Are you part of an academic career couple?

Years ago, and far away, my spouse and I were Assistant Professors of Psychology at campuses 135 miles apart. We bought a house in a city that was 90 miles from my campus via the Interstate and 45 miles from his campus by traveling small country roads.

We were young and enthusiastic, fresh out of our internships and job searches. My spouse followed me, for which I was extremely grateful. We did not have any family members depending on us. We were encouraged, one might even say groomed, to “try academics” right out of grad school, when we had recent publications from the research we had completed with our faculty while earning our degrees.

Not an ideal setup, being on campuses so far apart. But we were still grateful to have two tenure-track teaching jobs, given how competitive it was to find and secure those positions. We continued with our dual academic roles for three years, until we were no longer willing to put up with the stress and strain of it.

Our challenges included not spending enough time together; not knowing any our neighbors at “home”; developing separate groups of friends from our campus communities; and wanting to someday start a family. We sought out counsel and brainstormed creative solutions, including proposing that we each hold a 0.75 FTE Psychology faculty role on my campus. That idea was quickly shot down; it was the only time I remember crying in a faculty meeting.

Without tenure, we left unsaid the fact that we were aware of other “dual role relationships” that were quite unseemly, given our core values and our understanding of power dynamics. Enough said, it was time to move - and move on.

The amount of change we undertook was dizzying! We picked a city to move to longer-term, gave up our tenure-track jobs without yet having other job offers, sold our house, and moved across the country. The unemployment rate in our new city was 1.4 percent, so we ended up landing on our feet in new jobs, just not in academics. I missed my students and many of my colleagues, but it was the right decision for us.

Decades later, I still know it was the right decision for us. We have two adult children, great friends and neighbors, and a rich work history that has expanded our horizons in ways we could not have imagined back on campus.

There are probably as many unique work-life configurations as there are academic couples!

--> Are you part of an academic career couple? Or were you in the past?
--> Do or did you live together, or travel extensively to see one another?
--> What are/were your challenges and rewards of both being in higher education?
--> What advice do you have for other academicians in, or considering, dual career situations?

Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Thank you!

*Note that this blog post first appeared as a LinkedIn post on 4/24/25.