Random comments on the 1L year: I shouldn't even blog this for fear of jinxing it

So, when I was making plans for going to law school, I read a lot of how-to-succeed-in-law-school guides (a sucker for a good self-help book, I am), as well as a lot of law school blogs and online forums.

Something that a LOT of these sources emphasized was how hard law school could be on your marriage/relationship.

There was a lot of warning that non-law school people can't understand what you're going through in law school, and that you had to prepare your partner for the stress you'd be under and how much time law school would demand, and that you would have to remember to give time to your relationship so it wouldn't founder. There were also a lot of comments on how many couples break up when one of them goes to law school.

Sometime in April, I turned to NLLDH and asked, "Have you found that me being in law school has put a strain on our relationship?"

And he just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Because actually, no, we haven't found me being in law school to be a particular strain on our relationship. (Caveat: I realize I've only finished one year, so this may change, although I should add that most of the comments about the strain of law school that I've seen talked specifically about the first year.)

But honestly, I don't think this is because law school isn't hard. It's because in comparison to the strain that getting Ph.D.s and working in academia place on a relationship, law school is NOTHING.

When I look back at my life since NLLDH and I first got together (in 1993!), here are all the ways that earning Ph.D.s and being academics put pressure on our relationship:

• After completing his doctoral exams (in the minimum time allowed by our grad program) and immediately turning around and teaching his first independent course, a summer (and therefore compressed/intensive) course, NLLDH, who has issues with perfectionism and was dead exhausted, had a kind of a mini-breakdown just before we moved in together.
• Throughout grad school, he struggled with excruciating writer's block.
• Throughout grad school, I struggled with an excruciating fear of my advisor/her feedback.
• When he used up what was the standard level of grad student funding in our department, he decided to move back to his parents' house to finish his dissertation. (Since he was a foreign student in the US on an educational visa, there were limits on what kind of employment he could take.) We broke up based on the theory that we would be living in two different countries.
  
  • (That didn't actually happen, because we moved his stuff to his parents' house, then moved me into a new apartment, and he moved into my new apartment to catsit for the 6-8 weeks I was in Europe doing dissertation research. By the time I got back, he'd got a non-departmental TAship that he managed to keep for the next two years, so he never moved to his parents' house and we just kind of pretended we'd never broken up. Still, it was a strain.)
• When he finished his degree, he got a job about 5 states away. I was writing my dissertation. Should I go with him? Should I not go with him? I was going with him. No, wait, I wasn't. Okay then. He moved away, and we broke up (again on the basis of being in two different places) for 2 years. If he had not had to move for this job, we would not have broken up.
• We ultimately got back together, and got engaged while living across the country from each other. We got married 7 months later where I was working as a full-time adjunct, and the day after, he had to fly back to his job. (Honeymoon? what honeymoon?)
• I got a job at Rural Utopia. He came with me, had nothing to do for the first semester (in the middle of nowhere where we didn't know anyone yet), and spent a lot of time drinking.
• Ultimately, NLLDH got full-time teaching at Rural Utopia, which was great, and more than a lot of academic couples get. However, although we saw each other in meetings and what not, and ate lunch together on campus, we also had workloads/schedules such that he'd get up and leave the house before I woke up in the morning, we wouldn't see each other till dinner, and then he'd go to bed about 8 pm and I'd stay up and work for 3-4 more hours. (Yes, we did get summers "off," so there was that.)
• NLLDH decided that staying in his position at Rural Utopia (not tenure-track, not permanent - renewed year-to-year, so not secure, no support for research) was not something he could do long-term, other academic options didn't pan out, and he decided to go back to school to retrain for a new field. I also got a new job at Former College, in a big city, based partly on the idea that it would be easier for NLLDH to find a satisfying job in that rural area. Which meant that we left Rural Utopia, I moved to Former College City, he moved to Second Grad School City, and because he never did find a job in Former College City, we lived mostly apart for the three years I worked at Former College.
• During which time I suffered from depression, ran up a bunch of debt (partly the impact of maintaining two households and paying for travel, partly me being a depressed dink), and was relieved as much as distressed when Former College booted my ass.

(The list above is necessarily incomplete, since it's from my perspective, and NLLDH might very well add to/subtract from it.)

Now, I don't mean to suggest that academia was the cause of ALL BAD THINGS EVER that NLLDH and I have gone through in our relationship. Because it definitely wasn't - he and I brought plenty of our own issues to the party. Many couples might well have made very different decisions about these matters than we did, in ways that might have reduced stress levels. Moreover, I'm not someone who sits around bemoaning what happened in the past, because it's what has made us who we are, both as individuals and as a couple. I don't regret any of the things we've done or haven't done because of our choices to pursue Ph.D.s, try out academic jobs, and change careers. So this isn't meant to say that ACADEMIA RUINED MY LIFE, DAMMIT. And finally, I realize that lots of careers, never mind life itself, put stress on relationships, so I don't at all mean to say that only academics have to deal with relationship angst.

Nor is law school entirely stress-free. The exam period kind of sucks, because it really does expand to suck up ALL. YOUR. TIME. I told NLLDH at the beginning of it that I was probably not going to be able to cook, clean, or be very much fun while exams were ongoing (his response? "You do EXACTLY what you have to do to do well on your exams, and screw the rest of it till they're over." So that wasn't so bad, although we're both sick to death of frozen pizza). I did feel somewhat disconnected from him throughout the process, because I was immersed in the Dormant Commerce Clause and zoning amendments and inchoate crimes and personal jurisdiction and so on, and so my brain was just in a completely different place; I was so consumed by exams that when he said something about something else, I occasionally felt like, "How can he expect me to think about that??"

