Residency and Commitment

[Thirteen]

What is the best time to actually get married/plan a wedding in residency?
Originally, we were planning on next summer (as he possibly moves/starts 2nd yr. for anesthesia, and my lease is up/I'm done with my MA), but at this point, I'm thinking "When are we going to plan this?"

There are so many possibilities and things are really up in the air until Matching March
But I don't think we'll be able to pull it off.

P.S. Still no proposal yet, but it's definitely coming

Re: Residency and Commitment

if you search the phrase "when is the best time" on this site, you'll see TONS of posts with these two questions. they're usually among the first asked by new members if you aren't already married / don't have kids.

when is the best time to get married?

when is the best time to have kids?

the general consensus is - there is no best time, do it when you can fit it in. but you can have fun reading everyone's "this is what we did" responses.

[madeintaiwan]

Re: Residency and Commitment

What is the best time to actually get married/plan a wedding in residency?
Originally, we were planning on next summer (as he possibly moves/starts 2nd yr. for anesthesia, and my lease is up/I'm done with my MA), but at this point, I'm thinking "When are we going to plan this?"

There are so many possibilities and things are really up in the air until Matching March
But I don't think we'll be able to pull it off.

P.S. Still no proposal yet, but it's definitely coming

You did mean when are YOU going to plan this, right?

I was thinking the same thing. There's a 2nd year and a 3rd year who are both getting married next year. Their spouses to be are a NP and a 3rd year PMR resident respectively and it is the she's who are doing the planning. There is no "good" time. When you're ready is the time.

[Vishenka69]

Re: Residency and Commitment

The best time is whenever it works best for you. My DH wasn't ready until after the match and I wanted to do it before we move, hence we had a 4 week window. As for planning, some take years and some do it in a few weeks, it all depends on how elaborate of an affair you want.

[MrsK]

Re: Residency and Commitment

We got married on March 2 of his M4 year so we could be back from the honeymoon for Match Day. It was the only time DrK was free and we had to battle my brother and his fiance for the wedding date. (We didn't know that they had picked the same day!) It was exciting but kinda scarey when our guests asked us where were going to be living and we didn't know. Still, it was so nice to have a distraction/break before the Match.

[moonlight]

Re: Residency and Commitment

What is the best time to actually get married/plan a wedding in residency?
Originally, we were planning on next summer (as he possibly moves/starts 2nd yr. for anesthesia, and my lease is up/I'm done with my MA), but at this point, I'm thinking "When are we going to plan this?"

There are so many possibilities and things are really up in the air until Matching March
But I don't think we'll be able to pull it off.

P.S. Still no proposal yet, but it's definitely coming

Do you know a location yet? Will it be 'back home' where ever that may be or are you having it in the city you and him are living in after he changes programs??

[Thirteen]

Re: Residency and Commitment

We're both currently in LA - I've been here 5 years, he's a native Los Angeleno.
The thought is we would get married here (as his family/majority of both our friends live here). But I don't think that's a possibility.
And I really don't want to fly back here after we move somewhere else.

There's just so much up in the air until Match. Oy.

[spotty_dog]

Re: Residency and Commitment

We moved to Cleveland from Portland for med school, then he proposed in late July and we set a date for mid-June. We decided to have the wedding back in Portland (and the honeymoon in Hawaii.) We hired a wedding coordinator for the on-site stuff and DH handled most of the planning. Yes, during his MS-1 year. He is just so much more efficient at that stuff than I am! Residency would be different I think, plus I've gotten better at organizational stuff with time, so I think it would be mostly me if we were getting married after the Match. Anyway he took Step 1, we flew to Portland, had the week before the wedding for final preparations, then got married and had a week or so honeymoon with plenty of time to come back and have him join a research lab for summer work.

For you a lot might depend on the program, how they handle vacation time, how stressful CA-2 is vs. CA-1, etc. But generally residencies offer an awful lot of vacation, and planning a wedding doesn't have to be super time intensive I don't think. You'll make it work!

We also did some planning surrounding the Match -- namely, we were ready for kids right around then. We were going to wait until after the Match to try, so at least we'd know where we were going and if we'd be close to family before we committed to creating a new person, but, um, our son had different plans, LOL. I think I was 9 weeks along on Match Day. It's crazy how much control those fickle Match gods have over your life, but it's also amazing how possible it is to roll with the punches when you're in love with a dawkter.

