For folks who don’t know, academic gigs are hard to get. I finished my PhD first & left for NY. When I got my WI job, my partner got a temporary gig in TX. For years we’ve made conference dates & semester break visits work.
For us to both have permanent gigs in the same place & know that neither of us has to go on the job market or move maybe ever again is just mind-blowing. It gives us some stability & predictability that we have literally never known.
Sometimes we message like “OMG we can get snowed in together” or “Soon we can go on planes together instead of in order to see each other!” or “In a few months we won’t have to do XYZ long distance relationship thing.”
My partner is brilliant & we’ve always respected each other’s career paths. I’m really excited for them to have a tenure track gig where they can do their important work & I get to walk down the hall during office hours sometimes to see their face for a minute.
