Q. So you guys commute between New York and Atlanta?
A. Yup.
Q. And you’ve been doing it how long?
A. Ten years.
Q. Don’t you like each other?
A. We quite enjoy each other’s company.
Q. Ha-ha, that must make marriage a lot easier, right? Cuz you don’t have to see each other all the time!
A. Yes, it is wonderful. When we were looking into each other’s eyes swearing our wedding vows, promising to love each other forever, each of us was secretly thinking, “I hope no one is taking this too literally.”
Q. You must be seeking someone with whom to cheat on your spouse. Allow me to volunteer!
A. Thank you so much for your concern. Oh, gosh, is that the time? I promised my neighbor that I would decalcify her llama this afternoon and I still haven’t bought the safety goggles. Toodles!
Q. Why don’t you both just settle in New York? I hear there are a lot of good schools in New York.
A. Thank you for your suggestion. This has never crossed our minds before.
Q. Have you tried Columbia? I bet they have a good English department.
A. They have an excellent English department. We’ll just give them the good news that I’m available to improve it, shall we? Problem solved.
Q. Why don’t you just get your employer in Atlanta to hire him?
A. Have you ever tried to get a group of academics to do anything? Even something that doesn’t cost money?
Q. It doesn’t seem like you’re trying very hard.
A. Yes, the fact that we do not have jobs in the same city tells you more about our laziness than it does about the academic job market.
Q. Well, don’t worry, I know another couple who spent their entire lives commuting bi-coastal, they’d just see each other in the summers, and they finally got to live together after they retired. Then one of them died. But they were together for a couple years first. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
A. Perplexingly, no.
Q. So…. why haven’t you had children? Clock’s a-tickin’!
A. I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service at this time. Please try your call again later.
Tags: academia, family, humor, rachel trousdale, relationships, the horror of academia
Tag is missing, “Two-Body Problem”
This is a really odd question, but do you file your taxes separately? I would assume it would get a little wonky filing state and federal jointly when you both have primary residences in different states, but since I’m a librarian in Texas and not a tax attorney, I know precisely nothing about state income taxes other than other states have them and it complicates tax filings.
We file together. I’ve gotten really good at the New York / Georgia part year resident forms, and it’s much cheaper than filing separately.
Thanks! I honestly expected it to be cheaper to file separately, so that is good to know!
Q. So…. why haven’t you had children? Clock’s a-tickin’!
A. I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service at this time. Please try your call again later.
Better Answer: Oh, we do have children. They live in Portland.
Hahaha that’s perfect!
Thank you for your suggestion. This has never crossed our minds before.
Variations of this are my go-to for obtuse advice.
[eta: I misspoke. That’s my second-rung tactic. The first rung is just to give a level, bland look at the person offering impossibly obvious advice and let them fill in the silence. I am a monster.]
No, I am also a fan of deploying the long, awkward silence. No need for a witty response or a quick comeback (for those of us easily tongue-tied); just a vast chasm of silence that their idiocy can echo into.
I’m bad at the “maintaining eye contact” part. It always seems like the right time for a “stare into space while taking a long sip off my cocktail” moment. Although I will often follow that up with the “side-eye to see if they got it yet”.
I am so, so interested in doing this with my weird shitty neighbor, and so far I haven’t been able to work up to it. He tries to mansplain something to me about once a month, usually involving my dog, who is usually present and barking and trying to get him to pet her. He’s also a bit of a rambler, so what I really would like to do is hold the dog by the collar and let her keep barking and barking and barking while he talks and talks and talks and then eventually trails off, realizing that I am just staring at him with dead eyes.
But I am afraid.
FYI Marian Diamond, a pre-eminent biologist and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, who gave THE BEST lectures on and off the topic, and is basically a superstar, is married to a guy (I don’t remember his name) who is/was also a professor at UCLA, and thus they lived, separately but marrieds. I think they liked it – I met him on a BART train once and he told me about their arrangement; he seemed to enjoy their lifestyle. I thought, “He probably snores.”
Oh snap, she name drops him in that video “Dick Diamond.” I guess they divorced! Was it all a farce, that BART conversation? Did a nuclear chemist lie to a stranger about his marital status?!
HELLO I AM ONE OF YOUR FORMER STUDENTS AND I JUST SCREAMED. THANK YOU FOR WRITING FOR THE TOAST. NICOLE AND MALLORY THANK YOU FOR HAVING THE GOOD SENSE TO PUBLISH RACHEL, SHE IS THE BEST.
OH! HELLO, SCOTTIE SISTER! I NEVER HAD HER AS A TEACHER BUT ALL MY FRIENDS DID. TO A ONE THEY ADORED HER AND THEY ARE ALL BEING INFORMED OF THIS ARTICLE AS WE SPEAK.
She’s at ASC?! My best friend from high school is an ASC grad and former prof. 🙂
The Toast is such a wonderfully small world.
