Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
I’m 21, three months out of college, and now a first-year analyst at an investment bank. The hours are everything people warned me about: 80-plus a week, all-nighters before pitches, a calendar that belongs to whatever deal is live, not to me. I knew what I was signing up for, because banking isn’t the end goal for me, it’s the on-ramp. I want to get into venture capital, work my way up, and eventually make partner at a fund investing in startups. That’s the actual dream. The two years of banking is just the toll I have to pay to get the resume and skills to make that jump credible. I’m fully bought in on the plan and I’m not interested in advice that starts with “have you considered a less intense path.”
What I didn’t fully plan for is that I’d also like to have a dating life and some real friendships somewhere in the middle of executing this plan, and right now I don’t see how that fits. My days are work, eat at my desk, work more, five hours of sleep, repeat. The people I’m around most are other analysts who are just as buried as I am, and the unofficial consensus among us is that anything resembling a social life gets shelved until the analyst stint is over. Even on a rare free weekend, I’m often too fried to do much besides recover, and half my mental energy is still going toward VC networking coffees and reading about deals because I’m trying to build the relationships and pattern recognition I’ll need to actually break in.
I’m not asking how to want this less, because I don’t. I’m asking how someone with a genuinely demanding job and an even more demanding multi-year career plan on top of it is supposed to meet people, build something real, and not show up to it as an exhausted, distracted half-version of themselves. And practically, how do I date and stay reliable for someone when my schedule is unpredictable now and is about to get even more front-loaded with extra networking on top of the actual job.
Sincerely,
Those Are Rookie Numbers
The short answer to “how do I meet someone and maintain a relationship when I’m this busy” is “you don’t.”
The longer answer is that this is part of the tradeoff that you’re making by pursuing this career; you’re expected to put in insane hours and most of your energy is going to be devoted to either that job or the various little side-quests and skill grinding that you’re undertaking in order to advance in the career path you’ve chosen. Much like with grad students, medical students and internists and other folks with similarly demanding schedules, this is the road you’ve chosen and it comes with costs.
This is one of the reasons why recognizing and managing The Opportunity Cost is important; there are only 24 hours in a day, and everything you decide to do with those hours comes at the expense of something else. If you, for example, intend to hit the gym or go running every day, it’s going to take away from time given to other things and you have to decide what’s taking priority. Everything in your day is going to require deciding what’s more important and what you’re willing to give up in exchange.
That’s part of what you’ve signed up for; the time that you might put towards dating is going to have to come from professional development, networking and actual ass-in-office-chair time, or it’s going to have to come from things like “sleep” and “eating”. At which point, you have to make a decision about where things stand in your list of priorities.
Now in theory, the whole point of a job like yours is that you hustle your ass off in the beginning and then once you’ve paid your metaphorical dues and sweat equity and then you finally get to relax and reap the rewards. In practice… well, that’s increasingly an open question, especially if you don’t burn out on the way. But let’s assume for a moment that things do ease off enough that you have the free time to actually go out and socialize and meet people.
That’s when we are going to want to take a second and do a hard pivot to a related topic: why people in certain careers and occupations tend to date people in other specific careers and occupations. It’s fairly well understood that celebrities tend to date other celebrities for obvious reasons: that tends to be the social scenes they hang out in the most and the people they spend the most time with. They also tend to have resources that create opportunities to meet folks in the same social strata as them.
But you also tend to find that folks in other careers have similar patterns in terms of finding partners and relationships. First responders – police, firefighters and EMTs – tend to disproportionally date nurses, especially ER nurses. Lawyers and other white-collar professions tend to date people in similar professions. The reason for this isn’t just propinquity – the tendency to form relationships with the people who you spend the most time with – but also compatibility.
See, when we talk about compatibility, we tend to think of it in terms of shared values, interests, backgrounds, goals, politics and upbringing. What we often don’t think about are things like “lifestyle” and “schedules”. There are plenty of times when we might meet someone who is right for us in all the ways we would need to find a partner… but we never get to see them because our schedules just don’t line up the way we need them to. Or because their lifestyle means that they have demands on their time and energy that we don’t and thus it’s harder to schedule dates or even find time to spend together. It doesn’t matter how much you have in common if you don’t actually have the chances to develop or maintain that connection… even if you both really want to.
This is why those aforementioned celebrities tend to date other celebrities; it’s as much about who can understand and will put up with their maddening schedules as it is about class status or overlapping social circles.
If you’ll forgive an awkward and inelegant metaphor: it’s a little like trying to own a Huskey if you live in an apartment in Manhattan. You may love that dog with all your heart and soul, but it’s going to be very hard to give it the kind of care and attention it needs in that environment. You can try to make it work, but it’s either going to require a lot of extra effort on your part or dealing with the consequences of having a very large dog with lots of energy and exercise needs that’s cooped up in too small a space with not enough to do.
Now I bring all this up because, even after you get through the hell period that is you trying to get up the initial rungs of the career ladder, you’re still going to be having issues of long hours and demanding projects that will often require unscheduled overtime. So while you may have more time and opportunities (in theory) to meet people and date, you’re going to want to keep that sort of compatibility in mind. If you want anything more than a casual relationship with someone you only see sporadically, you’re going to want to find someone whose lifestyle and scheduling are similar to yours.
Good luck.
Hi Dr. NerdLove,
I need advice for managing interpersonal conflict when it is hot and humid. I live in Europe, whose recent heat wave is (in)famous. We don’t have AC. My SO and I are usually really good at compromise and communication, but when it’s been so hot for so long and I’ve been spending days verging on heat exhaustion, and I’ve been averaging four hours of sleep a night, my approach to conflict is more like RAAAAAHHHH ANGER MAXIMUM FORCE I HATE EVERYTHING and my SO’s is the same. We’re exploring temperature mitigation alternatives for next time, but any advice for staying calm and constructive when it feels like your brain is shutting down?
