We met about three months before he defended his dissertation. One might say that it was not a likely recipe for success in terms of starting a new relationship. While I had recently left a depressing job for a new one as Construction Project Manager, he was feverishly putting the final touches on his dissertation. Only fellow academics (or their significant others) can understand what those last weeks are like before defending the culmination of years of research and hard work. In those early days of our relationship, our only opportunity to meet was when he would come into the city to see his advisor and we’d be able to work in a quick dinner.

As an ABD (All But Dissertation), he had already accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Washington. I later learned that it is not common for degree-granting institutions to warmly welcome their own newly minted PhD graduates with open arms, which seems rather like shoving the baby bird from the nest. I had always thought that years of academic study were a kind of litmus test, which, if passed, would lead to employment and future success at their department. Wrong! Most commonly, you have to apply elsewhere to find gainful employment and you would be wise to have a back-up plan. So, having survived graduate school and gotten a PhD, you are immediately turned out to swim with the sharks in a very competitive environment. Tony had already been called to interviews across the country, but his first was with his university and they offered him a tenure-track position. Having a bird in the hand, it seemed wise to accept. The interview and his choice to accept occurred before we met, so as much as I like to think I’m a pretty good catch, I can’t take credit for being the reason he stayed in Seattle.

The first year or so of dating we shuttled between my small city apartment and his larger suburban one near campus. The benefit of my apartment: it was close to all the fun (and distractions) a city can offer. Benefits of his? He could walk to campus in 10 minutes and owned an Asian shorthair cat that would curl up on his lap as he typed out his dissertation. Tony never stayed overnight in the city the day before he taught a class. He needed that evening and next day to prepare. Like many people, my thoughts of academic life were that professors had a pretty good gig. You work hard to get there, but once you get your job and tenure you can coast. Summers are free for “research” trips and time spent reading books on the beach. Over the course of his early years in academia, I learned that none of those assumptions was remotely true. Achieving tenure would become the first big academic mountain we’d need to climb. I say “we” not because I am an excellent research assistant or typist, but because as partner I found myself in a supporting role. I literally had no idea what I had signed on for. Achieving tenure is a much more arduous and capricious prize to seize than most non-academics perceive. I had assumed that once you have that PhD in hand, you have a clear path to success, with all the support of your university. Although a PhD is definitely a milestone (some might call it a mill stone), it really is just a toehold for the next six years of arduously pushing the rock up the hill like a poor academic Sisyphus to achieve the nirvana that is tenure.

Teaching in and of itself, along with all of its ancillary duties, is a full time job. As a young academic, you somehow still need to find the time to conduct research, publish your work, provide service to your school by participating in various committees and review panels, and still show up at conferences in your field to present your research. Oh, and if you could please, why don’t you write a few grant proposals and bring in some dollars for your school and university. I was incredulous that typically 50% of grant funds are held by the university as “overhead cost.” It’s kind of like doing well at your job and as a reward they give you a 50% pay cut. While there are a wide range of salaries for academics, you don’t go into it for the money. University compensation seems grossly out of balance with expectations and makes me wonder if the tenure process is really good for academia in the long term. To me it seems that the playing field is not level for all players. If you are a single parent, for example, how do you accomplish tenure and still have a family life?

As I learned these truths of academic life, I pondered how our new relationship would find space to grow and thrive. Even in the best of circumstances, relationships are hard work and I wondered if there would still be time for discovery and fun? How do you provide support for someone who needs you but also needs you to give them space to get through the epic volume of work laid out before them? As Tony wrote and wrote and wrote, I would occupy myself with other things. Sometimes that meant going to a movie on my own or planning a social event he might not be able to participate in. The more he wrote, the more I felt like it would never stop. It was as if he was working on an endless term paper—one that with a little bit of luck he might be done with in six years. In my career I oversee development and design for large senior housing projects around the US, and I could not imagine sitting down and working on the same project for that long of an extended time frame, refining the details over and over again. In my management of architects and interior designers, I often get to a point where I tell them “Pencils down,” meaning this is as good as it’s going to get, let’s move on to the next steps of the project and get it built. My project work has a distinct beginning and end. You typically work as a team and share the experience with others. You gain experience from doing it, but you also get to move on to the next project and often with a new team of colleagues.

