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Although Sternberg was alluding to the dangers of quitting the dissertation, this same fear of scholarly commitment also gets played out within marriages. The people I know whose relationships have foundered at this time are almost too numerous to count. Most fit a similar pattern. Take a man I knew in graduate school at the City University of New York, married for 13 years to someone who was not in the academy. I used to see them together at the library, his wife on his arm, usually smiling and keeping him company. One day I noticed she no longer accompanied him. The next, it seemed, he was divorced and married to someone else in the program. The reason? While he told me her leaving food on the stove was indicative of her lack of concern about household things in general and himself in particular, it appears he had been going nowhere with his dissertation -- and he'd been having an affair. Shedding his wife was like shedding an old self, one in which he could safely project all the undesirable parts of himself -- including the stalled dissertation writer. In this case, it worked. He finished. He got a job. For all I know, he's very happy.

Divorce, of course, is not unique to academia. And similar patterns of relationship breakups undoubtedly occur in any profession requiring long apprenticeships, like medical school. "Academia is just a part of this phenomenon," says Schneider. "Whenever you try to do something big and do it right and your partner has nothing to do with it, then if the marriage is not strong, it will crumble."

But what if the academic couple are not hobbled by dissertation paralysis or conflicting aspirations? If both manage to write their dissertation and both get jobs in their field, then why should the academic marriage be any more or less precarious than any other marriage?

Sometimes it's all a matter of priorities. The case of one assistant professor of rhetoric offers a glimpse of how even relatively good circumstances can gradually undermine the importance of personal relationships. Married to a woman he met in graduate school, who also has a job in her field (though in another state), they are currently going through a divorce. For years they had gotten jobs that necessitated living apart, but ultimately it wasn't really the geographic limitations that ended their marriage. "Our commitment to our marriage was not as strong as our commitment to our careers," he says bluntly. When they finally both got offers at the same university, he declined. His wife didn't think she would stay for more than a few years and he was not willing to leave the good job he had for an uncertain future.

When asked if he thought it possible to be happily married to another academic, he said he didn't think so, adding: "Academia is a world that is not set up to nurture a marriage or a personal life in general." And while he concedes that there were problems in the marriage to begin with, the demands of their professional life only exacerbated them. "The academy puts a wedge between people. It gives them something else to fall in love with," he says, echoing Sternberg's romanticism. "But it's still a wonderful life, even if I blame my career for the divorce and feel distant from it now."

Almost half of all marriages today end in divorce, though that number appears to be leveling off after rising sharply in the 1960s and '70s. I've been unable to determine if academics have any higher divorce rates than the rest of the population. The questions of why people divorce and why the United States leads the world in divorce rates are not easily answerable. A recent Scientific American analysis of regional divorce rates, however, finds a possible answer in the "restlessness of Americans": As people migrate, writer Rodger Doyle asserts, they are more likely to loosen family ties, including those with spouses. Divorce is an American tradition, as Glenda Riley's historical study puts it, approved by the Puritans as a viable way of changing one's life and sanctioned in the formative years of this nation's history in the spirit of democratic individualism.

The academic life partakes of both America's forlorn restlessness and bootstrapping individualism. Professors are definitely one of the most peripatetic of work forces in the country. And the myth of meritocracy, of advancing through one's own intellectual prowess, is still very much its driving force. Finally, in a society where men often marry younger women, aging male professors who work closely with admiring young graduate students often succumb to the temptation to start over with a newly minted marriage where the lines of authority are not so muddy.

"I don't know that things are worse in academia than they are in other professions," rebuts one Ivy League law professor whose first marriage to another academic in the same field ended in divorce. "We all work harder at our careers these days, whatever they may be." He cites the counterexample of one of his colleagues who gave up a private law practice to go into academia, where he could have more time to spend with his family.

But a female cultural studies professor at Sonoma State University disagrees. "Going into academics kills women's marriages," she states matter of factly, though she herself is happily married to a nonacademic. "Male professors are expected to be married to their scholarship but not to their wives in the same full-on, participatory way. Women academics are asked to be polygamous and then are punished as a result." The secret of her successful marriage? Her husband is not jealous of her career, nor does he expect her to do any domestic work. Though this assistant professor thinks there are systemic things that could change (the long road to tenure, for instance, which almost demands women put off having children until their late 30s or early 40s), she is quite content with being married to her career. "There's no more or less expected of women in academe," she says. "There's more expected of women in marriage." And while she notes that there is still a lot of inequity in the academy, she has more hope of changing this world than of changing the expectations that go along with marriage.

Aside from changing the entire process that involves so long an apprenticeship and so much emphasis on publication, what else can universities do? "Individual departments [can] nurture a sense that everyone in the family matters," says the soon-to-be-divorced assistant professor.

Academics suffering from the confusion of a broken relationship would do well to revisit the Wife of Bath. Refusing to be secondary to her husband's nightly readings from a book on wicked wives, she tore out the pages, and, when that didn't work, smacked him. Now I'm not recommending that you beat your partners into understanding, but metaphorically, her battle to make her physical presence take precedence over his obsessive belief in "the text" resonates. She won, but only at the expense of the literature. It was this struggle, how to merge a literary love affair and a human love affair, without destroying either, that I yearned to hear discussed in the halls of the academy. If I had heard such conversations -- a candid acknowledgement of the sacrifices and conflicts that came with the field -- maybe I wouldn't have had to read between the Wife of Bath's lines wondering if "wo in marriage" was a universal truth or merely academic.
SALON | March 24, 1999

Christina Boufis teaches at Stanford University and San Francisco County Jail. She is the co-editor, along with Victoria C. Olsen, of "On the Market."