The Two-Career Couple and other myths

[resonant]

Well, it's six months now since the spouse became a pastor and our marriage became weekends-plus-Wednesday-dinners.

We've done crazy things like this before. When we first got married, the only job I could find was 90 miles away, so we rented a house halfway in between and split the commute. And of course in recent years we've been separated frequently so that we could coordinate his grad school with the kidlet's middle school and high school.

None of it was unbearable. But looking back, I'm beginning to think we were all sold a bill of goods on the subject of the Two-Career Couple.



Two jobs -- sure, that works. (I mean, it had better work, since it's rare for one person's salary to be able to support a family.) It's rough when there are kids too young for school, but it's pretty much the reality for everyone I know who's not retired.

But two careers in one marriage? Two people who have some ambitions, who want their current job to lead to something?

• The Tech Goddess's marriage works because she's ambitious and her husband just wants something interesting to do all day.



• I have a co-worker who says, "It's impossible to move up here without leaving town, because you can't jump more than two band levels, but all the jobs in this facility are below Band 3 or above Band 7," but it doesn't bother him too much -- his partner is the founder of a small and quite successful software company, so my co-worker can pick jobs he enjoys without worrying about an upward path.



• I knew a Salvation Army officer who wanted a family but was single well into her forties because in the Salvation Army an officer can only marry another officer. At the time I knew her, I thought this was horrible, but without that rule, couples would be faced with a situation where "I love you and I want to have a family with you" also had to mean "I'm ready to devote my life to running a medical clinic in Haiti -- when do we leave?" (My friend got the family she wanted: after she married a fellow officer, one of their clinic patients brought in a baby boy and said, "We already have seven, and we don't want this one," so that's now her son.)



• At our old address on campus, there's now a woman who's getting her master's and also taking care of her two preschoolers. Her husband stayed back in Indianapolis because he had a great teaching job he didn't want to leave.



• The kidlet's choir director commutes an hour and a half each way because his wife is a pastor the next state over.



• And at least one of the recent divorces in my family was not so much incompatible people as incompatible ambitions.

This isn't just idle sociological musings. The spouse lives in a town of 3,000; I'd like to tell you how many employers it has, but when I look at the ones listed on the Chamber of Commerce website, I happen to know that at least a third of them are defunct.

My town has lots of employment options for me (and I happen to adore it), but it only has two churches in the spouse's denomination, and that's probably one too many.

In personal/professional terms, it's simply a case of not being able to see around the next bend yet. But in sociological terms, it basically means that I've spent sixteen years telling my kid, "You can have the path you choose, if you care enough to put the work in," but I'm now noticing that the reality is a little more complicated.

Comments

[out_there]

There is a big difference between two jobs and two careers, and I personally think that most marriages survive by people compromising career ambitions around the family unit (unfortunately, it's usually the wife compromising but having two careers in two different directions... it's not something that works easily.).

[resonant]

I feel like it might be ever so slightly easier if we thought of skillsets rather than careers (e.g. the Tech Goddess's husband fixes things with his hands; I make processes run more smoothly ...) but the problem is that potential employers look at your resume and go, "Why do I want to hire a technical writer/administrative assistant/business analyst?"

[out_there]

*nods* Having the skills and being able to market the skills are two rather different things, aren't they?

[watersword]

I was always taught to call this "the two-body problem", because I was raised in academe.

[resonant]

To me the most interesting thing about your comment is that you have words for it, which means people were discussing it!

[watersword]

Oh, it's a HUGE thing in academic circles. Hunh, there's even a wiki article!

(It was a major strain in my parents' marriage, although not the reason they divorced, and I watched my mother's colleagues struggle with it as I grew up.)

[ursula]

Yes, this! Though I have a one academic career, one professional career household (mathematician and engineer), and I find that my fellow academics aren't nearly as used to thinking about the tradeoffs involved when one partner is in industry.

[j00j]

I have watched so many academic couples struggle with this. It's broken up several marriages that I know of, although that usually wasn't the sole reason. Others seem to have weathered it well, though they usually had plans for being together again in the long term.
I could've been in the same boat (complicated by polyamory-- more people, more careers!), but thankfully we all wound up mostly giving the finger to academia. We all have things we like doing, but have options about where to do them while staying local. So I guess that's somewhere between a job and a career?

[isis]

Yeah, I have the same background, and knew a lot of people who struggled with it. The worst was when two people in the same grad school program for a tiny field fell in love and got married, because the chances of finding two positions in e.g. astronomy or meteorology is vanishingly small. (And in fact I knew couples in those fields, who lived in different states or even different countries.)

