Hi everyone,

Currently, I’ve (M25) been dating a great girl (F24) for around a year, but have been with her for around 3 years… long story, just life is funky sometimes. It’s been great as an official couple the last year.

Truly, I absolutely love this girl. She makes me so happy, she’s changed me from someone so afraid of love that I was a full blown womanizer to being unable to imagine myself with anyone else. Shes smart, she is an amazing communicator & I truly feel like she considers me, always. I’m planning to propose soon.

The only problem is that we have a long road ahead as she just started med school and has dreams of specializing, and I sometimes fear I have not yet sewn my wild oats - not with other women, but with world travel and trying to build myself as a man.

For context, she just started med school a month ago. We are long distance. It is very hard because we miss each other so much, but I’m not worried about us. We’ve talked about what the future holds and essentially, once I propose, it will really be on me to travel wherever her career in medicine takes her over what could be a 12-15 year journey (med school, residency, fellowship). I could do this as my current job will likely let me go remote, but I have some real fears that it will be hard for me to build friendships + lay roots + explore my desires of entrepreneurship if we are potentially moving every 4 years. She will be all I have in these places, while she’ll have a career and people she sees everyday.

She also wants to have kids around 30-32… I kind of don’t want to have kids, but it’s something I’m willing to embrace and lean into for her. That said, given her career, I’d likely be mostly solo parenting with the help of our village (her parents are willing to move wherever we may be) for a 2-6 years while she finishes her education. Again, I have fears of the aforementioned above, but add in raising children on my own a lot of the time. Further more, I really envision myself leading an adventurous life full of travel (I currently travel all over the U.S. and internationally with friends, family, and alone), which I can do on solo trips while she’s in school, but kids would make that pretty much no longer possible until they are grown. I’d like to keep traveling in my 30’s, if possible.

She is the kind of girl I am willing to make serious sacrifices for, I truly believe she is a rare find, but I just can’t get over this feeling that by marrying her, I will lose out on the ability to establish my own businesses, have a base somewhere steady, and will likely have to let go of my more adventurous aspirations to be a very involved parent while she’s finishing residency & fellowship.

This isn’t a post about me having doubts & not wanting to be with her, it’s a post about me wanting to make it possible but needing help embracing what changes may come. For those who have done it, or who have advice, please let me know.

I know attendinghood doesn’t fix everything, and will come with its own challenges but we’re in the last year of residency and I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel but I’m so stuck in how awful things are right now I can’t see it. I’ve been with my husband since medical school, so I’ve been through it all and accepted my fate and now I think I’m just… sad.

Sad from having to attend my umteenth social event with my baby this weekend without her dad while all of my friends have their babies and husbands with them. Sad because we’re in the thick of another away rotation where I feel like I’m raising our baby alone. And we still have another away rotation to get through as well as god knows how many weekend/holiday shifts. At baseline it’s been difficult being alone for most of medical school and residency, especially since residency moved us to an undesirable area where I don’t have a community, but with a baby everything feels amplified. My husbands really great but sometimes he’s just so beaten down by the system that it feels like I’m all alone in this. This is an extremely brutal rotation and on top of not being able to physically see him, we tend to keep missing each other on FaceTime.

Looking for any positivity or solidarity for those of you on the other side. My husband is the type who prioritizes family and signed an offer that matches that but it feels like that’s eons away right now.

Hey everyone, looking for some advice from people who have navigated the medical school/healthcare job hunt as a couple.

I’m currently in the middle of this med school application cycle. Based on the standard admissions timeline, I likely won’t have a clear picture of where I’m actually matriculating until late March or April.
Meanwhile, my wife is graduating nursing school this upcoming May. From what her program and advisors are telling her, major hospital new-grad residency interviews happen around January, and they generally expect offers to be accepted or commitments made by February.

This leaves us with a rough 1–2 month gap where she might have to commit to a hospital system before we even know what state I’ll be moving to for medical school.

For those who have been through this:

How flexible are new-grad nurse hiring timelines? Is it realistic for her to hold off on applying/accepting until March/April, or does waiting seriously hurt her chances at competitive units/hospital systems?

Can she accept an offer and renege if needed? We obviously want to avoid burning bridges if possible, but how standard is this in nursing?

How did you coordinate geographic overlap? Did you pick a target region based on interview invites, or just wait it out?

Any insight, personal experiences, or strategies from nurses or med spouses would be greatly appreciated!