To be fair, ASC and the Toast are not, shall we say, ideologically disparate.
YAY SCOTTIES!!!! And Rachel is definitely, definitely the best.
I JUST FOUND THIS AND WANTED TO SCREECH HELLO AT MY SCOTTIES! (HI, RACHEL!)
Apparently all her former students write in all caps.
Solidarity from a really old English major.
Aaaah, academia. An entire industry still built around the idea of having a stay at home wife and a family who can move at a moment’s notice. Who needs a stable social network? That’s what your work is for!
I’ve seen this lifestyle first-hand, from the scientist point of view. I’ve recently decided to leak out of the pipeline like a champ at some point in the next year. Part of this came from the fact that even as a postdoc, people have constantly been trying to get me to move away from my husband for work. “Come work on site at this national lab for six months!” “I have a husband.” “You can spend a little time apart, surely! It’ll be great for your career!” “I already spent five years apart from him during grad school, and we’re apart because of his travel for a third of the year.” I’ve gotten over my feelings of feminist guilt, but I still get looks of sadness and bafflement when I tell this to professors I know. “Surely you can make it work.” I’m tired of making it work, damn it.
Of course, even after I leave, my husband’s going for a tenure track job, so I’ll still get to be the trailing spouse to his academic career, so woooo.
I married a guy in my department, and then I quite after my master’s instead of getting the PhD. I’m sure people assume I quit to avoid the two-academics-one-marriage problem, but it was really because I hated the program with ever fiber of my being! Only having to worry about getting one university job instead of two is just a fantastic, amazing, world-altering side benefit.
We had this exact situation. Only he got a TT job and I teach adjunct classes in his department, along with another part-time job. I am super happy we don’t have be bi-coastal and we’re (mostly) happy.
Ughhhh I think Boyfriend is maybe going to be the one who quits academics. He has a Masters and a real job in Seattle and I have four more years left (fingers crossed) on a PhD in College Station Texas.
I will be right there with ya, sister! Just weathered year 1 of T-T job applications with my bf (3 on-campus interviews, no offers), and he’s just taken a position at a national lab. I decided not to go the academia route because it was of absolutely zero interest to me, and I have a great “applied world” job that is very flexible, but it will be interesting to see how flexible they feel if I end up in Bozeman or Laramie or Lubbock with no real connection to one any of our office locations (plus I travel a lot, and that gets complicated if I live near an airport with 4 flights a day).
This is all pushed off another couple of years though, because bf just accepted a job at a National Lab just outside a very large city, which is great news for me! At least until the next round of applications…
I’m apprehensive that the person I am getting married to is, in many ways, the platonic ideal of the Academic Spouse– ze has no particular career goals at this time, ze is happy to live in any of the three countries I might be moving us to, ze likes to plan out the cute lunchboxes ze will make– because I don’t WANT to reinforce a shitty system, you’re right that the industry is built around that expectation and it’s BULLSHIT, and I feel like two queer trans folks should be able to do better. But so far all we’ve done to Subvert The System is that I pay zir a fair rate when ze helps with the monotonous scutwork of my research. And in return, ze is moving to a country where ze won’t be able to legally work for at least six months. I feel like I should be pointing accusing fingers at half my department and wailing, “I Learned It From Watching Yooou!”
as a current standing Academic Spouse who absolutely loves being the academic spouse (because I have a much worse student debt for a much lesser degree, and less than zero desire to EVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH ACADEMICS PROFESSIONALLY EVER AGAIN) I have honestly never been so happy with the lack of career-based stress in my own head. Even though I’m currently working an office job I really, really like knowing that the moment spouse gets offers elsewhere, for however long the offer stands, I can just throw everything in a suitcase and leave with them, guilt-free!
I sincerely hope everything works out for both of you 🙂 and good luck with the move!
Yay for cute lunchboxes though.
Leaking out of the pipeline FOR THE WIN.
Partner and I met in grad school, because meeting someone in grad school is a great way to find someone with compatible interests to have an agonizing, stressful long-distance relationship with. He defended and stuck around the place lecturing for a year or two, because shitty humanities job market. I defended and got a postdoc on the East Coast, he got a VAP in the upper Midwest, and we Skyped and cried a lot for a couple of years. Then I didn’t get a position after my postdoc, because shitty humanities job market, and moved out to to be with him because I was tired of tilting at this particular set of windmills. Then his department pulled the rug out from under him and he’s unemployed because shitty humanities job market.
This time we are STAYING THE HELL HERE TOGETHER because I have a job I like and he’s done tilting at windmills, too.
I get you on the Feminist Guilt (“what do you mean, you walked away from your academic career for a man??!!”), but really, academia felt like a relationship that was unsatisfying at best and emotionally abusive at worst, so I don’t really regret walking away from that. Also, there’s something deliciously satisfying about saying, “Screw this, I just want to be happy” and then doing what makes you happy.
