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[quote=Anonymous]DH and I got married at 24 in the middle of our PhD program and are now 29.  I think we are absolutely a great match for one another personality-wise and temperament-wise, but the downside to getting married so young has been dealing with a lot of career "two body" problem issues that perhaps we were not mature enough to handle well.  We have done long distance for stints of time on and off for the past few years, and he recently took a faculty job in an area that has very limited job prospects for me, which has led to a lot of resentment. If I get lucky, I might be able to find employment in the city he is relocating to in the next year or two (there is only one employer outside of the university in the area that fits my expertise), but if not, I'm not sure how we are going to resolve this. Basically, I can give up or entirely change my career, he can give up his incredibly competitive dream job, or we can move on from one another.

We have spent the past year fighting about how his dream (to be a tenure track research professor) has been extremely disruptive to our lives due to the fact that a serious academic job search is a national one.  He was adamant about wanting to be a professor, and I harbored a lot of resentment about how he was unwilling to at least apply for and seriously consider jobs outside of academia (such as in industry or government) where we might both be able to find jobs in our respective subfields in the same geographic area more easily. Aside from the aspect of personal professional fulfillment, I also don't want to raise a family on one faculty salary, even in a lower COL area. We had considered trying to start a family earlier, but there was a series of setbacks and opportunities that have made it challenging to be in the same city for long stretches of time without sacrificing a lot of career opportunities.  It started when we were not able to coordinate our graduation dates, because his PhD advisor moved universities and department put pressure on my husband to graduate early.  I realize that prioritizing our career aspirations is a choice.  But at this point, despite getting married young, it doesn't mean we are having kids any earlier than those who got married later.

If I had more perspective and didn't get married so young, I would have better appreciated how challenging balancing professional ambitions of two spouses can be, especially when you have very specialized training.  Of course, you can't help who you fall in love with, and perhaps if I hadn't married my husband, I would have met someone who I had to work out these issues with anyway.[/quote]

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