Work-life-balance, or: collaborating with your wife/husband/any family member or not?

Here is a question I would like to share with you: What do you think about working together with your wife or husband or any other member of your family? I would guess that rather many people probably think that one should keep one’s family and one’s business apart, right?

However, I made wonderful experiences with working together with my wife. We currently work together in one project where I am responsible, together with others, for the philosophy part, and she is responsible for empirical psychological studies. I appreciate her work very much, and I love to work together with her on interesting questions, on discussing results and hypotheses, generating new questions and so on.

In the beginning, it was really interesting and quite a new feeling to see her in professional contexts. But that soon normalized. I enjoy our working together very much.

It is great for both of us that we work in the academia. This gives us a good understanding of what the other person thinks, what motivates her, what constraints in the academia she is confronted with etc. It also means that we deeply understand that the other person actually loves the job because we love it both. Working together on the same or at least related questions also gives rise to very deep discussions about these issues. (However, at home we also talk about other things than the job.)

In sum, working in academia and especially in philosophy is such a great thing that I pursue passionately; I can hardly think of another job that is equally cool. And for me, working with my wife is really the highlight. What about your opinions and experiences?

 

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Ahh!! I'm *so* glad you just posted this. I am literally working with my wife while I'm writing this comment. We've been driving each other completely batty, and she's sitting over my shoulder watching as I type this. Anyway, she's editing a 78 page paper of mine, both for form and content (an *awesome* wife, isn't she!), and we've been going back and forth, annoying one another to no end. She pesters me about an awkward turn-of-phrase or thought-experiment, and I reply with exasperation that, yes, philosophers really do write this way and take these thought-experiments seriously.

Anyway, although we drive each other up a wall, I can state with no hesitation that I owe so much to her, and that two minds are definitely better than one. Although she does psychology, she really gets philosophy and has helped me work through a bunch of tough problems. Plus, I'm such a poor editor that I don't think any of my papers would get past the handling editors' desks at journals without her! I, in turn, do my best to listen to her psychology presentations -- though, if I'm being completely honest, I'm pretty sure I get the better end of the deal! (She just laughed as I wrote that)

Finally, yes, it does bring us closer together, in the sense that we not only help each other with work; it gives each of us a fresh perspective and insight into the other's intellectual life!

[Andreas Wolkenstein]

Marcus, what you write sounds very familiar to me! And it's also great to see that philosophy and psychology seem to fit together very well...
I can really say that in philosophical matters I gained a lot of profit from the clear style of my wife's scientific thinking. Indeed, I would say that I came to analytic philosophy mainly through her.
Before I met her, I was interested in this post-modern stuff, always thinking that there must be some deeper truth in it. But as my wife started to question the post-modern theories - "my" theories because I thought that everybody could have his or her own post-modern theory - I realized that there is no real truth in it. (Sorry for maybe being a bit imprecise here, although in general I think that that is what characterizes post-modernism; however, it would need a post on its own.) And I gained new trust in my thinking because I saw that you can commit to some premises and to some conclusion, and I saw that justification is possible as well as progress in science and philosophy as well. That may sound a bit weird, but post-modernism really made me somewhat stuck in "you cannot have a position because anything goes". (Apart from my wife, there was a teacher at university who also gave me this trust.)
Now, given all this I am pretty happy to have found the way to analytic and experimental philosophy.