This may sound like an excuse about not getting into a relationship.

[reinhard]

When I was an undergrad, I never wanted a relationship because I knew I was going somewhere else for grad school (or just leave town in general) and I know long distance relationships are simply illusions. It's eventually going to fall apart.

 

I am in grad school now and I feel like once I am done, I am going off to another city and repeat this mistake. The thing, I realize now that it's going to be harder for me to make new friends or even meet the opposite sex since I will have fewer opportunities to engage myself in social events (not that I even like to or have the motivational as well...).

 

How do other people do it? For those of you who are in school and in a relationship, how do you feel it's going to "work out" if you know you are going to somewhere else after a few years?

[fuzzylogician]

Life is what happens while you are making plans.

 

It just doesn't make sense to avoid getting into a relationship because it may not "work out" (easily) several years from now. You also can't evaluate a potential relationship with someone you just met in terms of what might happen several years down the road. It puts an unfair burden on the other person and it's just looking at things from the wrong perspective. Life is happening now, not later. If you are planning on a life in academia, you won't be in permanent place for a very long time. You are looking at 5+ years in a PhD program, plus 1-3+ years as a postdoc (perhaps 5+, depending on the field), and then perhaps a TT job, which may not be your last. But even if you're just in school for 2 years and then get a job, who's to say that that job will be for life and you'll never move? And who's to say your partner won't need to move away for school or for a job? 

 

Having to move for jobs will force you to evaluate your relationship and actively *choose* to stay with your partner, if things are good. Or it may speed up the end of a relationship that was slowly dying anyway. If you choose to keep the relationship, you may have to make some sacrifices for it. You have to be aware of it, but keep in mind that juggling a career and a personal life always involves work and some sacrifices. You have to decide whether having a relationship is important enough to give up some advantages of being completely unattached and able to move around. It's a choice. If you choose the relationship and work at it, I personally believe that things will work out, one way or the other. I can't tell you how, but since I see it happening around me all the time, I know it's possible. And if it ends up not working out, I think it's still better to have tried. Anyway, that's how I live my life. I just moved for a postdoc and I know I'll move again at least once soon, and my partner is also an academic, so things aren't easy. But I wouldn't give the relationship up just because I don't know yet how it'll work out. Life is not just about the end result, it's about the process, and having someone to share my life with is more important than the complexity it adds to my choices on the academic job market.

[ERR_Alpha]

I've always been told and firmly believe that relationships require work. When you meet someone you really care about, you work as hard as you can to make it work. A lot of people in my cohort are doing distance, and I might be doing it soon. Nothing worth having in life comes easy.

[juilletmercredi]

Long distance relationships don’t always fall apart.  I was in one for a few years with my husband before we got married, and we are currently long-distance again after a couple of years of happily living together.  It’s not ideal - we want to live together, of course, but in academia such is life sometimes.

 

I agree with Fuzzy - you can’t always put off developing your social life until you are “done”.  Because your education/training/career has a way of never being “done”.  Because after grad school might come a postdoc or adjuncting or a VAP in another city; and then may come a tenure-track job in a fourth city, and you might decide to move to a better job or have to move because you don’t get tenure.  Non-academics do this, too.  They move because of job opportunities, or move because they hate the weather, or whatever. 

 

THIS is your life, right now, and you have to live it.  If you are going to a doctoral program, you will be there for five to six years at least - that’s a long time to completely avoid entanglements.  And you never know what might happen.  You might date some people, but it simply doesn’t last that long.  Your partner might agree to move with you wherever you go next (my husband would’ve moved with me to my remote college town in the middle of nowhere if he wasn’t still in school back in Grad School City.  In fact, he’s planning to move here as soon as he’s done, next December).  You may fall in love with your grad school city and find a way to stay.  I know people in all three of those kinds of situations, too - people who stayed where they met a partner, people who moved to where their partner was and made their career work, and people whose partners followed them.

 

With me and my husband, we stayed in communication about it.  When my husband was in the military, I was willing to move with him if he decided to make a career out of it and just make it work.  When he separated from the military and decided that he didn’t want a career there, he made it clear to me that he was willing to move with me to where I find a job, within reason.  In return, I’m committed to finding a place where we can both have fulfilling careers and enjoy it, which means I’m more flexible about not necessarily working within academia (although I never was really attached to the idea anyway).  I’m not in school anymore - I’m a postdoc.  But you kind of just have to trust yourself and your partner and trust the process.

[TakeruK]

Life is happening now, not later. If you are planning on a life in academia, you won't be in permanent place for a very long time. You are looking at 5+ years in a PhD program, plus 1-3+ years as a postdoc (perhaps 5+, depending on the field), and then perhaps a TT job, which may not be your last. But even if you're just in school for 2 years and then get a job, who's to say that that job will be for life and you'll never move? 

 

 

I agree with Fuzzy - you can’t always put off developing your social life until you are “done”.  Because your education/training/career has a way of never being “done”.  Because after grad school might come a postdoc or adjuncting or a VAP in another city; and then may come a tenure-track job in a fourth city, and you might decide to move to a better job or have to move because you don’t get tenure.  Non-academics do this, too.  They move because of job opportunities, or move because they hate the weather, or whatever. 

 

THIS is your life, right now, and you have to live it.  If you are going to a doctoral program, you will be there for five to six years at least - that’s a long time to completely avoid entanglements.  And you never know what might happen.  