I feel fortunate that I didn't have to deal with this since 1) I met my spouse-to-be while we were both working for the same institution, 2) but in different fields, and his was more tech than science and so more flexible, and 3) in a place with a surprising number of opportunities in both our fields. Both of us have made a number of changes in our career paths (including mid-career "toss it all and go traveling") but neither of us has had to face the choice of career vs marriage. (Which is also partly due to number 4, we are childless by choice.)

[lomedet]

Yeah. We're running up against our own version of that, as our "taking turns" model which seemed so good in theory (and in our thirties) smashes into real life (and we, or at least me, into our forties). No wisdom yet, just fellow-feeling.

[resonant]

It's tough, and when you add in the fact that relatively few people seem to stay in the same career they start out in ... tougher still!

[jelazakazone]

Life is so complicated. I had no ambitions. Now that my kids are 10 and 13, I have ambitions. Partly because it turns out I suck as a stay at home parent. The whole "taking care of kids" is problematic for "career advancement" at the moment (I have passion to do so much more than what I'm doing because despite being a sucky parent, I'm committed to attempting to parent them to reach certain goals.)

[resonant]

My best friend switched her work hours from full-time to part-time when her two kids were about that age. I was childless at that time, and I said, "Aren't they starting to need you less now?" and she said, "No, this is the age when the trouble they can get themselves into begins to grow."

From your recent post, it sounds like you've got a genuine parenting challenge right now -- I wish you well. Parenting takes a lot more brains than people usually think.

[jelazakazone]

I've heard people say that there should be parental leave when kids are teens! :D

Both my kids have "issues" (of the ADHD variety) and we live in an area of the country where conformity is praised and the standards for Success are insanely high. I worry about the pressure cooker culture they are growing up in.

Thank you. I am striving for balance. That's all I can ask for at the moment.

[celandineb]

Like watersword I think of this as a two-body problem, being an academic. In the first three years of my SO's tenure-track job (also the first three years of our marriage), I spent one living with him while writing my dissertation, and then two in states 1000+ miles away (one east, one west) when I had one-year positions. We got lucky in that I then found a tenure-track job in the same state, and we did the live-in-between-and-each-commute thing for seven years.

During the last two of those I decided I didn't want to be a history professor and went back for a library science degree. I got lucky again and after a couple of years working at my previous campus, I got a job at a different uni which is literally less than a mile from our house, by sheer chance. So now I walk to work, and SO does all the car-commuting. Luckily he doesn't mind, and we'd far rather live where we are than in the town that would be halfway between our two jobs.

I'm also more portable as a librarian than I was as a historian, so if SO ever decides to go for another position (possible for various reasons, though tricky as he's now a tenured full professor) there's at least some chance I could find a job/career position wherever we ended up. It's not terribly likely that I would seek another position, most likely if something goes pear-shaped at my uni which we hope does not happen. I'm reasonably satisfied with my job and don't have high ambitions, so although we are a two-career couple, so far we've mostly managed to make it work. There was one point where SO was offered a job in another country, but that was the same year I got the tenure-track history offer in this state, so we went with what seemed to be the better bet at that time, both employed at places close enough to make a living situation work. But it does mean that it's kind of his turn, and if that happens, as I said, I'm more portable... although it would be likely that I might end up with a job (i.e. a non-professional position) than a career, in that case.

All of which is an extremely long-winded way of saying that I agree, I think the "two-career couple" is a lot harder to make happen than it seems like it should, given especially that people can and often do change their minds about what they want out of a career along the way.

[resonant]

Do I remember that you've lived in other countries, or am I mistaken? I've been wondering if countries that do better on other measures (parental leave, childcare, etc.) do something differently about employment and marriage.

[celandineb]

Not lived, no. Study abroad and research trips of varying lengths, both of us, but I don't really know what if anything is done in other countries that relates to this issue. One thing I'd note, though, is that the European countries are MUCH smaller than the US; everything is so much closer together that I think that makes a difference when it comes to finding jobs/careers for two people within a limited geographical frame.

[resonant]

Oh, right, of course -- I tend to forget that not every place is as huge as North America.

Also, I get the impression that in parts of Western Europe the single-child family is more common than here. Having only one child definitely removed some complications from our complicated life.

[hunningham]

Yes, partner and I spent about six years living together in separate cities. And once you start looking around, so many couples are doing the same thing for various reasons.

