Healthcare Professionals: Date at Your Own Risk!

According to popular culture, hospitals are hotbeds of romance, an equal mix of coding and cuddling. Patients fall in love with nurses, nurses fall in love with physicians, and physicians stay in love with themselves. Hospital romances are so common that a report in the November-December 1999 Journal of Emergency Medicine describes ER waiting rooms: "The waits are so protracted that one can observe all cycles of birth, death, love, and romance in the waiting room." If there's that much going on in the waiting room, imagine what's happening once you get inside.

There was a statistic some years ago that in spite of international travel, most people found a spouse within five blocks of their home. Hospital romances usually happen on the patient care floors, and are the result of proximity and high turnover. People working on the floors usually qualify for staff housing, which is a plus, and because of high staff turnover, get more opportunities for selection. Between traveling nurses and residency rotation, any attempt to find a relationship on the job probably feels like speed dating. Given the rising acuity index in every hospital, 30 seconds is probably all the time that anybody gets to socialize anyway.

Even so, there are exceptions in the support services. In the hospital where I worked, a departmental secretary married the head of radiology, and two pharmacists (married, but not to each other) ran off together, but since they ran to New Jersey, it sort of takes the romance out of the story. Then there was the physical therapist and the occupational therapist. They went to New Jersey too, but somehow it felt better. In the interests of full disclosure, I married a patient – but since she was an outpatient at the time, I'm not sure it counts.

One of the reasons that romance springs up so often in a hospital setting is that there are clear advantages to romancing a fellow employee. Where other romances may start with a casual cup of getting-to-know-you coffee at the local Starbucks, hospital workers are more likely to break the ice at the hospital cafeteria. This offers several advantages. First: It's easier to focus on your companion when you really want to forget about the food. Second: Many hospitals offer a 10% employee discount at the cafeteria. This may not seem like much, but to younger staff members, struggling under the weight of student loans, it's practically subsidized romance. Third: You don't have to worry about what to wear. All this, combined with staff housing, which saves on travel expenses, the hospitals are underwriting the costs of romantic encounters.

Still another reason there are so many romantic encounters in hospitals is the fact that some people find love not just once, or even twice in a lifetime, but go around several times. While the home lives of most professionals don't get much attention, it seems as if physicians aren't allowed any privacy at all. Their private lives have been the subject of a great deal of study, including the rates of marriage and divorce.

Johns Hopkins University Medical School followed the lives of their graduates from 1948 until 1964, and found an overall divorce rate of 29% after three decades of follow-up and 32% after nearly four decades of follow-up. There were significant differences based on practice specialties. Over 30 years of follow-up, the divorce rate was 51% for psychiatrists, 33% for surgeons, 24% for internists, 22% for pediatricians and pathologists, and 31% for other specialties.

The timing of that study makes it likely that the respondents were predominantly male, but a 1993 review by the Department of Surgery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, in Toronto asked about the lives of woman surgeons. While this was a snapshot, compared to the nearly 40-year-long Johns Hopkins review, only 6.5% of woman surgeons were separated or divorced. Yet another study, this one from the University of Minnesota, questioning woman physicians and surgeons who were married to physicians, reported a divorce rate of 11.3%. With female physicians in such stable relationships, even when married to a male physician, you have to conclude that any non-MD marrying a male physician or surgeon had better take a number.

While patterns of physician divorce may vary around the world, it seems as if the worst place to marry an MD is Australia. The Royal Australian College Of General Practitioners reviewed Australian physicians, and their marriages. They found that Australian physicians have several unifying characteristics:

These may not be universal traits among physicians around the world – some seems to be uniquely Australian – but it doesn't matter. It certainly seems as if Australian MDs are half a bubble off plumb, but when their marriages go on the rocks, it's the wife who gets the worst of the deal. Regarding the wives, they wrote, "She becomes anxious, phobic and depressed; she resorts to somatisation, abuses alcohol, analgesics and benzodiazepines, complains constantly about her husband's hours of work, his colleagues and other staff in the practice and engages in compulsive behaviours (spending sprees, gambling, exercise and dieting). These behaviours further alienate the husband and sexual difficulties develop."

And then, to make matters worse, the poor woman often goes and consults – of all people – a psychiatrist.

Hospital romance novels have become a well-defined subset of the romance novel genre. Medical thrillers have to have a romance as a subplot. They look good on paper, but for real romance, stick with the people in food services and the laundry room, or at least radiology techs and admitting clerks. That's where you'll find romance that lasts.

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