Last updated on July 26th, 2023 at 03:02 pm
To answer this succinctly, busy teacher or prospective educator: No, teachers don’t generally have time for dating.
Now for an elaboration based entirely on my personal experience:
The workload of a teacher doesn’t allow for much of a life outside the classroom
First, a defining of terms. When I refer to dating, I mean the process of finding one’s spouse. The modern series of conversations and awkward meetups and dinners with total strangers to ascertain if a person is fit to be the person you plan to be united with for a lifetime of marriage.
If dating, to you, is less a deciding marriage partner process and more of an activity, a hobby, going out– then my answer would change to maybe.
As a teacher, you get to choose one hobby– that’s it. I don’t make the rules, I just expose them in all of their tepid baldness.
(That’s a maybe if you are not the co-captain of two sports, the sponsor of an afterschool craft club, and treasurer for the Sunshine Committee!)
The point is: Teaching is 1.5 full-time jobs, so you can forget about a time-consuming quest for lifelong love. Why do you think you see so many “Third-grade teachers” featured on dating shows?
The teacher workload is outsized and overwhelming. It’s not conducive to a harrowing process of going on dead-end coffee dates and narrowing down suitors and generally making major life decisions.
My dating experience as a teacher
All of that being said– I managed to pull it off.
But I had the pandemic.
My husband and I met on a dating app. Back then, he was not my husband of course, but a random guy I conversed with about kayaking. He didn’t send me a shirtless bathroom mirror pic, and he didn’t request one from me– so far, so good. Besides that attractive quality, we shared a number of core values.
He asked me out, and we met at a zoo, gaining admittance to the grounds just in time to witness two giant, aged tortoises making love.
This’ll be a grand story for our kids, I thought, but did not say, because that would’ve been weirdly getting ahead of things. I was an introvert and a third-grade teacher and barely had a shred of capacity for social interaction to spare, so I can’t stress enough how much of a personal accomplishment this was.
We continued chatting, taking our conversations off the app and meeting for dinner or for walks at the park.
I think I was able to manage this because I prioritized it, seeing the potential of the relationship. That, or I must’ve given up my current Netflix show.
By the spring, we managed to clear the Sheer Discomfort hurdle and started to get to know each other. We didn’t know what loomed ahead, the testing of our fragile young love bud by the uncertain waters of a worldwide event.
How pandemic teaching helped my dating life
In March of 2020, my school closed for Spring Break and didn’t reopen for student instruction until the next year. We joined schools across the globe in a scramble to transmit instruction through computer screens.
The sudden and complete jump from one mode to the other was a mountain of work, to be sure, but once we were settled– maybe by week 3 or 4, and I had gotten my routines down– I felt the workload ease off my shoulders a bit.
Instead of spending all day in a room with the children and then spending hours after planning for what to do the next day/week/month in the room with children, I found more breathing room to plan and generally get my thoughts together.
Live instruction time (through the screens) was a fraction of what it had been.
So despite the numerous and sudden changes that erupted over the course of that last quarter of school, I found sweet irony in the fact that I had more time, more space, more room for life to seep back in.
And that meant more time to get to know my future husband (we married later that year!).
For the teacher who wants to marry
My love story is just that– a single blurb in a galaxy of experiences. Let this encourage you, teacher.
Make the time for things that are important to you– the Big Life Things, if you will. It’s difficult, but not impossible. Clear as much time as you can in your schedule. Take (wise) chances, even if it leads to a vow never to visit a particular coffee shop on that side town again. I experienced many dating ups and downs and mostly funny stories to share with inquiring housemates, all of this while being a busy, small-talk-hating teacher.
You never know what could happen! Remember– I’m rooting for you.