[ladymoreta]

Re: Residency and Commitment

I'm not much help from a practical standpoint because we were married in undergrad, but how would you feel about eloping, then coming back and just having a big party at a restaurant or something? Would your families kill you? It seems like that would be way less stressful, and it woudn't take much planning. I had a super-simple wedding, but by the time it was over, I was just sick of it all. It turned out really nice, but looking back, I'd have been just as happy and ended up just as married with a backyard barbeque.

Re: Residency and Commitment

Med school, rotations, residency, fellowships...does it ever end? Will we be planning around this for the rest of our lives? YES. I know that my MD BF and I have had a long term plan that seems to constantly get changed. At first we were in San Juan together where I was in optometry school and he was in med school. However, I made the decision to quit optometry school and move to New York because I hated my program and I had always wanted to live in New York. MD BF was in his 3rd year of med school so he was bouncing around everywhere anyway and wouldn't really have been in San Juan. We made it work somehow...which seems to be a common theme on these boards. I moved to a city I had always wanted to live in only to make the 4 hour trip to Cape Cod to see him almost EVERY weekend. I like to think he realized how much this was for me to do for him. Now here we are a year later and we made the move to Philly together. First time living together, new city, high stress intern year = lots of ups and downs. I am most recently confused about our plans for marriage...I keep waiting for him to propose because we had tenatively set our date for Sept. 2009 but it still hasn't happened. At one point he told me it would be before the end of the year but I don't want to turn this into something that is no longer exciting because I am worried about it. He pretty much told me he was giving me his grandmother's ring so I keep thinking...what's the hold up?

[ladymoreta]

Re: Residency and Commitment

I don't know... I guess we're looking for our lives to settle down once residency is over (he hasn't seemed interested in a fellowship yet), but we really don't know what to expect after that. We had the "when does it end" discussion when we were in undergrad, and that's a big part of why we decided to go ahead and get married back then. We thought it would be good to get the "for poorer" and "for worse" out of the way.

Lots of guys do better with specific instructions. Waiting for him to propose just keeps you in unhappy limbo, and too much of that can end up damaging your relationship. Since you've moved in with him, he may think that that is enough commitment for you, and he may not know that you want it to progress any further (to marriage) anytime soon. Being ready for marriage means that you are able to have tough conversations with each other. Sit down with a couple of glasses of wine and tell him that it isn't enough for you, and you need to have a ring and a date by the end of the month, or you will need to make some important decisions about your relationship. Residency is stressful and extremely busy, and we have to be understanding at times, but if he plans to marry you, he needs to commit to it. If not, he needs to let you know. It's so easy for us to get caught up in the mindset of needing to support our SO's, but you have to remember that you are worth him making plans for, no matter how busy he is with work.

Re: Residency and Commitment

My fiance and I just went through the process of deciding how/when to marry -- so I'll share what we decided would work best for us. He's a fourth-year medical student pursuing Emergency Medicine, currently galavanting all over the country working in different ERs in hopes of securing the right residency. And I'm a writer/editor and non-profit slave

We got engaged in August, though we'd known for a long time that marriage was always the plan. My ring isn't fancy because we're broke - but I loooove it, it's from the Sundance catalog and suits me (I don't like diamondy things). Originally, we figured that we'd just add to all the chaos that May will bring - moving, settling in a new city, him starting residency, etc., - by throwing in a wedding too. But then I started planning and within a week I FREAKED OUT. I felt stressed, worried about money, felt bad making my family travel for the wedding, etc. And we decided together that all that effort and expense for one day wasn't worth it.

Instead, we're meeting up in Colorado in three weeks, when he's finished his latest away rotation, getting the official documents out of the way there, and then we're heading to Santa Fe, to a place that's very special to us, and saying our vows to one another privately. Then we're going to go hiking, and will spend a few days at a bed and breakfast. Then in May, after graduation, we'll have some family parties, but nothing extravagant.

Weddings are important to some people, and I understand that. For us, especially since we're not religious, a wedding wasn't the important part - the marriage is, and I don't imagine we'll have a different or more difficult one because we didn't throw a big affair. Given what's ahead for all of us connected to 4th years -- matching, possibly moving, etc. -- there isn't really a great time to have a wedding. If we had decided on a shindig, we would have had it the weekend after he graduates, before he began residency. I'm glad we'll have that time to move, unpack, get settled and just enjoy each other before he disappears to the hospital for a year. But if it's a priority to you, then there's always a way to make it happen.

Re: Residency and Commitment

We've went back and forth about cost issues and sometimes I feel like weddings can be a lot like Christmas...sometimes you get so caught up in it that you forget the real purpose and meaning behind it all.