Being in law school with a family can be hard. The demands on students are bad enough without having to keep a spouse happy, keep a child feeling loved, and keeping a home rather than an apartment clean and functioning.?
Even if you don’t have children or aren’t married, non-traditional students are much more likely to bring someone with them to law school that isn’t a law student. And this someone is not going to understand the nuances of law school.?Case in point, the wife of a 1L who posted on Law School Discussion about all the time her 1L husband was spending with a younger, more female classmate.?
What I’m having a hard time understanding … how a 36 year old married man with a child instantly becomes best friends with a 24 year old girl, becomes her study buddy, can’t function without spending time with her.?
The piece of good news I’ll give to the wife is that becoming intimately involved with the life of your fellow students is not uncommon in law school. You spend so much time with your classmates that you learn things about them that you would never learn in an undergrad setting.
?Even comparing law school to high school, you learn a lot more than you would have thought. Law school has the same rumor mill as high school with more alcohol and a bigger need for a distraction.?But the fact that this 1L is not just studying all the time with her but also going out to eat, bringing her to family functions, going out drinking with her is a little suspicious.
?I understand why a 36 year-old man with a family and kids ends up drinking and shooting darts until 3am. There were plenty of non-traditional students I went to law school with, both with and without families, who regressed to acting like undergrads because we lived in a college town and the majority of people were fresh out of college.
?Regardless of the reasons, ignoring your family for your social life is inexcusable. If you are studying 24/7 with the hot young thing in your Contracts class, that’s a law school problem. If you’re out painting the town red with him or her, that’s a relationship problem.
?The other sad truth is that this guy is throwing away the biggest advantage that non-traditional students have: the love and support of their partners and family. When finals roll around, a support group within the law school is less reliable no matter how well you groomed it. Having a family at home gives you people who care about you, even if they don’t understand what you’re going through.?
So to the wife above, yes, your husband’s behavior is entirely normal, but also not what you signed up for. I’m not a relationship expert, so I don’t know how to fix this. But step one is getting him to recognize what is and isn’t a necessary part of law school.
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I have only seen anecdotal evidence about the effects that law school has on existing marital relationships, and, from what I have witnessed personally, it seems to me that as many married relationships survive law school as those that disintegrate. I’m not sure that law school has a causal relationship to divorce: weak marriages with uncommitted partners aren’t going to survive stress, law school or otherwise
Even so, the same thing can be said about people in general, and law programs eagerly continue to spend time and resources on assisting their new (and youthful, and single) student populations to “cope” with the stresses of law school. I think that as the percentage of non-traditional students rises amongst student populations, law programs need to devote some of that time and energy towards their very different stresses and needs.