There were many Saturdays and Sundays Tony spent working. We would try and save one of the weekend days for something fun that we could do together. A day trip or a hike, dinner and a movie. Somehow his demanding academic pace had to be reconciled with our relationship. The scale often tipped toward academia, but to his credit, he managed to keep me in the picture. As a partner of an academic, I have learned that at times you must draw on a deep well of patience and understanding. I certainly failed at times, but the more our relationship grew, I understood that I had a role to play as well. To support, to listen and to occasionally make myself scarce when he needed time for focused work and reflection.

I travel a great deal for my career and routinely use my corporate credit card for business travel, hotels and meals with clients. In academia there is no such thing as an expense account, let alone any kind of reasonable budget to support your work. You are expected to attend and participate in conferences all across the country on a travel budget that usually only covers airfare and accommodation for one such event per year. The expense of any additional conferences is laid at the feet of young academics to absorb from their already less than stellar annual salaries. When I asked Tony about this, he said it was the nature of things at universities–an expectation without financial support. I thought that not much business would be conducted in this world if employers did not cover expenses. If it’s the expectation of your employer that you need to travel as a condition of your employment as well as for the success of the business, then it stands to reason that your employer would be taking care of this cost. Not so in academia. For young academics, who often might be shouldering student debt, this seems doubly unfair.

Over the years, I have joined Tony at various faculty social events. As a spouse of an academic, I can tell you that the occasional social gatherings are a bit awkward for someone like me who is not able to connect on an academic level. I think of these as “putting all the smart people together in a room.” It’s not that people aren’t social, but with such infrequent gatherings, there is awkwardness. Talking about non-academic topics is a bit challenging in these group settings. I think if you are an academic who toils away on your own for the most part, it can be daunting to be in social interaction with your peers. Professionally, when you put a group of people with a high level of intelligence in the same room, you will find that they generally possess very differing conceptual framework filters, and thus conflicts can occur and you end up with fractious moments. I have watched with fascination and some degree of horror as common workplace problems or squabbles can quickly turn into something otherworldly. Being correct in your work and research is vital for an academic.

Much of the conflict I have observed does not come from the work or research but rather from the endless administrative tasks and committee work. How do you approach a problem? How do you structure a program? What kinds of support are necessary for students? I have often observed manipulation on a grand scale among academics. Every job has office politics, but for an academic they seem to evolve in a way that is completely foreign to me. In my professional life, people come and go. Some you like, some you don’t. If you disagree with someone or their approach to a problem, hopefully you can negotiate a path forward to some kind of resolution. Occasionally you have a boss you don’t like and your choice is to either work out your differences, put up with it or quit. The private sector isn’t a workers’ paradise, but generally speaking you find like-minded colleagues and with a little luck they can become your friends, too.

In academic life, you find colleagues with whom you might be able to collaborate on research, or commiserate over committee work, but the stakes are high. There is a competitive dynamic among junior faculty. The overarching goal is to achieve tenure and the pathway is not always clear on how to get there. Do you need to curry favor with an older, more experienced faculty member? Should you volunteer more of your precious time to support an issue or cause they are championing, or are you merely someone on whom more work can be off-loaded? Faculty meetings can be contentious and problems and resentments can build up over time. And with typically infrequent injections of fresh talent, and sometimes long stretches between meetings with colleagues due to busy schedules, there often is not enough time to build good working relationships. With effort, good relationships can develop, but it is often not the natural course of things. Relationship-building that might take weeks or months to achieve in private sector work environments might take years in academia, if ever. You really have to work at it.

There is no playbook on how to achieve tenure but make no mistake that there is a game to be played. That may sound sinister, but without the kindly guidance of a true colleague or mentor, it can be a very long six years. As I watched my spouse toil away for six years, I never really had any doubt that he would achieve tenure. As for his endless term paper, he did indeed finish it. Tenure was not a gift, but rather earned by hard work and sacrifice. I now know what it takes to achieve this and I’m proud of his efforts.

Currently, our next destination on this journey is promotion to full professor. He is almost there and I have no doubt that he’ll make it. He possesses a drive and ambition that most private sector employers would love to harness. And I’m getting better at knowing when to push and pull the levers of support when needed. I also know when it’s a good time to go see a movie on my own. Balance, effort and striving to be better are not just academic pursuits, they are also really great relationship fundamentals.