Beyond Biglaw: Should You Marry A Lawyer?

Columnist Gaston Kroub considers the pros and cons of marrying a fellow attorney.

Perhaps because of my recent wedding anniversary, I have been thinking a lot about the importance of strong personal relationships in our lives, and how a career as a lawyer intersects with the process of partnering with someone, for those inclined to do so. Of course the decision of whether to marry at all is a personal one, just as the decision of whom to marry is. So I will not tell you what to do — you will need to answer the question for yourself. But assuming that a lawyer does want to get married or otherwise establish a family with someone else, it is interesting to consider the question of whether to consider a fellow lawyer for marriage. Or to consider what marrying a lawyer means for a non-lawyer — at least in terms of the pros and cons of doing so.

During my first year of law school, the professors would constantly remind us that they were “training us to think like lawyers.” I am sure that everyone who has attended law school has heard something similar. Even though each professor articulated this important statement of purpose differently, there is no formulation that I remember distinctly, with one exception. What I do remember clearly is the message conveyed to the class by my contracts professor, who was the only one willing to discuss the consequences of our legal training upon our future relationships. His message came at the end of the year and was both quite startling and stark. He told us, frankly and without sugarcoating of any kind, to expect that all of our personal relationships would be more challenging because of our legal training, especially if we actually went on to practice as lawyers. I do not remember much from contracts, but I remember that bit of sober wisdom.

It is tempting to imagine that everyone is the same, and that there are no special considerations that need to go into the decision of whether to marry a lawyer. But doing so would be silly. Considering the importance of such a decision, it is critical to be honest with yourself — about the qualities in a partner that are most important to you, as well as the qualities that you as a lawyer are bringing to the relationship. As time has passed since my contracts professor gave us his “warning,” I have actually come to realize that what he was providing was not a warning at all. Instead, he was issuing us a challenge: to maintain mutually fulfilling personal relationships, despite being trained as a lawyer.

Over the past few weeks, I have discussed disparate personality traits that I have seen displayed by lawyers, for good and for ill. Obviously, when looking for a spouse, or acting as a spouse yourself, it is important to value the right personality traits. It is also critical to work towards bringing constant demonstration of the positive ones into your relationship, while limiting demonstration of any negative ones, of course. Ultimately, every person brings good and bad qualities to a relationship, as we are all human. What determines the success of a relationship is often the ability to adapt to the needs of the other, while working together to build and enhance each other’s good qualities. For lawyers trained to be “critical thinkers,” and who are in a service profession that demands long hours and extensive commitment to clients, meeting those standards in a marriage is a challenging task.

At the same time, it is important to be honest about the ramifications legal training can have on a relationship. While the ability to think critically is perhaps the defining skill of lawyers, constant critical evaluation of “life’s developments” — and your partner’s reaction in response to those developments — can be very damaging to a relationship. Even more of a challenge to personal relationships is a lawyer’s tendency to communicate in critical, or demanding, terms. For a relationship with a lawyer to flourish, there must be space to forget about thinking critically about everything. Likewise, the lawyer’s tendency to focus on maintaining the status quo, while viewing everything as an adversarial negotiation, can also be damaging to a personal relationship. While some people appreciate those abilities in a spouse, there also must be a realization that not everything in life can be a negotiation.

Underlying these sentiments is the assumption that the lawyers in, or being considered for, a relationship actually want to be lawyers, rather than just people who went to law school for lack of a more compelling alternative at the time. It is important to realize that good lawyers are usually very hard workers, and obsessive about delivering results for their clients. Very often, practicing the profession at a high level requires working in hard-charging work environments. While admirable, the constant focus on serving the needs of others can come at a cost to the lawyer’s ability to focus on their own personal relationships. In fact, I think the mutual understanding about how hard it is to actually “be a lawyer” is a big factor in creating lawyer-lawyer relationships in the first place. I am talking lasting relationships, of course, and not office flings born of boredom, proximity, or mutual desperation.

Speaking personally, I realize that at the time I first started a relationship with my wife, I was not yet a lawyer. Perhaps that has made it easier to tame some of the potential negative consequences of demonstrating “lawyer behavior” in my own relationship — though my wife has never been shy about calling me out when I slip into “lawyer mode,” reminders that I appreciate receiving. Relationships can be messy, frustrating, wonderful, and life sustaining. It does not matter if you are in a relationship with a lawyer, or the only lawyer in the relationship. The challenge to treat your significant other with at least, if not more, respect than what you give to colleagues and clients is an ever-present one. You can shirk that responsibility, or recognize that nurturing your relationships is your surest path to happiness. Should you marry a lawyer? That is a personal decision. But you can definitely control whether your spouse is happy to be married to one.

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Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique. The firm’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

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