May your way forward be satisfying, too.
I love this! I am determined to spend the last 2 years of my PhD program figuring out what I ACTUALLY want to do because I am 99.9% sure it is NOT to become a professor at a research university. There are so many other cool science jobs that don’t involve this unsatisfying/abusive world of academia.
academia felt like a relationship that was unsatisfying at best and emotionally abusive at worst, so I don’t really regret walking away from that. Also, there’s something deliciously satisfying about saying, “Screw this, I just want to be happy” and then doing what makes you happy.
*high five*
“Leaking out of the pipeline” is the best phrase for this. My husband, after 10 years of VAPing and adjuncting, left in January for a regular office job and the worlds of stress that have lifted from our shoulders are astonishing. I do not feel guilt about my happy, comfy teaching-track/admin job, he does not feel anxious about doing the adjunct hustle every six months, and we are both experiencing the particular joy of regular paychecks and some measure of job security.
It’s a psychologically/emotionally tough shift, at least for some people. I wish you the best with it, and I hope academia knows what they’re losing.
GIRL. Come sit over here by me. I recently posted to the Toasties a query about leaving academia in the dustbin of my own personal history, and they were so helpful. I am hoping I will figure something out over the next year, as it’s the last year left in my 3-year contract. And yeah, part of it is because my husband (who DROPPED OUT of our PhD program) now has a great, stable job, in the city we’ve been living for the last decade+, and we have friends and family here, and why should I give all that up just because I get offered a 4-4 teaching job at Bumfuck State, Southeast Campus?
But I, too, have all the feminist guilt. All of it. The extra special irony sprinkles on top of this career angst sundae? My research/teaching are on gender, work, and motherhood. Haaaaaaa. I understand the structural forces that have shaped our predicaments all too well, and yet here I am caught in them
But on the bright side, I’ve FINALLY, finally shaken off the insidious ideology that says that a tenure track job is the only worthwhile career to pursue, the only path through which I can find satisfaction, intellectual growth, and a community of peers. FUCK THAT NOISE, that is some bullshit propaganda right there. So I’m feeling better on that score.
Oh no. I haven’t finished my dissertation yet, but I just got to “My research/teaching are on gender, work, and motherhood. Haaaaaaa. I understand the structural forces that have shaped our predicaments all too well, and yet here I am caught in them” and suddenly I thought I was reading about myself for a minute.
So anyway, just wanted to drop a comment of solidarity. Good luck to you!!
Thanks!! And to you!
As someone who leaked out too, all I have to say is: dude, fuck academia. As a workplace it’s entirely built around exploiting young people who’ve been duped into thinking that being interested in your subject means it’s normal to hate your job.
You can do it! Find a normal job with coworkers you don’t mind and friends you don’t debate with all the time. The difference in stress and guilt levels, especially with normal job compared to grad school, is shocking.
“decalcify her llama”
CHORTLING with laughter. One of my mom’s friends’ go-to was “I have to go polish my cat”.
My favorite is always, “That sounds like the perfect marriage!” Usually shouted by divorced women, followed by gleeful cackles.
“I wouldn’t like this situation were I in it, so I am determined to make sure you are as unhappy as I think you ought to be. Then the world will make sense again.”
Fuck people, man.
RACHEL HOLY SHIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
by which I mean: it makes perfect sense that you are here, here being here and you being you, but I DID NOT EXPECT THIS. It seems like everyone I know is writing for The Toast these days! Conclusion: I know the best people. See you in five hours, Best Person! (I’m gonna make jackets.)
Make me one too. It’s a club I wanna belong to.
Man, my academic adviser from my youth retired this year, and it just now occurred to me how BONKERS it was that he and his wife both built careers at the same, small conservative Catholic university, but it also explains a lot.
I would like, just once, to have an encounter with someone who says all manner of horrible, invasive jokes and comments you’ve heard 10,000 times before, and to ask them honestly why they say things like that. Do you really think that you, a stranger or brief acquaintance, are more familiar with this person’s circumstances than they are? Do you really think you’ve offered them a solution to their problem they haven’t already considered? Do you REALLY think that asking them personal questions (“But the sex is great then, right, because you only see each other so often?”) will benefit you in some way???
(The only reason I haven’t done this before is because every time I get a stupid question or comment I’m blinded by rage and can barely control my anger enough to say something very trite and walk away, and as a rule I prefer to stay out of jail.)
“I stopped counting at 42.”
“What?”
“I’ve heard that comment more than 42 times.”
“Why 42?”
“It’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything. You really should read a bit more widely.”
