Marriage and a Doctorate

In June D and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary...which means we are nearing 10 years together. For most of that time (minus 2 years of outside work in the middle) one or both of us has been a student. Many of our best nights have been spent writing near each other late into the night with a forever hot pot of Starbucks brewing (and sometimes finishing with a neat drop of whiskey as we crashed for the night). Now, D has less time to spend writing and reading and spends more time texting and managing and I spend more time writing but often in frustration. Our schedules are rarely similar. Often I walk through the door to a just waking husband and often he walks through the door to a sound asleep wife. It hasn't been easy.

There are times when I feel as if I'm taking too much of our time and finances and contributing little (adjuncting just doesn't pay that much!) On these days I often clean the entire house from top to bottom and make a cherry pie just to fufill some sort of notion of the 'perfect wife'.

Of course, this is also a problem because whatever time I'm spending doing something else I'm not writing. And, if I'm not writing it means that my dissertation is NOT getting done. Which means that we will have to stay here longer. And it means that D and I often put plans for the future aside and keep living day to day. Which is nice, as we can simply often savor a moment but often it seems as if it is a matter of living instead of living well, which I've always believed must contain living towards the future...not for the future but towards the future.

Which isn't easy, for either of us. And there have been many nights where it felt like it might not be worth it. And yet, we are still here, still celebrating, still moving towards the future, together.

One of the reasons is that we have decided to dream big, together. Like when we started off this crazy adventure and spent all our savings a month hiking through Europe. Totally Awesome. Awe-inspring. The best thing I've ever done. And, so we often think about that rather big moment and push ourselves to keep doing that kind of thing And we have decided, slowly to allow the future into our lives...even if it doesn't quite fit. Like purchasing a house. It makes it a bit more difficult....an apartment complex isn't cheap but it also doesn't take money every month because the bathtub leaks or the upstairs bedroom heater isn't working right. Still, although I was worried when we bought the house it was a step in making sure that this dream of our ours wasn't just about me but was about our dreams, our life, our growing together. Which meant, growing up and out of that student bubble it's so easy to live in. Where really if you have cheese, wine, some bread, and some coffee you are all set.

Sure, I'm still selfish sometimes, I put my work ahead of D and I often meet my adviser despite the hassle it brings to leave the house for the city yet another time. And D admits that he spends way too much time at work and we both get lazy and uncommunicative and grouchy.

But at the end of the day, we make our plans together. And maybe that's the key to this marriage and graduate student thing. We are learning to live in a marriage where student life is not the main focus but simply one of our focuses. Its not that we still don't have discussions like whether or not emotions are a kind of rationality (one of our unsolvables) but we have that discussion and then another discussion about whether or not its time to paint the kitchen or pick the pumpkins. And then I go upstairs to pound away at these clicking keys and D romps around with the dog. And that seems to work just fine (except for those nights when grouchiness trumps all and then well, we just hope for the next day!)

It seems the key, for us at least, has been to transform our passion for learning about philosophy and education to learning about life...which is probably what truly living philosophically is all about.

And for more on the subject here is some articles which articulate some of the frustrations and opportunities of graduate life and marriage.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/20/marriage

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/03/us/health-for-graduate-students-marriage-presents-a-special-problem.html