3min read • 6 months ago
To help healthworkers and non-healthworkers in relationships understand the dynamics at play and offer advice on how to navigate the murky waters.
Healthcare workers, relationships, love, partners, emotional exhaustion
An exploratory essay
The Internet has decided that healthcare workers are bad partners. Again.
Sometime last year, an X user took to the streets of the venerated platform to express frustration with healthcare workers, claiming they made terrible partners in romantic relationships. As with many controversial online conversations, the post quickly raised dust, with people almost immediately picking sides: those who agreed and those who didn’t. For many healthcare workers, the claim struck a nerve, pushing many into the defensive and drawing clear battle lines across the conversation, because what do you mean healthcare workers don’t know how to love?
But framing the issue this way suggests a simplicity that doesn’t quite exist. There are a number of reasons why relationships among people in certain professions do not work, and research has shown that income, employment, job stability, and educational status lie at the top of the pile. Surprisingly, healthcare workers did not make this list. If the aforementioned factors do not detract from the appeal of healthcare workers, why the frustration? Why the accusation? We could debate endlessly whether healthcare workers make better or worse partners, or whether the claim holds any real weight. This article, however, is not interested in proving or disproving that argument. Instead, it aims to present the different dynamics at play in romantic relationships involving HCWs from different perspectives and allowing you, dear reader, to arrive at your own conclusions.
It will be very easy to dismiss this rant on X as emotional and one of the very many hot takes that are shared on that platform, but oftentimes, social media outcry reflects a lived experience. In fact, in a survey that compiled people’s responses to the question “What profession makes the worst spouses?”, healthcare workers made the list for entirely different reasons: no compassion, 70-90 hour workweeks, and sociopathic tendencies.
The frustration expressed in these spaces often comes from real relationships that did not work, real expectations that were unmet, and real emotional effort that went unacknowledged and many times, engagers are forced to pick a stand, either agree or disagree, based on their own experiences as well.
What online outcries like this tend to leave out, however, is context. In the rush to rant, justify, or defend, the dynamics that shaped those experiences–work conditions, emotional exhaustion, communication patterns, and systemic pressures–are often flattened or lost altogether. The focus now is on the result, the injury, the hurt, and things taken out of context, almost always lead to polarisation.
Man is a social animal, driven by a constant need to connect. We bond, we gather, and we seek closeness, which is our own version of touching noses or headbutting the people we care about, much like cats do.