The two-body process, Part 1

A long time ago, I decided to talk about the two-body problem from the real-time perspective of living it. Then I didn't.

I can make excuses, but the truth is I didn't because living it was painful enough and I didn't have the personal strength to put it out into the world. I started several posts and didn't finish them. They always felt incomplete, and worse yet, it felt counter-productive to just be another whiner about something that was plaguing us so severely. It is a serious problem, but when it strikes home it's harder to handle.

Here's the score. I have a tenure track position. It's what I've always wanted to do and my husband was gracious enough to support me in that endeavor. My husband has a PhD, as well as a professional master's degree, that should have allowed for employment outside of the academic world. We moved here optimistic that he would find some position, he had ~ 4 months left on a post-doc and he was allowed to finish it up remotely. We felt 4 months was plenty of time to find a job somewhere in a city of !~225,000 people. That was 16 months ago.

Those first 4 months were crazy. There was the move, there was a hurricane, there was culture shock, there was two mortgages, my father had heart surgery, there was the "global financial crisis". It was bad. We worked and tried to stay on top of our lives. Hub even did some temp work to make ends meet. He put out many job applications and we told everyone we met of our plight. (Having of course been often reminded that in the South, you have to know someone to get anywhere). Before we knew it, the window was gone and still he was unemployed. That was 12 months ago, about the time I wrote that original post.

We hatched a new plan. The soft-money plan. A title, an office and the gumption to write some grants was all we would need.....