 

I just want third these two very good points! I feel that sometimes, (usually older) professors have some idealized image of grad school where students put aside everything and focus on their academics/career only. So, they give advice like "don't worry about X until you are done!" (where X could be relationships, starting a family, saving for retirement, buying a home, whatever). But I think this is really faulty advice and I'm not sure whether it's because these professors have a skewed memory or perhaps things were just different back then. At my school, we are currently working hard to make an argument for better quality of life for graduate students and reverse the mindset that "grad students shouldn't have families" that some professors have. So, I just felt the need to emphasize these points by fuzzy and juillet, and let you know that you might get opposing (and what I feel is bad) advice about this from some professors!

[maelia8]

In my first-year cohort of twenty, all but five people are either married or in committed LTRs (most of them long-distance), and they all somehow manage to make it work (I'm one of the singletons). I think that you have to want very much for it to work and be willing to make some sacrifices for the relationship in order to maintain it, whether those be geographical, monetary, or career-related. I think it's very important to constantly reassess the extent to which you are willing to compromise in a relationship - although you may go into it with the mindset that you're not ready to make any sacrifices or compromise in order to stay with the other person, that may change over time, or your feelings could just as well evolve in the opposite direction.

 

I've broken up with various partners half a dozen times because I was moving for a job or for education, because each time I asked myself, "Am I ready to make sacrifices and compromise to maintain a long-distance LTR?" and the answer was clearly no. However, I'm open to the fact that this could change at any time in the future, so I try to stay open to all possibilities. I understand that eventually it will probably be necessary for me to compromise more and make more of an effort to accommodate my partner if I want the relationship to really last for the long term, but I'm not ready for that yet and you, reinhard, should definitely not feel pressured by your age or any other circumstances to stick with someone and do an LDR if you don't think it's realistic for you right now (or even if it's just not something that you feel comfortable with, period). Good luck!

[LittleDarlings]

I say do online dating, it's easy. Who knows you may meet someone and not want to move

[victorydance]

The vast majority of relationships don't make it past a year. So not getting involved in one because you may move in X multiple years is not really very good reasoning. 

 

Remember also, having stable relationships is a skill in itself. If you spend most of your life never being in a relationship, what happens when you actually meet someone you do want to be involved with and have no relationship skills whatsoever? You will probably fail miserably. 

 

Just go out there with an open mind. If something happens, then it happens. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. 

[AKCarlton]

How do other people do it? For those of you who are in school and in a relationship, how do you feel it's going to "work out" if you know you are going to somewhere else after a few years?

 

I met my fiance during my post-bac in Arizona. She knew from the beginning that I was going to grad school. We discussed it and sure, some of those became very heated, but they were also necessary.

 

I asked her before I applied to grad school if she was willing to move to the programs I was interested in and I made compromises. However, I also explained why I was applying to where I was applying.

 

When I get my offers, I asked her again, where she would rather live. And we made the decision together. I wasn't going to ask her to move anywhere she wouldn't be happy.

 

Also, she wasn't going to move unless she already had a job lined up. It's something we discussed and agreed upon. We lucked out that she got within her field and we were able to move together. And now, we're across the country in Boston...me going to school and her working.

 

It's all about communication and being honest from the beginning. Also, I know how silly and simple it is, but it's also about being adults. You are at an age where you need to act like adults and not make decisions on the whim. You have to communicate with each other and not expect things from each other.

 

If you're an adult, or simply mature, about it, you have nothing to worry about. If you both want it to work out, it will. If you have outrageous expectations and insecurity, then you need to reflect on your relationship and your future...not about your career goals.

Edited October 21, 2014 by AKCarlton

[juilletmercredi]

I just want third these two very good points! I feel that sometimes, (usually older) professors have some idealized image of grad school where students put aside everything and focus on their academics/career only. So, they give advice like "don't worry about X until you are done!" (where X could be relationships, starting a family, saving for retirement, buying a home, whatever). But I think this is really faulty advice and I'm not sure whether it's because these professors have a skewed memory or perhaps things were just different back then. 

 

Yah, please ignore any professor who tells you this, and continue on about your life.  In the bad old days professors were primarily men - primarily married men who had wives at home to take care of that pesky housework and child-rearing while they focused on their careers.  Plus, you traditionally went to grad school right after undergrad, so you were < 30 before you finished - and then transitioned directly into a tenure-track job.  So you maybe didn't have to worry about starting a family and saving for retirement until after grad school was done.  (I think they also just have skewed memories.  My advisor once told me that if he could do anything he would do a PhD in another field, and then laughed uproariously when I looked at him like he had grown another head.)

 

That's an unrealistic state of being in 2014+.  People do stuff between undergrad and grad school; gender equality means that people share in building relationships and families together; and people definitely do stuff between grad school and the TT job (if they get one).  If we all put off relationships and families and working on our mental health until after we're in the TT job, we could be in our mid-to-late-30s or early 40s before we start (or, it could be never, since most of us won't get TT jobs).

[Rose Tyler]

Relationships can end for a lot of reasons, not all of them about diverging life decisions. Worrying about what could happen if you got into a relationship and then had to move for career reasons is putting a lot of pressure on a relationship that doesn't even exist. The most important thing is finding someone that you enjoy being with and then communicating about major decisions like this.

 

I'm in a long-distance relationship and I have been for almost a year now. It's not always easy, but we make it work. We're both in undergrad at different schools. I have every intention of going to grad school next year and she knows that. I wish that I could include her in my application decisions, but my choices are surprisingly limited by the type of program and my research interests. I do intend to ask her input if/when I get offers. She, on the other hand, is applying to go teach English in another country for three years. She asked me about six months into our relationship if I would continue dating her if she did that. I said yes and while that was a huge decision for me to make so early in our relationship, I don't regret it.

 

I agree with not putting your life on hold for your career because it's likely that you're career will never actually be "done." Do things for yourself now and don't wait. Moving might end a relationship or it might not.