LNL76

Another different perspective.....if your spouse stops you from doing what makes you truly happy, THEY'RE doing it wrong.

USMCFLYR

In a nation that has such a high rate of first marriages not lasting past 10 years - your chance of a career lasting longer than a marriage is certainly possible. You had better put a good amount of thought in to BOTH the marriage/family AND the career.

80ktsClamp

My long lost brother??? Is that you???


You're dang right my wife and mom are proud of me.

And you're also dang right that was sophomoric... and people that possess a sense of humor laughed.

80ktsClamp

Totally agreed here, within reason of course.

Hilltopper89

This is correct. However, you can't control that but you can control yourself regarding priorities. Plying that she doesn't support your career will only make things worse. In this case you're gonna have to choose the career over the spouse every time. I choose to put my spouse first.

alaskadrifter

Not everyone can be doing what makes them happy all the time. Marraige is about sacrifice and compromise. In a good marraige sacrifices go both ways. If you're not willing to compromise for the other person, even on something that makes you happy, you're doing it wrong.

Don Ramon

How long have you been married??

pengu

Sounds like marriage really sucks !!

Don Ramon

Na, marriage is awesome...when you're married to the right person. When you're not, you will be dreading the day you were born.

Electra

Well, that took an interesting turn...

To the OP: I'm a female pilot, married to another pilot, and I have many female pilot friends in various relationship and family statuses. There is no "right" answer to making it all work. What people (of both genders) fail to realize so often is that being a professional pilot is not a career choice so much as a lifestyle choice, particularly for the airlines. Weird hours, many nights away from home, traveling with complete strangers who become your dysfunctional family for a few days, and often dealing with difficult commutes on top of everything else. Communication is always important in any long-term relationship, but it is exceptionally crucial if you're going to be apart often. What someone else said about trust is true, it is required. I have seen friends struggle with boyfriends/husbands who were insecure about time spent away with crews (yeah, there is a lot of assumption that all male pilots make us weak in the knees and 8 hours a day in the plane with them isn't enough so we always hook up with them at the hotel) and resentful of the schedules. There is a reason many of us marry other pilots; your job might seem exotic to someone outside the industry at first, but when you miss important life events and holidays because you have to work or cancel dates because you get stuck somewhere, the shine can wear off quickly. You can have expectations for how long it will take you to get your employer of choice, hold day trips, etc. and plan how you will fit your "other life" in, but having expectations frequently leads to disappointment when it doesn't happen how you were planning. The right person for you will be someone who recognizes that your job is probably a passion for you, not just a paycheck, and accepts that being in a relationship with a pilot might require a bit more flexibility.

I'm sure I'll take flack for what I'm going to share because it's APC, but you're smart to solicit a variety of experiences so you can start to consider what your "big picture" could look like. I've been pretty lucky, I think. I have an incredibly supportive spouse who loves his job and understands how much I love mine. We really struggled early on with the terrible pay and terrible schedules, and I would be lying if I said it didn't strain our relationship a bit. Now that we have more seniority, I see my spouse pretty frequently even compared to how much quality relationship time my outside the industry friends enjoy. We're still disappointed because we are often still apart for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, but we make up for it by celebrating well when we are together on another day, and we both understand how we are "subject to the requirements of the service". We tend to spend intensive amounts of time together when we're off work, and enjoy a bit of "me time" when we're on overnights. It works well for us. But the truth of the matter is that when you're both gone 4-5 days a week it is really impossible to have it all, and we never felt we'd be fair to each other or to our kids if we had them, so we choose to remain DINK's. We travel and play and spoil our friend's kids and pay all our bills every month in full and don't for a second regret our choices, because they are our choices. We could play it differently, but it would be a dramatic change. My mom-pilot friends stress about making their schedules work so that someone can be home with the kids, fret over nannies and daycare, forgo upgrades so they can have more flexibility, and worry that it creates too many obstacles for intimacy with their spouse. But my friends still pull it off because they have great partners, so it can be done, and I'm sure they wouldn't have it any differently but it can be challenging in ways that can't quite be compared to having most other jobs while maintaining a family life. You have to be all-in and have a lot of help at home of some sort. Even day trips are usually odd hours (not 9-5), and there isn't a lot of room for taking time for decompressing from a stressful multi-day trip when you're coming home to little people and a spouse who need and miss you and demand all your attention.

There are a lot of challenges when you choose a flying career, this is just one more of them, but before any guys on here bother getting smug about women and their place in this industry, let me offer this: I've had plenty of male pilots rag on me about how selfish I am choosing a career over family while they talk about their five kids and their wife who stays home and how they live paycheck to paycheck to support the family and are hoping their kids are going to turn out to be all-state athletes so they can get scholarships to allow them to go to college. I bet their wives would be super happy to discover that their husbands are drooling over the hot flight attendant and spending their per diem at the hotel bar while enjoying uninterrupted ESPN free from family distraction three nights a week while the wife's at home with colic-y babies and mountains of housework. No situation is truly "perfect".

The best advice I can give you is to find a balance; be true to yourself and what you want, and try to be realistic. Plenty of couples face job losses, relocations, childcare issues, and have to sacrifice something for the greater good in their relationship. Being a pilot might make it a little more complicated, but certainly not impossible.