutely right on all of the above.  My husband and I are in the middle of our first year apart, and we aren't likely to be in the same household again any time soon (we are in the exact same specialization, at least in the eyes of most search committees).  This is, in effect, our compromise.  Had we met earlier, one of us would have gone into a different area at the very least, but we didn't.  For several years we did the one TT/one part-time gig, and while this might have worked if the part-time spouse had been able to teach better classes and had been remunerated a bit better, that didn't happen at this particular institution either.  So here (and there) we are.

It's tough, but we're making it.  Certainly it helps that we're both absurdly busy!

[moderator]

I'm wondering if anyone can point me to an online support group for academic couples in the "two-body problem"; it seems to me that, if anyone should have a forum, it should be us.  :)  (Hey moderators, how about one here?)

Lihtox,

I'll talk it over with the other moderators and see what we can do. Thanks for the suggestion.

Best wishes,

Moderator

[august_leo]

I am 1/2 of a two-body academic couple. We currently don't have a problem. I have a tt job and he is starting a post-doc any minute now at the same university (in the UK, where it wouldn't be unheard of for him to move into a tt job, at least not at our school).

When the two of you sent out applications did you think of where you would both  work?

We are not sure we want to stay in the UK forever (too soon to tell) and when I think of going back on the market, I think we would only apply to (a) schools that had an opening in each of our areas (b) schools near schools that had an opening in the other person's area, (c) schools that had an opening for one of us and a good, strong department for the other if we can negotiate a spousal hire.

Maybe you should try and stay put this year and next year apply to places like above if you don't get (b) - which really seems like what you want (R1 for her, SLAC for you).

[slaccer]

Hear, hear.

I'm part of a two academic couple, both in the same major field and specialization, both interested in SLAC teaching.  And we're not in a big field like English, where it might make sense to have two in the same specialization.  We've done better than we might have.  We have two TT jobs, one SLAC, one teaching-focused U.  One of us has frustrations about student quality.  We both have frustrations about commute length, clocking about 3 hours total every day between us.  We both have issues participating in our campus lives, since we can't realistically go home and come back, and yet someone has to pick up the kids and cook dinner.  And it's really hard to juggle when we've got a sick kid or a preschool snow day, since we can't easily pass off a kid between classes since our jobs are 1 1/2 hours apart.

We'd like to move to having two jobs closer together, with one of us picking up an improvement in job situation and the other one ending up with something at least comparable.  This year, we applied for TWO pairs of jobs.  That was everything that met our criteria, and in both cases one of us was stretching to fit one of the jobs, since neither school really had two jobs in our specialization.  We've had one rejection letter from one school and nothing from the other, so it looks like we're out for this year.  Perhaps next year will be a better year and we'll have 3 openings, but perhaps not.  Last year, we applied to the two jobs we were a possibly good fit for as well.  Phone interviews but no better.

Tough row to hoe indeed.  We're lucky to have the two jobs, but the commute is a killer and we're often dead beat at the end of the day, making us worse parents and certainly worse partners than we'd otherwise be.  This is the best we've come up with after 7 years of trying, including each applying to the other's school at various points, blind faith moves for one person's job, long distance marriage, crappy treatment of each spouse by the other's department, and a pile of adjunct work.

In hindsight, as someone said above, we'd have been much better off if we were in more different fields, but we met too late for that and at the time we didn't know we were both going to be chasing the slac teaching dream.

We really have both done a pretty good job of blooming where we've been planted (despite frequent repottings!) but our degrees aren't getting shinier or newer, and I worry that we aren't going to manage to improve on what we've got.  The joy of the two body problem is that a school only has to reject ONE of us for us both to be out of the running.

Crud, this isn't getting any more cheerful.  I'm going to bed.

[marichiweu]

Yeah, me too. I'm ABD in social sciences, my partner ABD in the arts. I just landed a t-t job at a state U in a very remote place, and after they made the offer we spent a long and awkward time batting back and forth the 'spousal accommodation' issue. In the end (or wherever we are now) they were able to come up with a reliable stream of adjunct classes for my partner in 2-3 relevant departments. No long-term guarantees, although one dep't sounds pretty positive. My job is great, a bit of a coup given where I stand, but the place is not ideal by any stretch. But given everything, we're going to pack up and go, child in hand, and hope that a) the part-time work evolves into something better or b) a couple of years puts us in a position to be more choosy.

So everyone on this post so far has my sympathy, and I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of a forum particular to this issue. A two-person job search so multiplies the challenges and constraints that we need to share every bit of insider information that we can.

[oldfullprof]

I never solved this problem either, so I drive 240 miles to my job up and 240 back weekly.  I teach at a regional state college.  My wife's dean wanted to fix me up with a soft money job (research assistant professor) at my wife's R-1 the last time I needed to change jobs, but it would have been about $12,000 less than what I was making or what I was offered at my new place.  I would have been working for a newly hired assistant prof with no pubs or track record.  Just couldn't take this. 

[locutus]

I have sympathy OP.

I'm in a two-body situation myself. Though we're at slightly different points in our careers so it's kind of complicated.
I'm working on the whole willing to compromise thing.