You're in your late 20s. A graduate student. You're in a relationship with another graduate student, maybe in the same discipline. Your partner is going on the job market this year, you plan to be on the job market next year.
What thought have you given to the implications of all this? Whose career will come first? How will you decide? Is living in the same place a priority? If you plan to live apart, how long do you think your relationship will survive the separation - do you have a deadline for finding jobs together?
And what happens if/when kids come along?
It's not unusual for young academics to live hundreds, even thousands of miles away from each other, with all the stresses and strains that places on relationships; and let's not even get started on the costs of running two households and commuting to see each other occasionally. (Some friends of a friend are a British couple who live in Oxford and Paris (and they have two small kids, growing up French). Forget the problems of living in different states, they are living in different countries! This is not just an issue in the USA!)
What's your experience? What compromises are you prepared to make to keep your dual-career academic relationship alive?
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I am in a dual career couple (my husband's also an academic) and we've been commuting for 7 years now, first from the west to east coast, and now between two countries. Both of our institutions have 'tried' to do something (with his being much more active in reality than mine, which to this point only pays lipservice to trying to solve 2 body problems). But we are suddenly faced with a choice, one of us has to quit, because a baby is on the way and we refuse to live like this with a child. It's going to be me, since he makes more money than I do. So a university that claims to be incredibly family friendly and trying to hire and retain more women, is going to lose another young women, all because they can't get their collective heads around the fact that 2 body problems ARE a family and women's issue.
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