How Do You Date a Therapist? (#18)
7 Minute Read
Imagine you’re on Tinder and see an attractive person. You swipe right. Holy cow, you connected! After a bit of flirting and some innuendo while chatting, there it is, the big question.
“So what do you do?”
“I’m a marriage and family therapist.”
“Oh...you’re a therapist...So, are you, like, psychoanalyzing me right now?!”
Cue the eye rolls and sarcastic internal yell.
Just because I’m a therapist doesn’t mean I care to practice my job while I’m off the clock, and for the record, yes, you might have some unresolved issues. Just kidding... Real talk though, dating as a therapist can be pretty challenging, especially when our job itself pertains to helping clients build healthy relationships with themselves and others. Since we usually do not share our personal lives with clients, here is an inside perspective on what it is like to date as a therapist.
When you’re single
The struggle to avoid seeing your clients on dating apps: There is nothing more uncomfortable than seeing your client on a dating app (and knowing that they can probably see your profile too). When you’re out trolling for fish, you’re going to include that shirtless selfie/bikini shot, which doesn’t exactly scream professionalism. Many of the details that wouldn’t otherwise be shared with clients are all out there for them to see, such as your age, schooling, casual personality, private musings, and even mutual friends. Generally, we leave the door open for clients to bring it up in session if they feel so inclined, but otherwise we will just pretend like it never happened and move on.
The presumption and defensiveness from dates: Now don’t get us wrong, there are some really lovely people out there who are super chill about us being therapists. Unfortunately, we’ve gotten the same set of annoying questions more than enough times to start developing some irritation.
“You’re a marriage and family therapist..are you even married? How can you help married people if you’re not married?”
“Aren’t you too young to be a therapist?”
“So are you secretly psycho?”
And my personal favorite, “It must be nice to get paid to listen to people all day.”
It can get really frustrating to ask someone a completely innocent question, only to have them throw it back in your face by assuming that you’re doing market research or practicing interventions on them. We like to blend in too, and many times that could include some parts of our therapeutic personality, but we choose to go on dates because we genuinely want to get to know the other person.
When you’re in a relationship
Limited resources: Becoming a therapist, specifically a marriage and family therapist in California, comes with a huge upfront cost. It takes two years of studying intently for a master’s degree after college, with many programs requiring students to undergo their own therapy at personal cost, before graduating and beginning the stressful process of gaining one’s hours to become licensed. Associate therapists can take anywhere from two to six years to accumulate all of their necessary hours, often being paid a fraction of the session fee that a licensed clinician would charge. The amount of time and money spent during this journey can impose a lot of stress on the parties involved, especially the therapist’s partner, who might be the primary source of income for a long while.
Confidentiality: Dating anyone who has a confidentiality clause in their job description can be difficult, but it is especially heightened when your partner’s (the therapist) emotional burden must be kept secret. It can be really tough to know that your partner (the therapist) had a rough day at work, yet not be able to say or do anything about that particular issue, simply because it is not shared information. However, it can also be very validating to simply support your partner by being present, offering a shoulder to cry on, or engaging them in their favorite activity. You do not need to know what is wrong to be loving. On the therapist’s end, we struggle with finding the appropriate outlets to offload all of the emotional weight that we carry, which is why we talk about self-care all the time. The hardest part about not dealing with our own stress is that we know it will eventually become a problem for our partner, and we don’t want to be the instigator of poor relational habits if we could be doing something differently.
Minor fishbowl mentality: While being a therapist is not as restrictive as being a residential assistant in college, we often find ourselves scanning the vicinity for clients or anyone related to our professional lives. We try to limit our clients’ exposure to our personal lives because in addition to feeling embarrassment about what they might see, it takes the focus away from the work that they are doing in session. If a client saw me having dinner with my partner on Valentine’s Day, we might spend the first five minutes of session redirecting the conversation, which takes away from the overall process of change. The automatic thought of the therapist could be fear of the clinical dynamic shifting knowing that the client has publicly witnessed the therapist’s private life.
When we first started graduate school all those years ago, we wish that someone could have told us about the challenges of dating when you bear the job title of marriage and family therapist. Granted, there are many perks to dating as a therapist/dating a therapist that we are excited to share about in next week’s post, and given that we are all about insight, we hoped that this post might give others a peek behind the curtain of some unexpected challenges. If you are a therapist that is currently single, don’t lose hope! As we have all learned, it’s a process, right? Go get that self-care!