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Relationships with non-philosophers?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I am hoping to ask a serious question, especially to the ladies (and gentlemen as well) in philosophy who are married, what is it like to have a husband/partner who are non-academician and work on technical jobs like strategic management, big data or logictic, which are more practical rather than philosophical? Do you guys still vibe and get along well? Especially in considering marriage decision. Thank you in advance admin for posting this!

I'm married to someone like this and the "vibe" couldn't be better. Personally, I've never quite felt the allure of having a romantic relationship with another philosopher–I much enjoy a life with someone quite different from me–but to each their own. But, in any case, as far as marriage decisions go, I'm not sure there's any good way to predict how a relationship will develop over the long run above and beyond how healthy and happy it is now. So, although I'm not offering advice, the OP might consider that if they're unsure about a marriage decision on grounds like these, that could be an issue.

Do any readers have any helpful experiences of their own to share?

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14 responses to “Relationships with non-philosophers?”

  1. Tenured now

    I am (a woman) married to another philosopher, but I was just having conversations with two separate female philosopher friends at the APA who are married to non-academics. One is married to a general contractor (and has been for a long time) and was talking about how wonderful and liberating it is to not have philosophy take over her whole life. The other one is married to a detective (again, they’ve been together for like 20 years), and her relationship seems to me to be one of the happiest relationships I know. My suspicion is that what matters most is being with someone who is smart and interesting and excited about their own life, but who is also willing to try to understand and empathize with the ways in which academia can be particularly awful sometimes.

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  2. TT Prof Now

    I was in a 6 year relationship with a scientist. We’re no longer together but for reasons not to do with the ‘vibe’. In fact it was great. He was very curious about the world and able to discuss ideas which mattered more to me than his specific field of work. I don’t think I could be married to a philosopher, to be honest. Unless it was someone who was able to leave work at work.

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  3. similarboat

    I appreciate this question! I’m in a very similar situation–woman philosopher in a long-term relationship with a non-philosopher. He’s curious and smart and asks amazing questions but sometimes resists my tendency to turn everything into a philosophical conversation. For a while I worried that the relationship would suffer; I’d be missing the sparks that can fly in an intellectually intense relationship. But I’ve come to think that it’s probably good for me, and for our relationship, to be with someone who can yank me out of philosophy mode and just make me laugh and not think about work. I think it’s okay if your partner can’t fulfill every one of your needs, so long as you enjoy talking to and being with them.

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  4. Michel

    Although my partner is also a philosopher, I wanted to chime in to add that philosophy is just not really part of our life together. (And why should/would it be?)

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  5. Mark Taylor

    When I married a non-philosopher, she became both the enduring object of my love and the one entrusted with authority to call me to account. This has made it much more difficult to indulge in the intellectual vice of self-justification. When colleagues are going to read my work, I instinctively marshal defensive arguments. When my wife is going to read my work, I am always thinking about how I could be clearer and more winsome because I want to share something I value with someone I love.

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  6. Huh?

    I kind of don’t understand the question. You don’t marry your partner for their job but for their actual character and way of moving through the world. Lots of smart, interesting, thoughtful, intellectually engaged people did not go into professional philosophy (heck my uber driver today asked me a lot of detailed questions about the crito– better than most of my undergrads do!) My husband isn’t an academic and its like…..talking through ideas with a smart person whose views I care about, talking about the world just like I do with my philosophical colleagues and friends, etc. I don’t really understand why it would be any different. I suppose I don’t really ask him for literature recommendations when I’m starting a research project, but I wouldn’t say I thought that would be a defining feature of any marriage (and its not like I ask colleagues who work on different philosophical areas for that sort of thing either.) Academia can be its own weird space but if you feel like you can be close ONLY to academics, and couldn’t possibly get along with other people that seems to me a little concerning. I don’t know that I could get along with someone who wasn’t intellectual—but you can have all kinds of jobs and be immensely so (see, for example, my uber driver.)

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  7. Happily married to a non-philosopher

    I think you should ask yourself what you want out of the marriage. No one single person can be everything to you; they can’t share all your interests and engage in all the same projects. You probably don’t want to be with someone with the same priorities as you anyway. As some of the other comments attest, sharing an interest in philosophy or philosophical stuff specifically isn’t necessary for a great relationship. From personal experience, I can also say that it can be extremely intellectually enriching to talk about ideas with a spouse outside of philosophy. I get my philosophy fix from friends and co-authors, and I’m glad that academic philosophy isn’t a feature of my marriage. But no advice is one size fits all. Marriage is itself a joint project, and it involves many joint projects and interests besides. If something you want from your marriage is shared philosophical interest, then that’s something to consider very seriously. (Think Paul and Patricia Churchland!) But it sounds like you are more worried that the vibe will be off rather than thinking about the structure of your potential marriage. If you’re considering marriage, I hope the vibe is already pretty good! If the vibe is already off and it has something to do with your being a philosopher, that’s worth thinking through in some detail. FWIW, graduate school in philosophy sort of broke my ability to communicate normally for a little bit, which was a hurdle to overcome in my relationships.

