Sustaining a Relationship During 1L

There is an immense irony to life. My next post was going to be about how people in law school can sustain long-term relationships through law school with enough work. In the beginning of the semester, there was a lot of talk from people about how difficult it is to be in a coupledom while attending law school. According to 'every' book and 'every' lawyer, law students should ditch their significant others if there is any ambiguity in the parties' commitment. Other people heard that law school was the greatest test of the strength of your relationship; if you survived the first year, there was a good chance that you guys could make it long-term.

As proof of this, I had been planning to use my section as a case study for healthy relationships. I am clearly not up on all of the relationships in my section. There are almost a hundred of us, after all. Therefore, I'm going to be working off my limited knowledge of the love lives of my peers. As a disclaimer, this analysis is colored by my own bitterness and bias right now. It's not the word of God. Don't take it as such. Also, this post is exceedingly disorganized. Apologies.

Several of my peers got married last summer to preemptively solidify their commitment to each other in the face of the law school beast. From what I understand, those people are still in newlywed bliss. While many non-marital relationships stayed consistently strong, a lot of people broke up with their significant others in the first semester, present company included.

Perhaps it's because we were unprepared to face the stress of the first semester. Everyone goes a bit crazy in the first couple months. Unless you have legal experience, you are probably completely unprepared to understand and appreciate the complexity of the law. Personally, I found the content and the environment to be mentally and emotionally overwhelming, purely because I had no idea what to expect. Moreover, attending school five days a week with seven days of studying sets up crazy hours which can make it difficult for you to prioritize social necessities. Nonetheless, hell is unbearably lonely and most of us ended up back in our original relationships by mid-year.

Of course, most of the people who lived together had an edge on those of us who lived further from our significant others. While a lot of people who lived together had their issues here and there, most of them are still together. I hypothesize it's because returning to the sanctity of your home and the comfort of your lover removes you from the hectic environment and full-time job of law school. Living together provides a measure of stability and security. The majority of these people are doing pretty well.

Those of us who didn't live with our significant others had a slight handicap. I'm not just talking about the long-distance people. The ones who didn't live in the same apartment or the same city often had a more difficult time sustaining their relationships. This is logical and obvious. Good luck contributing to your relationship when:

1. It's difficult to find time for yourself, let alone your s.o., in a crazy hectic schedule.

2. You must expend a lot of effort to see them. People would disappear for entire weekends in order to visit their person. This means that you need to complete a lot of extra work during the week. So, study fifteen hours a day instead of twelve. Have fun with that.

3. Law school is inherently stressful and most people do not understand or have the capacity to understand the content without full immersion. Therefore, good luck explaining to your s.o. what exactly you're doing in Civil Procedure or Torts. I had to explain to mine a number of times the difference between briefing a case and my moot court brief.

I started talking about relationships with some of my peers a few weeks ago because my fiance and I were planning on moving in together this summer and it's just one of those social scripts that naturally follows such news. Surprisingly, a lot of people in our section quietly dropped out of their relationships by the end of this semester. Some stopped dating anyone altogether. Others either continued or began indulging in one-night stands because they didn't want to emotionally invest themselves in something other than law school.

I was shocked. I thought things were going pretty hunkey-dorey in the love department of Section 1. In fairness, I hadn't seen a lot of people for the month of finals when everyone was hiding in study rooms. I wasn't up on the gossip. But still, how wrong I was!

This post was originally slotted to be an uplifting and motivational treatise on how you can keep everything together through a really stressful and unpredictable period in your life. But, as some of my faithful readers may know, my fiance left me a week after my last final. As one of the reasons for the split, he cited the fact that we had both changed so much over the past year that we couldn't possibly meet in the middle again.

It's true. Law school has changed me. I have no doubt about that. I make law-related jokes that my family and friends don't get anymore. I savor my time on stupid websites which dish lawyer gossip and post funny law student anecdotes. I think in IRAC and CRAC and form topic sentences for discourse in my dreams. My tolerance for stupidity has decreased immensely. I have run out of patience for people who speak or move slowly because my time is valuable. Moreover, I have lived like a twenty-something, more or less by myself, for a year in one of the most amazing cities in the world. I cannot deny that I have changed and I am completely happy with the person I have become. I would have liked for the two of us to evolve along the same course, but it didn't happen.

So, I am bummed right now for myself and others in similar straits. I take my hat off to the long-distance folks who made it work. Despite my situation, I optimistically believe that law students can sustain a relationship with enough effort and contact. Looking at my section, it seems as though living together is the winning move. Just a consideration for future law students.

Pride and Performance

Before law school, many of us had hobbies we liked to indulge. I love writing personal essays and this is one I wrote for a creative writing class in college. It has to do with law school...sort of. Enjoy reading :)

I started singing in the church choir when I was five or six. Always ambitious, I thought that if I paid homage to God twice a week—once at church and once at choir practice on Saturday—I would have a better place in heaven, up with the angels. Of course, this is also when I thought I was going to become a nun because I was so good at being pious. (I changed my mind once I discovered boys.)

