Trying to maintain a healthy, stable relationship is challenging as it is. However, dating is much more difficult if you have a demanding job that either requires long hours or is the opposite of your significant other’s schedule. A Reddit user asked the question, “What careers are a turn-off for a serious relationship?” Many jobs people responded with in the thread surprised me initially, but they made sense the more I thought about them. Here is what people shared.
1. “I think it’d be difficult to date a person in the bar scene. I work a standard 8-5. My free time for doing anything fun is on weekends. They work from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. on weekends and are pretty flexible midweek, but even then, they will work a lot of weekday nights and even spend their free time at their bar or their friends’ bars. It’s a lifestyle I can’t live, even when I have strong feelings for someone.”
3. “Pilots and flight attendants. Irregular hours and long periods away from home can make maintaining a stable relationship challenging.”
4. “I would rather not date someone heavily involved in politics as their career. It seems like far too much stress and difficult to disconnect from.”
5. “Anything where the person is selling their body in a sexual capacity (stripper, pornography, sex worker). I don’t think I’d have a problem if this were part of someone’s past, but I wouldn’t be okay if it were part of our present.”
6. “Anything in the entertainment industry.”
“It can sound so dreamy from the outside. ‘I won’t end up going off the rails like those other stars’ and ‘I won’t be corrupted by greed and fame’ until they either do that or quit because they haven’t made any progress. Very few can be happy in such an industry.”
7. “A corporate job that sucks her soul out before I get to embrace her at the end of the day. The problem with those careers is the day never really ends. Neither does the week, month, or year.”
8. “Long-haul trucking or constant travel jobs.”
9. “Anything with long hours. After a 12 hour day, you just want to shower, eat, vague out for 30 mins and then sleep. Not ideal for building a relationship.”
10. “HR 100%. Everyone that I’ve met is bubbly but totally lacks empathy.”
11. “Surprised no one has mentioned sales. It’s typically a highly political position, may require travel, and hours can get wonky depending on the quarter. Also, there’s the fact that you are, in ways, selling yourself (sometimes more, sometimes less) to get people to buy things they may or may not need.”
12. “Pastors. I don’t have a problem with their beliefs, but I feel like I need to be perfect. I don’t want to be in the spotlight at church.”
13. “I haven’t seen this here, but many 24-hour manufacturing jobs make it difficult to maintain relationships. Rotating shift work with day and night rotations gets difficult. People don’t understand what working nights are like, and they really don’t understand manipulating sleep schedules to stay awake during a rotation. Maintenance outages can be even worse. In the oil industry, a 3-month turnaround is normal. You work 13 days during that period with one day off 12-16 hours a day. If your SO is a regular M-F 9-5 schedule and you’re on the night shift, you may not see each other for three months. That really strains relationships if the partner isn’t aware/used to it.”
14. “Cop. Any job where someone is placed at a higher level in the legal system and is less likely to get arrested in, I don’t trust it. If my partner hurts me, and they’re a cop, the likelihood of me being able to get it through court plummets immensely. Hell, it’s probably easier to divorce a divorce lawyer.”
15. “Line cook (or food service) so far. The hours are awful, most holidays are not spent with your family if the restaurant is open, and work conditions are labor intensive in a high stress environment.”
Are there any careers that are a turn-off for you? If so, share it with me in the comments below!
