Modern Love - Is the Husband Going to be the Problem?
When we married, we each walked down the aisle solo and came back arm in arm. I kept my name, he kept his annual fishing trip, and we shared the wedding appliances and the home office.
But when it came to entering the job market, we had what’s known in academic parlance as a “two-body problem.” Securing two tenure-track jobs anywhere is hard. Finding them close together is nearly impossible.
Yet we pushed ahead. I applied to every position in early modern literature, and he applied to every one in the classics. Neither one of us was going to take a backseat or be pressured to follow the other. We were prepared to live apart as long as we stayed in the same time zone and there were direct flights. The prospect of getting tenure in seven years, the academic freedom and job security at the end of it all, would make the personal and financial sacrifices worth it.
When our annual conventions rolled around, where the first round of interviews would take place, we each had four. Then it was on to the next stage — the campus visits.
Before my first visit, a professor of mine confided that a member of the interview team had contacted him about my candidacy and asked, “Is the husband going to be a problem?”
It was as if Brendon were a rabid pit bull. What were they really asking, though? If they offered me the position, would I try to negotiate one for him, too? Or would I crack under the pressure of living apart and jump ship mid-semester? Or would we do something really subversive, like starting a family before getting tenure?
I wish they had asked me directly, because I had the perfect comeback: “Not if I keep him chained under the bed.”
Instead, I had to rely on my professor’s response to my potential employer, which was that Brendon and I were both “adults” and would “make the right decision.” That is, we would put our careers ahead of our personal lives because this was the “adult” thing to do. We’d be like disciplined pro athletes, only without the money or the hard bodies.
For the first time since we’d met, Brendon and I weren’t equals. No one on his interview committees seemed to be sniffing around for info on his “problem” wife. Maybe they assumed that men put their careers first, or that women are less serious about theirs. It felt as if my wedding ring was a hurdle I had to clear to prove my commitment to academia, while Brendon’s was a badge of stability and good-guy gravitas.
I worked hard on my first campus fly-back to dispel the concern about my “problem” husband, making sure to slip in questions about real estate and school districts without seeming too eager to have children any time soon.
When the hiring season was over, we’d landed two good tenure-track jobs in two good cities with two airlines that flew directly between them. I dismissed the nagging concerns the process had raised for me and threw myself into divvying up the wedding platters. We pooled our moving allowances, packed up a Ryder truck in California, dropped half of our stuff in my new Midwestern city, then drove to his East Coast city and dropped off the other half. We had our car on a trailer behind the truck. This made backing up a treacherous proposition. For the whole 3,000 miles, one of us would jump out to scope the turnaround prospects whenever we were about to pull off. The literature scholar in me loved the metaphor: There was no going back.
Somehow we managed to have a child two years later, and, even though I hadn’t waited until tenure, I believed I’d done it in the most “adult” way possible — i.e., without inconveniencing my students or colleagues or jeopardizing my progress toward writing my book, the gold standard for getting tenure.
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Caroline Bicks, a writer and professor, lives in Boston.
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