Every weekend, I sang my little heart out and Kathleen, our director, would sing my praises to my father over the din of Sunday Catholics trudging out of their pews. For my first communion, Kathleen asked me to lead the church in song, mainly because I was well-behaved and had an adorable bowl cut. Ecstatic that someone important had recognized my god-granted singing ability, I pulled on my little white dress and veil that morning, congratulating myself on my superior achievement. Heck, to celebrate, I even dove into my sister’s supply of mascara, smearing it all over my cheeks until she came to rescue me from almost certain hookerdom.

As I mounted the stage for the first song, taking care to hold my dress like a princess and to primly place each white, patent leather mary jane on my way to the altar, a gaggle of my nemeses—the other, more girly choir girls—swarmed around me, assuming their positions directly in front of my microphone and edging me out. By the third song, when one of the Megans threw her hands up once again in my face, I’d had enough. I stomped off the stage and firmly plunked my behind in the pew next to my mother, turning bright red with the wheezing tantrum that was about to explode from my asthmatic lungs. I felt betrayed. Kathleen had sold me out.

Worse even, the gaggle of nemeses paraded around in their little white dresses to coos of admiration and their communions were not even that day! Those imposters! Sensing weakness, they crowded around my seat and informed me that Kathleen thought I would like some help—you know, just in case my little eight-year old self got a case of stage fright. Stage fright! I didn’t even know the meaning before she underestimated my superior soprano voice.

Sure enough, the big man in the sky punished me for my vanity that day, because I could never breach a stage again without going bright red and numb from the eyes down. Papers shake and curl in my sweaty hands. Perspiration forms on my upper lip. People swim in and out of my vision as I wobble in place. Heady self-consciousness requires something firm to hold onto. Most ironically, my undergraduate department chose me to be the graduation speaker. I’m pretty sure it was payback for never opening my mouth in class. They were dying to hear what I had to say after four years of classroom silence. Indeed, I’m sure many of them second-guessed themselves when I showed up to graduation red-faced, wet, and dehydrating by the second under the polyester gown in the heat of a New York summer. But I digress. (For the record, I knocked it out of the park. Check out the link up above if you want to see what I said.)

Seeing as how I abandoned my religion once I discovered boys (Hyperbole.), beautiful people make the agony of public speaking even worse. The piercing, crystalline eyes and sexy-casual demeanor of a hot spectator stand in stark contrast to the sopping mess I become when I take the stage. In an upper-level college seminar, two ex-boyfriends and an ex-girlfriend watched me stutter my way through a presentation on landmine removal in former war zones. I might as well have stepped on one during the second slide for all of the interest it would have stimulated in my discussion. Once I heard the embarrassed coughs and saw the cell phones come out, I knew I had lost them. I gave up trying to ad lib and just started reading the slides off directly so I could finish with some measure of dignity knowing that at least the information was out there.

Afterwards, my professor—another beautiful man—shook his head and asked me privately what I intended to do about law school, with the performance anxiety and whatnot. Stuttering, I retorted—to the best of my ability—that I planned to push paperwork for the rest of my life. I would be like Demi Moore in A Few Good Men: beautiful, silent, and deadly with a pen.

Me, You, and Outlining

The semester is winding to a close at this point. We have another three weeks of school and then finals start. At this point, everyone should be outlining or else having panic attacks about why their outlines aren't complete.

When my fiance decided to surprise me by coming to San Francisco for a week, I couldn't have been more thrilled. We've been doing the long distance thing for close to a year now and we snatch every opportunity to see each other. Of course, long visits require a certain allocation of free time. This means that sweeping romantic gestures, while highly encouraged, require extensive preparation and time management.

I am absolutely thrilled that I get to see my honey bear for a week. But my neurotic law student sense is tingling. I only had two days to prepare for his arrival and that was only enough to send out summer job applications and complete my initial, cursory readings. When will I get to finish that Property outline? What about the second round of Torts reading? Can I just get by with highlighting instead of briefing? Thank God that Moot Court's over but what about my Education Law class? I'm pretty sure we're going to have, like, six cases to read this week and I can't miss anymore classes.

As such, my fiance and I have found ourselves in the Gold Room this sunny, beautiful Saturday in San Francisco. I'm busy wrapping up Torts and moving onto outlining Property while he bangs out some sort of physics theory proof. It's a good thing that he also has work to do over his spring vacation, because otherwise my working alone in the Gold Room while he ventures into SF sans moi would be super pathetic.

Alas, that's the life of a law student. And grad student apparently. At least we have activities planned post-studying. Yes, I even made an itinerary for his stay. Don't judge.

tl;dr It's easy to make long distance relationships work so long as you both have no social life because you're in grad school.