The trailing spouse.

It makes me sound like the toilet paper stuck on M's shoe that he forgot to check for before leaving the bathroom.

http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2010/05/20/spousal-hiring-is-unethical-puhleeze/

There are a lot of spouses of university faculty who work where I work. I'm one of them. And although I have been trying to go from being embarrassed by the fact to acting like it is okay, it is definitely a situation fraught with complexity and needing a lot more active consideration than it gets. So far, most of us are just left to separate (or not) our home and work relationships as we see fit. But the resulting range of spousal situations is extremely diverse, including in the variable of "how well you leave your home life at home."

But there is no way to do this. Not completely. If A is sick, and we can't use the babysitter, one of us will have to stay home. And if both of us has a deadline that day within the same department or unit, one of those deadlines will not get met. But even in day to day interactions - of course I'll be more likely to act towards M in a way that reflects our, um, frankness with each other as husband and wife. Now, sometimes, this means I'm the only one in the workplace who tells M he's wrong about something. And some of the time, I even have a valid point! But other times it means I exert more influence on him than others can, and vice versa.

What I am most confused about in this situation is just what a good balance is. We are married, and we have a certain relationship with each other. While we will not have a marital fight in a university hallway, there are parts of this relationship that it would be impossible to change. Especially in exchange for some sort of perception of a less closely familiar relationship. In the same way that close friends in academia will interact differently, and a very sympathetic advisor-advisee relationship will lead to different behaviors. And for the latter, I don't mean a romantic relationship, I just mean one in which an advisor has a personality match better with some advisees than others.

I'd love to hear some stories from the workplace of better ways of working with spousal colleagues than just pretending it isn't a special situation. Of acknowledging the relationship as something that has an effect, but doing with more subtlety than just requiring one spouse is not responsible for work evaluation of the other spouse (although, in some places, I'm sure that would be a good start).