Posted by:
Student of Trinity
(
)
Date: May 02, 2015 07:13AM
Congratulations to your wife.
Is either of you looking at an academic career? Just because you have a PhD doesn't mean you have to do that; the world can't really have too many smart, educated people, but it definitely doesn't need them all to be professors. A PhD is the first step in an academic career, though, so you have to at least think about it at some point.
It's not so uncommon to meet academic couples in which the husband is a professor and the wife, despite her doctorate, has some less eminent position. Of course spouses don't have to have identical callings, but I seem to remember very few cases where both partners had PhDs and it was the wife who had the higher status academic job. And sometimes one has the uneasy feeling that the woman's PhD was just a sort of upgraded Mrs. degree.
My wife and I have had mostly parallel careers. The positions she held at each stage were pretty much all comparable to mine, but perceptibly better. We are both full professors now, in different departments at the same university. This is great, but it took fifteen years, and nearly half that time was spent living an ocean apart. For a couple of years, we were both single parents, each raising one of our children. If you do happen to being thinking of this kind of life, you may be luckier than that, but it's unlikely to be easy.
Of course your wife isn't a bad woman for not having had children yet. If you do want children, though, you may need to start soon. Female fertility suddenly starts to drop around age 35, and it drops very fast. From one year to the next, after 35, it's not a matter of taking longer to get pregnant, but of needing more and more luck to get pregnant at all. By 40, you pretty much need a miracle. Fertility treatments can work, but you only hear about the celebrities for whom they did work. In fact they usually don't work. They increase your chances, but not by all that much.
Professors can be as dumb as anyone else. We didn't think about any of that until it all hit us. Our second child is adopted. Adoption is usually a long process, legally, but in the end it works.
If you want to have kids biologically and your wife is still under 35, you should have no problem. Just don't wait too long.