Although tbh, it seems that the term “grass widow” for a deserted non-wife (or even a wife) gained currency first (due to the notion of an unmarried couple consummating their relationship clandestinely in the grass?).
That was followed by the punning contrast between “grass” and “sod”, where the latter connotes the turf over the grave of the late husband of the woman widowed in the more traditional sense of the term, i.e., by death.
This is one reason why so few two-physician marriages last.
Depends where you are in academia, of course. I know plenty of tenured academics whose marriages to other academics or people in other high-intensity jobs have survived fine. But I’d believe that top-5 universities are rougher that way.
Probably also depends on the field and program. My husband’s field is clinical psychology, which can be ruthless, and he was told it was unrealistic to expect to maintain a relationship in graduate school. During internship they were worked until one of them literally collapsed and required hospitalization, at which point they were all lectured about “self - care.”
He was miserable every second of graduate school and after watching his mental health deteriorate for years, I told him it was unlikely he would be any happier once he graduated if he stayed on this path. And praise be, he finally heard me, and after he graduated, went off into family practice. It allowed us to build a more stable life than I think we would have otherwise had. His mental health improved considerably. He’s still stressed about work but he’s able to set it aside and enjoy other parts of life now.
I’m no one’s dinner entertainer. I hate parties. I’m not going to raise my child on my own. Etc. It’s bad enough my career suffered due to having to move all the time. We got out of that life and haven’t looked back.
I had to really dive deep for this, but I started a thread about this a while back.
One of the (many) weird things about this is the fear of male teachers seems to disappear in a puff of smoke when you start junior high/ middle school. In my experience, then and now, there are a lot of male teachers in the middle and upper grades. Apparently, the desire to molest kids automatically stops at sixth grade.
That’s when the female molesters take over (and no, that was not an attempt at humor).
Yes, my discussion related to 1960’s. As for TV trope, it does seem that the idea was very sitcom . I immediately thought of “Bewitched” since I watched endless reruns of that after school, where Darrin socializing with his boss and having him over for dinner seems to have been a common thing. Although, being turned into a chimp during dinner rarely was part of real life… I think in the last few decades that at-home business dinner party has been replaced by the “expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant” event - where the meal can be expensed and reimbursed. Perhaps that change is directly due to the evolution of the state of marriage, with more common divorces and many more two-career families.
To the point that it was a plot element in the first episode of WandaVision earlier this year, a series which specifically used tropes from various eras of sitcoms (and the episode in question was modeled on elements of The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy).
Along with all that, it seems to me the “expensive restaurant business dinner” that replaced dinner parties, also does not typically include the spouses. maybe for economy’s sake, maybe because spouses are not as wedded to their other’s job as in times past, maybe to allow discussion to focus more exclusively on business, etc.