The Grad School Survival Program

How to send your spouse off to school without letting go of your marriage

Elizabeth McBurney

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After two years of marriage (and five years out of college), my husband started law school full-time. We had heard horror stories of how marriages are ruined when one spouse goes back to school while the other works, and we were determined that it wouldn't happen to us.

One of the best things we did was to spend a lot of time on law school before classes ever started. We spent dozens of hours over several months planning, talking, and praying about the decision. Here are three of the big-picture ideas— and the ways they applied in real life—that kept our marriage from getting leveled by the back-to-school bulldozer.

Stay Stable

When Brent decided he wanted to go to law school, his first thought was to go for a high-powered, top-ranked private school that would virtually guarantee a great job at graduation. Then reality set in: Schools like that are tough to get accepted to, they're extremely expensive, and most of the ones he was interested in were several hundred miles from our home in northern Virginia.

After lots of prayer, discussion, and sifting through law school catalogs, we decided that stability in our family life was more important than a degree from a nationally known school. Brent applied to three schools, all in Virginia, all state-supported.

When he was quickly accepted by George Mason University School of Law (a ten-minute drive from our house!), we knew we were on the right track with our stability idea. With Brent attending George Mason, we could keep our condo, my job, and our church. Obviously, lots of couples move to a new town to start graduate school—such as my brother and his wife, who moved from Houston to Boston so she could go to law school—and survive just fine. Physical location is only one kind of stability, but it's worth preserving if circumstances will allow.

Maximize Togetherness

Once classes started, we heard endless variations of, "So, how do you like being a law school widow?" We were glad to offer a sincere answer to a cynical question. We saw each other plenty, but it took concentrated effort and a firm commitment. Here are some ways we made sure we'd still recognize each other at the end of three years.

Adjust the work schedule. Brent's classes usually started at 8 a.m., so instead of working from 9:00 to 5:30, I arranged to work from 8:00 to 4:30. This meant that Brent and I got up at the same time, ate breakfast at the same time, and left the house at the same time. Before the day really started, we'd already spent an hour and a half together. (And yes, time spent gesturing to your spouse while brushing your teeth counts.)

Treat school like a job. Even during semesters when his classes didn't start until 10 or 11 a.m., Brent went to the library at 8:00 every morning to study. He also stayed there until 6 p.m. most evenings. He confined as much of his schoolwork as possible to the regular business day, minimizing the amount of time he needed to study at home (and be unavailable to hang out with me). He was also careful to take a sabbath every week. Even though he studied for eight to ten hours every Saturday, from Saturday evening to Sunday evening, schoolwork was verboten— except during finals, of course, when any pretense of keeping to regular routines went straight out the window.

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 2001, Fall

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