(I lived in Austin most of my life before this, so traveling point to point in the heat or even spending a few hours outside for exercise is something I’m used to, but “relief” being a 90-degree house is not something I can cope with.)
Thanks!
Made Of Ice Cream
As someone who’s lived in Austin, and dealt with the heat of a Texas summer, you might think that you’re acclimated to the brutal wrath of the Cursed Day Star, which longs to burn us all with its hate. But as you’ve discovered: part of what makes summers in Texas (or anywhere where man’s hubris in the face of God has gotten the better of him) survivable is all the infrastructure we have to mitigate the heat. Even before we had things like electricity and air conditioning, buildings were built with airflow and temperature differentials in mind – high ceilings, attic vents and cross-ventilation, awnings and shaded porches all helped keep the heat from beating down on you like the Devil’s smile.
Part of the reason why Europe and the UK are (quite literally) melting down in the recent heat wave is because unlike much of the US or the Mediterranean countries, their buildings and infrastructure was designed with cold in mind, with far more temperate summers and less constant heat. And that lack of heat mitigation combined with buildings that are more likely to store heat than repel it, has a lot of knock-on effects, like the way that tempers flare when temperatures soar. Prolonged heat exposure without relief tends to cause a whole host of problems including shorter tempers, poor impulse control and a lot of frustrated, angry people walking around looking for an outlet for their frustration. The fact that night offers little relief makes it worse; poor sleep brought on by the excess heat just exacerbates things.
So how do you keep all of this from turning your relationship from lovey-dovey to a PVP death match at the drop of a fork or one ill-considered word?
Cool down.
I’m being serious here. The reason why we talk about “hey, cool off before you do X” or “let cooler heads prevail” is in part because of just how much heat and anger are tied together. Your bodies are exhausted from the heat and the resources that are going to trying to cool your core temperature takes away from literally everything else. You may know, intellectually, that the fight you’re having is being exacerbated by the ambient temperature, but your emotional filter and impulse control have been taken offline because your body is redirecting power from all non-essential systems to trying to keep you from heat stroke. So having a place where you can get relief from the heat – actual relief, not going from 105 degrees to 90 degrees – is going to be crucial to keeping a level head. And also, y’know. Not dying.
Now, the ideal would be to keep the heat in your home from getting overheated in the first place. I understand, however, that this isn’t always possible. As much as folks like to say “well, get an window unit” or “install a heat pump”, that’s often not an option – European buildings tend to have windows that pivot left/right to open rather than up/down. Similarly, there are often laws against things like external condenser units on buildings, and freeholder laws mean that while tenants may own their apartments, they don’t have the right to make changes to the building. But there are still ways to help mitigate the heat and humidity.
The first step is to keep as much heat out as much as possible. You may not be able to do anything about the insulation in your place, but at the very least you can not make things worse by allowing radiant heat to turn your place into an oven. Covering up the windows – whether with thick curtains or going full college-student and covering them with foil – will help keep the sunlight from heating your place during the day. You might also consider using two fans – one on the cooler side of the apartment and one on the hotter side. Close every door and window except one in the room you are trying to cool and one open window that you will use to vent the air outside. Turn one fan in the room you want to cool to blow inwards, while you turn the other fan to blow air out the open window . This will help create a negative pressure zone, which will help force hot air out and draw less-hot air in. Repeat for each room you’re trying to cool down. At night, open all the windows to encourage a cross breeze, especially in your bedroom
You should also look into options that you can bring into your apartment without a landlord’s sign-off. A dehumidifier in your bedroom, for example, can be a godsend. Simply reducing the humidity means that your body can cool down as your sweat evaporates, and makes for a much more comfortable sleeping environment. I’d also recommend either finding or building a swamp cooler – basically a combination of a fan, an insulated container and ice or cold water. In a pinch, you can build one for surprisingly cheap, and you may well have most of the parts you need already. It’s not going to replace central air but it’ll make your living space far more tolerable. Keeping your bedroom a more acceptable temperature at night will go a long, long way to helping you keep your sanity during a heat wave.
I would also recommend that you agree that important discussions should be held in the evening, when the heat isn’t as brutal and hopefully the humidity doesn’t mean you feel like you’re breathing through a wash cloth. While you can’t (realistically) promise that you’ll only argue at night, avoiding triggering or quarrelsome topics during the heat of the noon-day sun (the proverbial domain of mad dogs and Englishmen) isn’t baking your brains into raisins.
However, it’s also going to be important to recognize when the heat is affecting you and how that’s turning what might be minor grumbles into full-bore conflagrations, and take appropriate steps. This can be hard to do in the moment, so you and your partner should agree in advance that any arguments or heated (er, as it were) discussions get put on immediate hold until you’ve both had a chance to cool off… literally.
That means that when you feel your temper starting to boil and you know you’re one cat’s whisker away from snapping, you agree to take the self-control you have left and go to your corners until you’ve lowered your literal temperature. Run cool water over your wrists, soak a wash cloth and apply it to the back of your neck, freeze wet cloths and apply them to your neck, armpits and face. Drink a cool drink, stand in front of a fan… anything that helps cool you down and bring some relief from the heat is going to help turn down the volume on that voice that’s demanding that you rip off your partner’s head for their affrontery.
It’s not easy, and it’s often hard to take that necessary step back when your dander is up and your beloved is currently tapdancing on your last nerve in their heaviest and stompiest of boots. But being able to say “Pause” and mitigate the heat, even on a sporadic basis, can help keep minor slights and discontentment from building up and… well… boiling over.
Good luck.