But I would submit that in comparison with the strain that academia placed on our relationship, me going to law school is NOTHING.

(But last caveat: we don't have kids, so that has made both the academic careers and the current careers less stressful.)

Comments

[philosopherP]

Thank you for this post -- Hubby is starting law school next year.

I've seen the "Law school is hell on relationships" claim before -- and then I realized that, no matter how busy Hubby is next year, at least we'll be in the same city.

[Fester]

I really like this post as I imagine that few can imagine the personal strain of a PhD - the selection of topic, being tops of all your classes - midpoint is not good enough for the bulk of you classes, then the prelims - as I was told that they were about deciding if I could fish or cut bait...one exam, 5 parts - 5 days long - was given 24 hours a section for 5 dayss.. I don't fear the bar after that hell. You have to say "all in" as you risk the last 3 to 4 years of life to be allowed to continue....Poor performance - and you disappear into the night - as you may get the we're sorry, but you're just not PhD material talk.. I have seen it happen.

Then the dissertation battles start... personality conflicts with the advisor when you are challenging one of his theories in your dissertation...

The PhD is is a knife fight of academic degrees - it is a personal battle between you and your committee - can't hide in a large class as one of the crowd.

Unfortunately, getting the PhD is the easy part of the getting the golden apple of tenure - it is the assitant prof time that is hard as you are expected to put together an equivalent body of work as in the PhD dissertation while teaching, grant writing and advising gradual students while satisfying the senior faculty bastards that you are working to feather their nest too....

[Rokeya]

This post was fascinating to me. I did not know the relationship history, so that was interesting. I wonder how much the various ups and downs you describe might also be a function of the moment in your lives each of you were at. This does not necessarily correlate exactly with age, but it does seem as though some of this might correspond with that phase in life where one is deciding what to do with their lives in this way for the first time. Perhaps going through another big transition moment with law school at *this* point in your life just won't involve as much tumult--similar to the way in which you described how you're not making the best friends in your life in law school like you've heard people say you would, in part because you're just not at that point in your life anymore.

[Historiann]

I agree with you that a lot of the "ZOMG your relationship may not survive this!!!" is more aptly aimed at people who are ages 22-26, which is usually the window in which when college relationships flame out. (That is to say, this may be more of a life-cycle issue than a Law School-making-your-partner-unhappy issue.)

And now that you detail your own torturous professional journey and that of NLLDH, going to law school seems like a slice of strawberry pie, doesn't it? (Your experiences are similar to those I've seen and heard of among academic couples.)

[Jackie]

My husband just finished his 1L year in an evening program-- he's 34, I'm 30, we've been married for seven years and have twin first-graders. So yeah, while law school was a stressor this part year, it was mainly the time-crunch, since he was working during the day as well. But we have survived much larger and more serious stresses on our marriage before law school!

[yasmine]

Wow. Thanks so much for this post. I finished law school a long time ago and felt that although it was difficult, it was manageable. After graduating, I proceeded to get a legal job (not a practicing attorney, but one of those alternative careers for JDs) and happily pursue my career. Then I met a graduate student. Ah the frustration! "The dissertation" looms over our relationship. The process never ends--I thought he would be finished a long time ago--I remember him saying "I'm almost finished--just give me a few months" three years ago. Sometimes, I secretly wish he would abandon the PhD and go to law school--it's so clean and easy--3 years, one bar exam and you are done!
Oh well. Kudos to you for surviving it--I can't imagine what it would be like if we were both graduate students.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Rokeya and Historiann, you're absolutely right - I kind of thought of that in conjunction with my last post, that the relationship stress stuff may be just as much life-cycle-y as the friendship stuff. So that's definitely something to factor into my (so far) lack of relationship stress.

philosopherP - yes, exactly! Being in law school but living with my husband is much less strain (so far, anyway) than not being able to live with him!

Fester, I do think that the strain of grad school is largely invisible compared to the strain of law school - I mean, the general public expects going to law school to be HARD, but tends not to see going to class and reading history books as HARD in the same way! (This might have been different if I'd done my Ph.D. in, say, neurosciences...)

Though I will say that I didn't feel at my grad program that there was a great deal of competition about grades, basically because everyone was expected to get all As (maybe one B was okay) (there were no plus/minus grades at that time); being tops in your classes is WAY more important here in law school (because since you're on a curve, only a very few people can claim those grades!). Ironically, I still found grad school more stressful in that respect - I mean, if everyone's getting As, they don't mean anything (although getting the B can really suck); it's sort of a given that people will get As, so it doesn't provide any reassurance that you are in fact doing well and succeeding, and so you have to try to glean your success from other, more intangible and subjective evidence. Whereas an A in law school is a VERY CLEAR sign of success (which isn't to say that lower grades should be taken as a failure; because of the curve, and your whole grade being based on one exam at the end, you can get a poor grade on something you actually understand quite well. Plus, grades are a fairly sucky indicator of future success as a lawyer. But at least if you get an A in law school, you can feel pretty sure it distinguishes you from most of your classmates, which was never the case in grad school).

Jackie, congrats to your husband! Glad you and he are surviving it - I do feel that by going to school full time (NOT working on top of it) and without kids, I am not experiencing the most stressful kind of law school there is!

yasmine - yup, that's pretty much the dissertation. And the clean and easiness of law school is one of the things that made it appealing to me!

[David Schraub]

Oy. I'm just finishing up my 1L year, and my girlfriend and I survived it reasonably well (we were in separate cities, but she's moving to Chicago with me because she's getting her master's degree at my school next year). But since I want to teach, I'm probably headed for a Ph.D. post-law school. And I thought that the hard part was over....

[AmyinTexas]

I'm late to the party... but what a nice walk down memory lane! It takes me back....