An excerpt from Lessons Learned: Stories from Dual Physician Marriages, published by the American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL), is available in print and eBook at Amazon and the AAPL bookstore.

How do two people build a strong marriage while both are practicing physicians? Medicine is demanding, and marriage can be too. Plenty has been written about how those pressures can strain relationships, but far less attention has been paid to couples who are not only surviving, but thriving.

My husband and I, both family physicians, have been married for 55 years. We believe our enduring happiness comes from doing life together: first working side by side as clinicians, and later building a national health care consulting firm as a team. We know our story is not universal, so we wanted to hear from others who had found their own versions of success.

We invited 34 dual-physician couples who consider themselves happily married to share their stories. Their marriages range from just two years to more than five decades and reflect a wide variety of medical specialties, work settings, family arrangements, and personal beliefs. Together, they describe what it is really like to balance demanding careers, raise families, navigate illness and loss, and grow together in a profession that often pulls people apart.

Lessons learned: stories from dual physician marriages

The result is Lessons Learned: Stories from Dual Physician Marriages, a collection of honest, personal accounts about love and partnership in medicine. While common themes emerge, no two marriages look the same. Rather than offering formulas or guarantees, the couples simply share what they have learned from loving another physician, and from choosing, again and again, to build a life together.

The chapter titles, chosen by the contributors themselves, offer a glimpse into the richness and diversity of these journeys:

• Opposites Attract
• Anatomy of Love, Stress, and Shared Google Calendars
• Marriage Can Survive Despite Training Separations
• Change Creates Opportunity… As Long as You Keep the Same Spouse!

Us: two halves of a perfect whole

Dora Fernandez (neonatologist) and Julio Fernandez-Bombino (nephrologist), married 53 years, titled their chapter Us: Two Halves of a Perfect Whole.

Here is an excerpt from their love story.

Julio’s perspective

“What is a career?” Julio asks. “Is it a passage, a pilgrimage, an orbit that simply transits, revealing a trajectory marked by time? If that was all a career was to be then I wanted more. I wanted my life to be filled with love. And what is love but a witness? I wanted a companion; a colleague and a fellow traveler. I needed a guide and an escort; a counterpart who would love me and celebrate my success. Who would selflessly lift me after a fall. Who would look beyond my failures and see only my intent. To see my aim and not my mistake. As a flawed and profoundly imperfect man I knew I could only do so much and still be human since being human is the greatest quality I believed a doctor could possess and even more importantly retain.

“How was I to know I needed or wanted any of this in high school? To imagine any of it in a weighty and sober adolescent dream, some rare clarifying juvenile hallucination or an impossibly clear-headed youthful fancy? Of course not. I went to a dance and fell in love.

“I remember seeing her big brown beautiful eyes and a brilliant smile that silenced all the noise around her. I remember the straight waist-long hair and the vitality of timbre in that first ‘hello.’ Instantly I felt a chemistry, some law of physics had been broken, and I was smitten. I had no idea if anything I was feeling was mutual but I dove into a conversation that referenced friends we had in common and how I was going to be on the football team only to discover that she was going to be part of our cheerleading squad.

“We went to separate schools as mine was an all-boys Jesuit high school and hers a Catholic school run by a strict order of nuns. We went on to continue talking and exchanged phone numbers. I was a junior and she was a sophomore. I asked her out on a few dates and we went out but coming from an extremely conservative and traditional family we were never allowed to be alone together. Either one of her two brothers or her mother would have to chaperone us and be present always. We officially became boyfriend and girlfriend, or ‘steady,’ as the term was back in 1972. She refused to use my name for almost a year as saying my name ‘Julio’ embarrassed her, something she still laughs about when reminded today.

“She was so beautiful and became an essential part of my daydreams moving forward. She occupied the most visible and irreplaceable part of my night sky. The vision of my future would open to me as that darkest of unknown velvets and only these things I knew for certain. That I was in love with Dora and I wanted to be a doctor. Those two north stars, if we are allowed to have two, were mine and they were the brightest of lights every time I attempted to peer into the uncertain.

“Did I envision more than fifty years later I would be writing about this road we continue to travel down; this impossible transit, defying all the odds? No. But life in its infinite and often merciless entropy, gave two teen lovers shelter from the chaos and made one thing certain. Without each other we would simply not have shaken the forces that exist to divide and isolate one person from the other; the strain of the essential and the ephemeral necessarily pushing and pulling until a small breach left for neglect to nourish becomes too much to repair.

“If I had any advice for doctors married to doctors or considering a dual physician marriage, it would be to apply equal amounts of selflessness and sacrifice to the one foundational person living beside and aside you. To the person who is closest witness to you and your life. In the most intimate of ways they see you and the vulnerability that is your human condition manifest. Everyday. The person who willingly or unwillingly channels your anxiety because they happen to be there, with you. Present. And sometimes being present is the only thing that counts. Love those present, vigorously.

“Reserve some of that selflessness and sacrifice you so willingly give your career and give it freely, often, and without remorse to the one who bears witness to you and that very career you share. They will need it from you because they do the very thing you do. And only they know how hard and rewarding it truly can be and is.”

Dora’s perspective

“Julio and I have shared the most abundant life together,” Dora says. “We have had the benefit of similar backgrounds and culture and yes that helps, but we could not be more different persons. Yet those differences have only served to keep it interesting, to keep us engaged. The commonalities are the bedrock, but the love and support we gift each other every day is to look on our aged faces. Faces that wear a shared and common experience. The rarest and most beautiful of all things. The understanding and compassion we afford our patients. Why not each other? Our companion in this and all endeavors? With no rewind or do-overs we owe it to ourselves to give the ones we most love this relief. A refuge and reward for the sweet and faithful companionship only a fellow doctor can perceive.

“Fifty years married is a lifetime. Most marriages that endure have a magic, a certain theatre to them. Ours is better. It persists after the curtain is drawn and the lights dim. It carries on after the performance and the make-up comes off. It prevails and remains. We do not retreat to our corners to meet again later. Julio and I, as well for all other doctor marriages, step on the same stage, stand in the same arena, every day and look at humanity straight on. We do not retire to unknown spaces or into voids. It may be scary for some but to know he is quietly there for me, to understand me in a way that only he can, beyond our home or our children has given our love a permanence I wish others could enjoy, if only for as permanent as humans are.

“Also… I highly recommend housekeepers and/or nannies.”

Deborah Shlian and Joel Shlian are family physicians and authors of Lessons Learned: Stories from Dual Physician Marriages.