A common one (for people I knew and knew about) was he found a job somewhere, and she decided not to move, but to stay where she had family and friends and the whole social network to help with the children. For a lot of women that seemed to outweigh having a husband at home. This was mostly when I lived in Hull & Newscastle, which are both cities with high unemployment and a big working class population, so it was more about a job than career ambitions.

[resonant]

I can see that -- when the spouse and I moved up here, I lost a huge support system, and it would have been a terrible hardship if the kidlet had been younger and less independent.

[laurajv]

First, I had a job that was relaxed and undemanding; then at home with kids; now grad school but still home with kids. This last phase is definitely more difficult, because suddenly I'm involved in a field I care deeply about that takes up a lot of time. We have to schedule in kid bedtimes and tv-watching dates.

[resonant]

suddenly I'm involved in a field I care deeply about that takes up a lot of time

Because I chose wrong way back at the start, my career has never really taken off, and I've sometimes wondered if I would even like putting more emotional energy into work.

[laurenthemself]

I'm 32, married eight years, no kids or plans for kids. Husband is 35 in January. He worked a long time in retail before virtually out of nowhere he decided to give nursing a go. He got his first basic qualification while still working retail, and is now a full-time entry-level nurse. He's going back to uni next year to do his Bachelor of Nursing; his workplace encourage that and will help him fit school around work.

My role if you look at my employment record is 'Contact Centre Agent level 2'. Meaning I am a person who does the extra stuff level 1 (basic call centre) can't do. Because I work in the ticketing industry, this is stuff like answer complaints, make special needs bookings, outlet helpdesk work, etc. I also work one day a week in Finance, mostly doing data entry, and two or three days in Fraud Analysis, mostly checking a billion database entries for suspicious credit card behaviour.

It probably sounds like it would be easier for me to change jobs than for my husband to. He probably could, there's always openings for nurses. Where he currently works is maybe a 45 minute drive from home, and where I currently work is anywhere from 80 to 110 minutes door to door depending on public transport. (I can't drive. Also, I work in the city, so it would be ridiculously expensive and time consuming to drive in anyway.)

However, my mental health complicates the shit out of everything. We've moved to where we are now because we were living an hour's drive from my family and that was part of the reason I had a massive meltdown in 2010 and went into hospital with depression and anxiety. The other part of the reason is that I was being bullied at my (now former) workplace. When I got out of hospital in 2010 I went back to the call centre job, which I'd had before the bully-job, and the fact that it was and is so very predictable and rarely has anything major for me to deal with and that I feel safe with my co-workers and bosses means that I'm unlikely to want to leave it. Plus they were really good when I had my second meltdown in 2013 (which was when we moved house from the hour-from-family house to the one-kilometre-walk from family house), and a minor depressive episode this year that also put me in hospital.

The thing is that Danny (husband) does want further nursing qualifications, and I do want to get back into publishing someday (I am forging on with a Master of Communication despite the brain weasels). It's not as big as an interstate thing, or even the international relationships other people I know have maintained. But when you're both working and studying, seeing each other only one or two nights a week even though you live in the same house is a very real thing, and it's really difficult sometimes. I genuinely don't know how we'd fit a kid in there if we wanted one (which, no). My hat is off to people who manage it.

Plus both of us write; we both got pieces published this year (short story in an anthology for him; one short story and one novel for me). So if that ever takes off for either or both of us, that could be a whole new ballgame.

Wow, that's a whole lot of comment for what boils down to 'yeah, I hear you on all this', but IDK, consider it an anecdote of another couple trying to fit their careers around their relationship or possibly vice versa.

[resonant]

These anecdotes are helpful! I wrote this up partly because I was looking around at the lives of my friends (who span multiple age groups) and thinking, "We can't all be in this fix because we did something wrong, can we?"

[jamjar]

My aunt's family always went where her job was because she was the breadwinner, but the side-effect of her career was that my uncle didn't have one. She was successful enough that promotions meant moving to where the new job was, so they moved states five or six times. He had a specialist legal qualification, but he'd have had to study and requalify every time they moved state, didn't necessarily dislike the jobs he had (at one point, he got a job working part time in a wine shop, and part time *reviewing wines professionally* which... nice work if you can get it!), but his jobs were always secondary.

I work with academics and the two-body problem comes up a lot there, not least because people are quite likely to be working in the same department, and people have to go where the job is.

"You can have the path you choose, if you care enough to put the work in" has never been true. The answer is closer to "If you don't put the work in, you can't have the life you choose (but there are still no guarantees that if you do, you will)."