Weddingbee Blog

With every relationship comes compromise, and for many couples, one of those involves determining who will relocate to accommodate the other. With numerous factors to consider, ranging from careers, schooling, family, friends and just overall personal preference, deciding where to live can quickly become one of the toughest issues to work through, one that has been a make-or-break decision for many a couple.

Though making decisions regarding this issue has been relatively smooth for us overall, it definitely comes with its share of work, compromise and effort. You may recall from my post early on about how Mr. D and I have been long distance for quite a length of time over the span of our relationship. We were very committed to making our relationship work and to being as close in proximity to one another as we could, and even still, it was very challenging!

We’ve both gone through a couple of moves already…cross-country as well as up and down the West Coast. We were very blessed to have family that supported our decisions throughout the process. Among all of those factors I listed above, the toughest one for us was career/schooling. Mr. D is pursuing a career in medicine and I in business. The way the timing works out in terms of when we both need to make decisions gets very tricky, both in the past as well as right now.

The first relocation decision we had to make was back when Mr. D was applying for medical school. The timing is crazy because applicants find out at random times throughout the year, some finding out super early, but many others who do not find out about admission until literally the day before class starts the following year. I on the other hand needed to make a decision regarding which job to take six months before Mr. D would even find out about what his options were. We ended up deciding I would move to Los Angeles, Mr. D’s hometown, primarily because a) my family is rather spread out across the world, and b) Mr. D’s family is almost entirely concentrated within a 30-mile radius in LA, meaning he would be visiting LA often wherever in the country he was. It turned out to be a good decision, as Mr. D actually ended up in Northern California (as opposed to much further away!). After two years of traveling up and down Cali, I made an industry switch and found a job opportunity up in the Bay Area.

We are now at yet another crossroads, as Mr. D is currently applying to residency programs. It’s a bit of a crazy process, a bit like sorority rush if you ask me. Basically all of the fourth year medical students apply to the programs they are interested in and are invited to interviews. Then each student ranks the programs in order of preference, and the programs do likewise. Then on the same day in late March, every medical student in the nation finds out which hospital they “matched” at, and that’s where they have to go for the next 3-5 years of their lives.

All this makes our wedding planning and relocation process quite difficult, as we will basically have no idea where we are going to live until one month before the wedding. That means we have one month to finalize all our last minute wedding plans, search for a place to live, move in all of our stuff, change our addresses, etc!

As for me and my career plans, what we’ve decided to do is that I will also apply to grad school (which is partly why I will be swamped over the next month!). Though we both have programs across the country we’d like to apply for, we’ve agreed to maximize our chances of being in the same place by narrowing our pool down and applying only to programs in the state of California. I will be finding out my options before he does, so what he’s going to do is rank the hospitals based on where I want to go, i.e. thinking about how close the hospital is to my grad school of choice. And we’ve also decided that wherever he matches, we will move there, even if it means going to a different school.

Some of our mentors have urged us both to pursue our first choice programs and do long distance the first few years of our marriage, that a couple of years is short in the long-run. However, after weighing all of the pros and cons, we have made a decision that living together as we begin our marriage is what is most important to the both of us, and we are both ready to make the compromises that decision entails.

How have you guys made your decision on who will move?