Let’s just say that after 6 months of marriage, DH and I no longer talk about work.  It is strange really, because we love to talk; we stay up late nights, talking about everything under the sun…..but never work.  I think part of the reason is that by the time we get home from work, we are so tired from it that we don’t want to talk about it!  And by the time we have relaxed and spent some quality “do-nothing” time, it is bedtime, and there isn’t enough time to talk about work. 

You see, our work worlds are like night and day.  If we had to switch jobs, even for a day, we wouldn’t survive doing the other’s work.  DH is a Business Process Analyst for a large international corporation (headquartered here in WA) and I am a first grade teacher.  The only thing in common between our jobs is the excessive use of acronyms.  For my job, there are GLE’s, EALR’s, CVC words, DIBELS, the WASL, and many, many more.  For his job, there is SAP, DOA, and many others I can’t remember because they don’t make sense to me.  So, when we attempt to have conversations about our days at work, they sound something like this.  Me:  “Honey, we had a 1/2 day SAI building day at school today, and we spent all afternoon in our grade level teams working on filling in gaps in the Investigations curriculum so it aligns with the GLE’s and EALR’s.  We also invented EQ’s to use in our classroom, looked at the Winter DIBELS results, and made lists of CVC words to use with our intensive students during interventions.”  Him:  “So…..what did you do this afternoon?”  It takes more time for us to explain the background behind our work and analogies than it does to even tell about our days.   So, we basically leave work at work and don’t “talk shop” at home.  Which is fine, once we realized that our long-winded, analogy filled diatribes about our day not only left each other confused but a little bored.  An arrangement I am happy with, although it does leave me wondering how many couples with COMPLETELY different jobs talk about work in detail.