Two Body-Problem Series: Navigating the Move

Credit: Tod Strohmayer (GSFC), CXC, NASA
Illustration: Dana Berry (CXC)

This entry in the two-body problem series is an account of one person’s experience navigating the academic track with their partner. For context, the people in the relationship are cisgender and heterosexual. If you would like to contribute your own story to this series, please contact us at wia-blog at lists.aas.org.

When did you and your partner meet? What are your backgrounds (educational, social, cultural, etc., for context)?

We met in college, in the first few days after freshman orientation. We grew up in different regions of the same US west coast state. We're both white with college-educated parents. Our first interaction was when I asked if he had a car and could drive two friends and me to the store! He kindly agreed, but we wouldn't date for over a year after that. He was two years ahead of me, and majored in engineering; I majored in physics.

How many times have you moved together and at what point were you both in your careers? Did you have to live apart during any of those transitions? Were there any difficulties faced and how did you navigate them?

Since I graduated from college, we have moved roughly 6 times.

My partner moved back to our home state for an engineering job while I finished college. He visited me often, including while I studied abroad. I wanted to attend graduate school in astronomy, but had only rejections and a few waitlists. In the meantime, I somehow convinced him to quit his job, come work with me at summer camp, and figure out the rest later. I finally got off one waitlist in July (that is comically late!), for a master's-only program. I accepted, he immediately shifted his job search to the city where my new grad program was, and we moved in together. This was a difficult time that coincided with the economic recession, and we were privileged to find an apartment as we lived off of savings. We got two cats as soon as he got a job, and lived there for two years.

I applied to PhD programs a second time, and ended up as a waitlist admit to just one school. It was in a region we were less familiar with, and a smaller city. We agreed on a year-long staggered move: the cats and I would get an apartment while he would stay behind to get his professional engineering license. We got engaged that summer, and decided to get married in our then-present city. He did all the in-person wedding prep while I handled the long-distance tasks. We visited each other as often as possible. I survived my first year of the PhD program, we were married and had a lovely honeymoon, and a week later we flew off together to an international summer research program I had applied to on a whim. When I asked if my husband could join me, they said yes (we had to pay for his plane ticket, but we shared the lodging included with the program). He convinced his employer to let him work part-time remotely from halfway across the globe, and ramped up his job search for our next new city, which was challenging from afar. By the fall, he finally landed a job in an area a bit different from his past experience. We were finally back to living together with our cats and belongings.

I continued the PhD program and we made a life for ourselves, even buying a small home. He continued his job, changing roles a time or two. He started his own side business so he could do some consulting that was more in line with his long-term career interests. After lots of discussion, he decided to apply for jobs in places we would prefer to live. He got a very good offer remarkably quickly, when I still had over a year to go in my PhD. He was excited about the work, and I was excited at the prospect of finishing my dissertation remotely, but neither of us were excited about reverting to living in two places half-long-distance.

We forged ahead with a small apartment in another new city. We rented our home to friends with the (written) understanding that I could visit as needed and they would move out within a few years. My husband liked his new job, and closed his side business. We both liked being in a more urban, walkable area. I bounced between cafes, libraries, and visiting my PhD institution (at my own expense). There was virtually no astronomy in our current city, so I decided to apply for three postdocs in yet another city, closer to family. We knew we would face another move if I landed one, and I would have several months to look for a non-academic job otherwise. I started seriously talking to folks about non-academic careers such as science communication, software development, and data science. As it turned out, I didn't need to, as I was shortlisted for two postdocs and offered one! After some negotiation, they agreed to a small pay bump and a transitional remote working arrangement.

My husband dove back into job search mode. After I punched my way through defending my PhD, I went back and forth between my postdoc city and my husband's city every couple of weeks for six months. I also got pregnant during this time. This encouraged my husband to double down on his job search! He interviewed in person with three companies on the same day, got two strong offers, and landed a job that was both up his alley and well-compensated. I found us a 2-bedroom apartment, and we moved in together once again when I was four months pregnant.

Our final move was about a year ago, when our child was 1.5, to a house in the same walkable neighborhood we had been living in. My husband has been at the same company for three years, and after three years as a postdoc I was promoted to a research scientist position.

How was searching for jobs together? What conditions did you have for accepting jobs?

We kind of iterated our way into a solution where one of us would move to a new place first, and the other would follow within a year. It was expensive and exhausting. We really like living together, so having to forge lives in different places was not as fun as when we got to do it together. We did constrain ourselves to the western US, and usually the west coast. If I had an easier time getting into graduate school, we might not have had to move as much. The PGRE cannot go away fast enough.

My career choice has always been, do you want to stay in astronomy or use this moment to exit? And so far, every time, the "stay" option, however last-minute, has won out. Because my husband can stay in his field of expertise pretty much anywhere, and I can't, his career has always been heavily constrained by my geography. I feel very lucky that he is generally OK with this, though I have no doubt his career would look very different — likely more lucrative, and possibly more satisfying overall — if he had been able to follow a career trajectory without my constraints. He has gotten really good at the job search process and has informally coached several friends and colleagues, and is considering turning career coaching into a formal side gig.

How did significant life events affect your decision-making process?

I strongly wanted to get engaged before we had to live apart again. In hindsight, the timing wasn't as critical as I thought it was. Planning a wedding long-distance is harder and less fun than living in the place where the wedding will be, but I'm glad we got married when and where we did.

I read the parental leave policy very closely for the postdoc I took. I learned that I needed to have worked there for a year to take 12 weeks of fully paid leave, and that was a primary factor in when I was willing to try getting pregnant. I was especially thankful that this leave was entirely separate from vacation, so we could still take time off as usual during my pregnancy and once I was back at work. The fact that this kind of scenario isn't the norm and/or bare minimum in the US continues to astonish me; I had a straightforward pregnancy and birth with lots of support, and adapting to life with a newborn was still the hardest thing I've ever done.

At this point, I can think of very few life-changing things that would cause me to seriously consider leaving our home or our city. We feel very lucky and privileged to have landed where we are, in the same state we both grew up in, having lived in a handful of other unique places, with family a short drive away.

At the moment, we are weathering the pandemic relatively well. We both have flexible and stable jobs, and my husband's work has been deemed "essential," so we are able to have the nanny we usually share with another family come to work while we also work from home. My husband was actually recently offered a job at a different company and declined, largely due to the inflexible vacation/sick/parent leave and work-from-home policies. I am very angry that our state, nation, and culture make it extremely difficult to have a career and a family.

Any advice for couples in a similar situation? Anything you wish you had done or asked for? Anything that worked really well?

We have had a lot more flexibility than dual-academic couples. We have had adequate financial resources almost always, and it was still rough at times. A dual-academic situation would not have worked at all for us, I don't think, since I have only had one option each time I reached the next stage of my career. Perhaps I would have found a way to make freelance science communication work instead. It is important to me that my life always somehow contain astronomy, music, and the people and communities close to my heart.

I do not recommend moving out of a home and then half-living in it later as you are frantically trying to finish a degree and somebody else has moved in; it was highly unsettling and disorienting, though our friends were gracious hosts and took great care of the place.

I don't think there is such a thing as an optimal time to have a baby, but for us, the optimal time and place was not graduate school. It is crucial to look closely at workplace leave policies and childcare options well in advance. Also, recognize that nothing in the US is set up to support working parents by default.

I strongly recommend talking extensively with your partner about your priorities and metrics for success in life, and revisiting this regularly. Lucianne Walkowicz's framework for how to do this is an excellent place to start: https://astrobites.org/2018/08/17/what-does-success-mean-to-you/.