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Couple lying back to back on heart shape
‘We used to spend our weekends driving through beautiful countryside, not hunched over laptops.’ Photograph: Alamy
‘We used to spend our weekends driving through beautiful countryside, not hunched over laptops.’ Photograph: Alamy

Secret Teacher: teaching brought me and my partner together, now it's tearing us apart

This article is more than 7 years old

I love my girlfriend, but we’re both teachers and we’re being pushed to our limits. One of us has got to get out of this profession

It was teaching, at the beginning, that brought us together. I was a young aspiring teacher, and I sent a Facebook message to an old acquaintance who happened to be in same profession. A flurry of messages followed, as we shared anecdotes about our classes, before I got down to the real reason I’d messaged her: a date.

As the weeks and months went by, we’d dash to each others’ houses after school, forgetting about marking, planning and laborious bureaucracy. Teaching played a secondary role in our lives at this point. I remember how, instead of spending our weekends hunched over laptops, we’d hop into the car together and drive through beautiful countryside. I remember drinking cocktails and going out with our friends. Every day we spent together was like one of those cliched movie scenes where the newlyweds drive off into the distance with tin cans rattling behind them.

Summative assessments, emails and performance management documents just didn’t matter to us. We found happiness in putting ourselves, and our relationship, first.

Skip forward two years and things are very different. We both hold positions of responsibility in our schools. We have a mortgage to pay. The two-hour round commute and pointless paper-pushing tasks are taking their toll. Nights out with friends are few and far between as we struggle with fatigue – we usually prefer an early night to a pina colada. Instead of tossing the paperwork aside, we’re drowning in it. And so is our relationship.

Right now, as I write this, we’ve spent about seven hours at opposite ends of the dining table, marking our students’ mid-term assessments. We’ve barely spoken to each other, save for the occasional grunt or “Cuppa?”. Spending our weekends this way is essential to keep on top of our workload and stop it taking over every evening for the next week.

We try to find corners to cut and quick-win methods in our day-to-day tasks, to carve out some time together – cuddling on the settee or chatting for 20 minutes over dinner – but the shadow of our careers is never far away.

We were recently away for a weekend when my partner, a newly appointed curriculum lead, received an email with a deadline for the following Monday. Forget the break: calculate these residuals and Progress 8 scores instead, please. She said it would have to wait until we were back – and was subjected to a series of attacks on her professionalism as a result.

As a fellow teacher, I know that such behaviour is not rare. On the contrary, I have seen co-workers succumb to the same sort of pressure all too often. I also know how hard my partner has sweated to get to where she is now. She is far from negligent, as her line managers implied. She just cares more about her stress levels and her home life than she does about calculating spreadsheets at the drop of a hat. Times like these test the strength of your resolve as an individual, and as a couple.

Of course, teacher-teacher relationships are not all doom and gloom – there are lots of advantages. We have shared some brilliant examples of best practice, given each other advice and cried together. We both celebrated when a kid my partner had persevered with for six months finally had a long-awaited lightbulb moment. You become so invested in each others’ school lives that you begin to live them yourself, from the frustration to the elation.

But now, as a couple, we’re trying to push all this aside. We’ve decided to be the consummate professionals we have always been between 7.15am and 5.30pm, but as soon as we fire up the car engines to go home, we’ll switch off.

My partner is starting to look at roles outside of the profession – a huge loss to the teaching world, if you ask me. I’m still hanging on to the thread of affection I have left for the job.

I have no doubt that the selfless, hard-working and creative spark I love is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. But we’ve had to ask hard questions of ourselves recently – and we’ve realised that while we remain in this profession, our lives and relationship will always play second fiddle. We are not OK with that. After all, don’t we deserve the cliche of tin cans rattling as we drive off into the sunset? It’d be a lot easier without the weight of teaching in the back.

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