My anecdata from fifteen years ago was that a lot of IT males and nurse females seemed to marry. Systemic thinkers, both.
Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
181–190 of 445 posts
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#182Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something like 90% of them are male? I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number? Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a softwa…
If you don't conflate gender with marriage, there's more opportunity for software developer couples.
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#183Software developers often marry other software developers, and computer programmers often marry computer programmers, but it is apparently rare for a software developer to marry a computer programmer. (Also, apparently mathematician isn't a real job.)
I would guess that mostly comes down to age. "Computer programmers" is kind of an old-fashioned job classification, so it's going to skew much older than "software developers".
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar experience dating someone in the field, though it went on a bit longer. for me it was just kinda rough to come home from a day of working on software to talk to my SO about their problems with software. great person, but it was an exhausting relationship. on the other hand, most of my friends also do software stuff and we enjoy complaining to each other about work. I guess maybe the difference is you…
I'm in this situation now. I'll have a bad day, then my partner comes home and dumps her bad day on top of mine. I don't know to handle it, because if I ask her to stop she sulks. It means I don't care about her bad day.
Oh, THAT part has little to do with profession; my spouse's and my jobs were completely different (or so we thought!), but if your relationship works and you are "each other's 'person'", ranting about work is part of the SLA :->
FWIW, my experience:
- Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win. And it goes beyond work rants; any intimate opening, sharing of concern or anxiety or even admitting past wrongs etc, will impose a burden on the listener. But if you believe or can work it out so that, e.g. "this increased my burden by +10 but reduced your burden by -70, so it's a good thing we did it", it'll help build mutual understanding and trust.
- Show empathy, don't try to solve. Cliche, stereotypical, but a person will tell you when they need active considered advice, as opposed to sympathy and ear. HARD for any of the IT problem solving personalities :)
- As a natural result of first two, you'll figure out who's had a worse day and gets priority; and you'll also figure out how to take some of their burden without becoming overwhelmed with it. Again, if their ask is sympathy not resolution, it's actually a lot less burden upon you than it may feel; or rather, us problem solvers impose burden on us that's not actually there :)
- More personal, but, FWIW... my spouse shared bad stories and rants about their work as a store manager, the drama of customers and supervisors and workers and people and policies etc, for 3 or 4 years. I listened patiently, tried to show support... didn't even realize how much I ingested & learned from it. When I transformed from sysadmin to people manager, after a year I realized that I've been implementing all the hard earned experience, lessons learned, approaches and thoughts she shared. One day, all my work problems were her problems of 3 years ago and it allowed me to succeed in that unforeseen (and somewhat unsought:P) transformation. So as we awkwardly say in my language, you never know what's good for what :)
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#185Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something like 90% of them are male? I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number? Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a softwa…
If you think lawyers marry lawyers, you should look up physicians!
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once dated a lovely beautiful nerdy funny intelligent successful software engineer. Our first five dates were awesome. So much agreement and joy and commonality. Instant connection and camaraderie. Further on we realized we didn't bring enough to relationship. We didn't want the"gender I'm attracted version of myself". We each wanted somebody to bring new perspectives, challenge us in ways that work and nerdy frien…
Could be something to do with a tech-literate person is _more_ valuable to an arts person than to another tech person. E.g. arts person wants their small plumbing jobs done, their offspring taught math properly, and so on, but other tech person doesn't need that because they do those things themselves.
Maybe, but FWIW... yes I'm in charge of networking setup at home, oil changes and such and all the tools are at least ostensibly "mine", but she's VERY DEFINITELY in charge of plumbing and house infra :-D.
[not to mention, she can easily pay somebody to take care of house infra; whereas I cannot afford the full-time mentorship services of a socially aware and emotionally intelligent coach :P ]
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people. If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture — the financial incentives are clearly there.
Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
> Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
It requires self-awareness and work.
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#188Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something like 90% of them are male? I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number? Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a softwa…
This is presumably US data given it is from the "American Community Survey". The 90% male ratio is true globally, however in the US, 25% of software developers are female.
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
If most couples you know are just cohabitating, the cultural forces to have a public ceremony decrease.
And that is bad why?
> And that is bad why?
Historically marriage was seen not just as commitment between two people but between them and their community, and them and G-d. By committing to the marriage in a public, religiously-affiliated place, the couple is acknowledging their responsibility to those parties as well.
If nothing else, it makes the commitment stronger and creates greater incentives to work through issues rather than bail. You can think of G-d and community as additional "accountability buddies" here.
You can say that's stupid, and that it should simply be a commitment between two people and that's it - but you have to acknowledge that the rise of that idea is very correlated with the rise in the diverse rate.
Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
#190I’m a big believer in the engineer (logical) and helping professions (emotional). match. If you look at the category of ‘software developers’ and add up all the helping professions like teachers and nurses and others it is the #1 pairing. This software engineer has been married to his teacher wife for 29 years and going strong …
Totally with you. I can't imagine being married to "another one of me" - either there's not much you add to each other, or you're competing.
Like you, my wife doesn't just work in another field but is very much more driven by care and emotion and logic and "justice" that matter to me. Sometimes this makes it hard to co-exist since we literally look at problems from a totally different perspective, but the resolution of that conflict (or figuring out how to coexist despite the difference) is incredibly enriching, I'd not get to grow this way with someone else.