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  8. Cecil Burrow

    I couldn’t imagine even the possibility of a talk over breakfast about necessary and sufficient conditions for S knowing that P.

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  9. Kapto

    I totally get the question!! As someone for whom being an academic philosopher is so much more than a job, so central to who I am, I’ve worried that non-academics or non-philosophers won’t be able to “get” me in crucial ways. And that I won’t be able to relate to them sufficiently, either. That said, I’m happily married to a non-philosopher – an academic, yes, but in a field quite removed from philosophy – and most of my close friends are not academics. They are almost all, however, non-practicing philosophers in a certain sense: they’re all into the kinds of big questions philosophers like, and they all view the day-to-day practicalities of life as an annoying distraction from the passionate discussion/argument they wish they were having. I figured out that it’s this last quality that I truly needed in a partner (and close pal), not a shared vocation.

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  10. Married

    I’m a (male) philosopher married to a (female) therapist. My wife finds philosophical conversation extremely unpleasant, even when it is completely jargon-free. This makes it difficult for me to share important parts of my life with her, and I’m often tempted to think that she doesn’t consider my work to be important. She is an extraordinary person in a thousand other ways, so this tension is tolerable. But it does make things hard sometimes. If philosophy is an important part of your identity, I would advise making sure that a prospective spouse enjoys, or at least isn’t put off by, occasional philosophical conversation. I don’t have any views about whether or how this trait is correlated with occupation, but I suspect there are philosophically minded people (or at least people tolerant of philosophical conversation) in every occupation.

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  11. Netanel

    I can really relate to a lot of what Kapto said. None of my good friends came to learn philosophy in university with me, but my friendship with a lot of them has to do with our joined interests in philosophy, though all jargon-free, and with my friends not reading academic literature, only thinking.
    When I was single I thought my wife would need to be like that too, but I ended up falling in love with a medical doctor who doesn’t really care about about philosophy per se. She’s smart enough to understand my work though, and sometimes my ideas come up in real life – I’m a philosopher of religion and we’re both religious. That gives me a chance to communicate my ideas to her with her being genuinely interested even though she doesn’t have a thirst for philosophy in general, and that’s really all I need.

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  12. MEHngus ah um

    I am a female philosopher partnered with a male non-philosopher, specifically a jazz musician. He is generally interested in philosophy (much more than I am interested in jazz, to be honest). Most importantly, he has a passion for jazz that matches my passion for philosophy. Sharing this trait, I believe, is much more important than sharing a profession: we understand the kinds of sacrifices one makes for what one loves, especially when these sacrifices affect the other person. My two cents: I was much more successful in my relationships when I stopped looking for matching interests and started looking for a matching level of passion.

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  13. 180

    Before I was with my current partner (philosopher), I was of the “couldn’t possibly date, let alone marry, someone else in philosophy” school of thought. How uncool! How stressful! Who would let philosophy infiltrate their entire life like that! Then, well, I fell in love with this person. That is to say: I think one probably shouldn’t worry about this kind of thing in this abstract way. If you’re with the right person, it probably won’t matter if they’re a philosopher or not. And if you’re with the wrong person, it probably won’t be because they’re a philosopher or not.

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  14. philamorous

    Just for a different, and probably somewhat unusual, perspective: I started publishing in philosophy because I started dating somebody who was in philosophy grad school, and we loved talking philosophy. We discovered on the first-ish date we had very similar metaphilosophical views, but I was frustrated I didn’t know much of the literature, and wanted to be better able to follow his work, or at least keep up my side of the argument.
    I’d previously trained & published in a social science, so the hill to climb to the research frontier didn’t seem insurmountable. Today, although LEM-style philosophy of the sort my husband does is not my primary interest, I publish in it on occasion, and I’ve developed a kind of side project publishing in social philosophy (more my speed). My husband reads around some in my main area, too, although he doesn’t publish in it. So, love, implausibly, has been enough to get one non-philosopher to do philosophy. That, and FOMO about conference travel (the last couple APAs we’ve done we’ve both presented papers, and conference deadlines are probably one of the major motivators for me to turn back to philosophical work).
    In any case, I think because I have the experience of coming to the literature as an outsider and finding it interesting (and the experience, on the other hand, of teaching my husband statistics) I tend to be more optimistic about the prospect of talking philosophy in a real way with interested laypeople, even working through your paper with them, so long as you’re willing to spend some time setting up the intuitions for the literature in which your work is situated. (Though my husband and I are both certainly better at doing this for the other’s papers than we are for our own.)

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