When I got my call about my acceptance to a PhD program, the professor mentioned that he was driving to Massachusetts to see his wife and children. I am from the West Coast and know next to nothing about East Coast geography besides that you have very small states over there, so I exclaimed, “Wow! That’s so great that you can easily drive from New Jersey to Massachusetts!” Then he told me that it’s a 5+ hour drive, a drive he makes every weekend because he has tenure and his wife doesn’t, so it makes more sense for their home base to be near her place of work.
And that’s when I promised myself I would do everything in my power to avoid dating another grad student. I’m starting in three weeks, so we shall see how it goes. If nothing else, it will provide lots of opportunities to pretend to be unimpressed with men. *cackle*
Unfortunately, in this age of unpaid internships and temp gigs, this problem is not unique to academia. My ex-husband and I couldn’t find a job in the same city and (I was told!) highly pragmatic professional field. Neither of us could afford unemployment (yay student debt!) and eventually we just got too tired of making it work.
Q. Why don’t you both just settle in New York? I hear there are a lot of good schools in New York.
A. Thank you for your suggestion. This has never crossed our minds before.
Q. Have you tried Columbia? I bet they have a good English department.
Dying over here. DYING. If we replace “New York” and “Columbia” with a different big city and Ivy, and “English” with “History,” I have had this same conversation so many fucking times.
I’d print this and hand it out at parties, if I ever went to parties. Married 28+ years, doing the commute for about ten.
One of my favorite professors in college actually spends half the year in France and half the year in New England, while her husband spends much of the year teaching in Canada. They make it work, and are both successful in their fields, but man, it sounds exhausting.
My supervisor commutes from one state capital to another (not bicoastal though) and every time he apologises for not answering my email over the weekend I just want to shout “OMG YOU HAVE KIDS IGNORE MY FLAILING FOR THE 48 HOURS YOU ARE AT HOME”. I don’t, because that would be weird, so I’m just trying not to flail over the weekend about anything.
My take away from this is that if you’re a young, untenured academic in America and you’re thinking about marrying another one, it really helps if you both have a low sex drive. If you want to see more of each other, why not consider joining the Navy.
I am so, so happy my boyfriend has jumped from the good ship Academie. Also that we live in England where nothing is really very far away. Y’all pulling long-distance stints have major fortitude, I would be distraught if we had to live apart not least because I would then have to have housemates, ugh.
One of approximately 5,000,000 reasons why I am not a professor. Even as an academic librarian (where the job market is less insane than the job market for teaching faculty), I’ve occasionally had to explain to clueless people that no, I cannot just “get a job” in X or Y place, jobs in academia do not magically come into existence when wished for hard enough, film at eleven.
(Insert joke about the monastic roots of academia and vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience here…)
This is my 300+ page dissertation condensed into one column!
I thank the stars that my spousal unit found his PhD so demoralizing that he didn’t want to spend another minute in academia after he passed his viva. Which sounds harsh, but he survived it and went straight into the private sector. While I’m still the trailing spouse who only has a Master’s in art history, we have finally ended up in a town with jobs we both like. A good friend (also a Toastie,*waves hello*) and her partner are in the same boat as the author and I hope fervently they both end up with satisfying academic jobs in the same city.
I just finished a move with my academic spouse, who after three years on the job market and a list of major publications as long as my arm, finally got a 3-2 TT position in her corner of the humanities. (I'm well aware that this makes Spouse a lottery winner.)
The version of this question I got from friends and family in our previous home was "You're both so well-qualified. Why can't you just both get jobs teaching at Hometown State U? Or maybe Tiny Hometown Liberal Arts College–a friend of mine said they're looking for someone in [field that is neither mine nor my spouse's]."
A related but distinct version, almost always posed by my mother, was "I still don't see why you think you and your spouse can't both become professors. I know how good you'd be at it, and I'm sure your students all loved you."
I don't know what it is about the academic job market that seems to bewilder otherwise intelligent people, but apparently it does–and with such facepalm-inducing consistency.
No kidding. People are so sincere "why don't you apply to (school name)?"
ummm because they haven't posted a notice looking for someone with my background. Duh!
honestly you don't have to have an academic spouse for this to be an issue. My husband (not academic) is not fond of moving, being yanked here and there, depending on what I've got (phd process, dissertation field research, back to school to write, temp job, another job…). It does not help that he's also not from the same country as me, or the country where I do my research
About to officially begin my long-distance marriage next Saturday (as in, I’m marrying my long-term long-distance partner next Saturday. Holy crap. We do not have tablecloths. Or rings. Whatever) As a PhD student in the humanities, I’ve had this conversation about 100 different times except with a couple variations. I’m an academic and he is not. This completely baffles all my academic colleagues. “Wait? So he’s not in grad school? Then why the hell doesn’t he live here with you?” “He’s not an academic though, so he’ll just move in after the wedding, right?” Or maybe – just maybe – he doesn’t feel like picking up his life and trying to find a job every few years while I bounce around begging universities to hire me. OY