I was merely trying to point out that we don’t know everything about her, or her marriage, based on this letter to Cary. We get the gist of her problem, but we don’t know all the particulars.

When you write “but the fact that neither her nor her fiance…..etc.” I am just wondering how you know it is a fact that they haven’t discussed him moving to her city.

A little logic here goes a long way.

You are making assumptions.

It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about what’s reasonable, practical and fair.

I think you might be confused. This letter isn’t about you. The OP wants to work. It matters to HER.

How about intellectual fulfillment? How about achieving something great in your life, looking back and knowing you changed the world? Making dinner, folding laundry and vacuuming (which I assume you, with your values, would assign to the “wife” category) is not exactly exciting stuff.

By the way, a life without “marriage” is not a life without love, just as having a job isn’t necessarily the same as having a fulfilling career, one that you’ve worked your whole life towards. The OP isn’t bagging groceries at the local deli, and she’s not stuck in a cubicle somewhere earning minimum wage. She probably worked her ass off to get where she is now.

I’m also not saying that I think marriage is worthless. My parents got married out of college, and built a beautiful life together. Still married after 40 years.

I guess my recommendation is that we leave the “Leave it to Beaver” script in the 1950s, where it belongs. It wasn’t good then either, unfortunately.

Of course, we don’t know much money actually is at stake here, just like there’s a lot we don’t know. I’m certainly not saying that the person with a job they like, even if it isn’t a “dream job,” is the one who is obligated to give up their job.

Taking this letter at face value, and resisting the urge to assume facts not in evidence, what I see is a scenario in which nobody is a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” What I see is something that sometimes happens in real life outside of movies and books. Sometimes you have two decent people who love each other but want different things. And either a) one of them is going to have to give something up, or b) they’re going to have to accept that they can’t make each other happy and move forward separately.

She doesn’t want to give up her job and he doesn’t want to give up his, and I see no reason–on the face of things–to assume that either of them is any more “right” or “wrong” than the other. Either one of them will cave or the marriage will fail. Stripping away the non-essentials, that’s pretty much the bottom line.

Telling the LW why she’s selfish and/or short-sighted for not giving up her job–or trying to convince her that her husband’s a sexist jerk for not giving up his–is counterproductive and in any case begs the question. The LW has said pretty clearly that she’d rather have her job and no husband than her husband and no job. She just wants to know if she’s “wrong” to feel this way. I say right versus wrong is beside the point. There is no right or wrong. She feels how she feels and should get on with the business of preparing herself for the consequences of feeling the way she does, whatever those consequences may be.

I’d say that, if nothing else, both the LW and her husband are learning a hard lesson in the differences between being young and in love versus being one-half of a married couple. Whatever happens with their marriage, undoubtedly they will both be better off in the long run for having learned this lesson.

A couple in my own department just managed to pull this off, despite the fact that next to nobody is hiring these days. She finished first and got the first tenure-track job; he came with her, finished up his PhD, and started part-time teaching. The next year, he went on the market and got the tenure-track offer in the city many miles away. But he didn’t take it; he used it to negotiate with the Dean here to turn his part-time teaching into a 2-year full-time contract. The following year, they BOTH went on the market, and EACH of them got a tenure-track offer, in different distant cities (as some people have said, it’s a lot easier to get a job if you have a job). As soon as the offers were made, both of them began negotiating a tenure-track offer for the spouse. The university that made him an offer was unable to offer her more than a contract, but the one that made her an offer was able to offer him a tenure-track job as well. And then came the final negotiation: both preferred to stay here rather than move to the city where they now had offers, so she used the double offer to negotiate the opening of a position for him here. Had she not been successful, they would still be moving together to the double-offer city.

Maybe things won’t work out for you as well as they did for them, or maybe it will take longer, but two people who are both committed to their careers AND to each other ought to BOTH be willing to put in the work it takes to make an all-out effort to find two jobs in the same city. Once you’ve tried this for a few years and turned up nothing, then the two of you might have to decide who moves to which city to take up a non-academic career, or whether you want to stay together at all. If he’s not willing to go on the market for you–and you for him–then you might have your answer. As my colleague said to her husband when she was running herself ragged with interviews on top of her full-time job, “If you every wanted proof that I REALLY love you, now you’ve got it!”.

We don’t know. The only two things we know are that a) they haven’t figured out a way in the foreseeable future to both work in their chosen fields in the same city; and b) she very clearly doesn’t want to give up her job for her husband. I’m not going to call her a jerk for not wanting to move, and I’m not going to call him a jerk for also not wanting to move.

The LW asked us to tell her whether or not she’s “wrong” for wanting to stay put rather than giving up her job. The people here telling her why she’s going to regret losing her marriage or why her husband’s a jerk for “forcing” her to choose are missing the point. So is Cary for suggesting ongoing negotiations when the negotiations have already reached a stalemate.

Life is choices. The LW is in the unfortunate position of having to make a hard choice with the knowledge that either choice is going to bring regrets. But she’s clearly leaning hard in one direction, so–to my mind–that’s clearly the direction she should go in (in the absence of a crystal ball or any other mechanism that can tell her to a dead certainty what her life would be like in either scenario).

What I see in reading this letter is a person who knows exactly what she wants to do but is agonizing over the “right” or “wrong” of it. I’m saying that there is no definitive right or wrong–on either side of the equation. There’s only a decision to be made. It is what it is. And, in the words of Mark Twain, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” :-/

I actually think their problems are with the marriage itself. The LW would rather be unhappy and employed than unemployed even temporarily. She has a right to feel that way, of course, but it does make one wonder why they got married in the first place. She’s in a job that she describes as far from ideal, 4,000 miles from her husband, but people are treating this as a triumph; her husband’s job has been demoted to a ‘project.’ You know, if they are both academics this project is likely to be a big research project rather than building a lawn mower from a kit.

If she’s not in her dream job, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to suggest he move so she can be only half-assed fulfilled but making money. Ideally, of course, both of them could find jobs they enjoy enough and be together. I don’t see either of them running from responsibilities but am puzzled as to what they expected from marriage. According to the LW, she has been married three months: this problem is not a new one.

I believe that our current economic situation should serve as warning that those of us in the 99% should always be thinking about our ability to earn a living. Neither age or gender (or investments, for that matter) exempt us from preparing for what we can do if we have to. Getting married is no guarantee of financial support. Men don’t think that way, and women should not either.

I didn’t say that a doctorate is a gateway to more money. Quite the opposite, in most cases, as anyone must know before going into graduate school and, most likely, serious debt.