how normal is it to help your partner in their job?

by Alison Green on March 3, 2025

A reader writes:

I have a senior role in a large architecture and engineering company, and my partner is an academic. I sometimes ask him for advice on how to handle a thorny problem at work and occasionally ask him to read something I’ve written. My partner, on the other hand, regularly asks for my help in core aspects of his job — putting together a spreadsheet to organize marking for courses, fixing up formatting on PowerPoint slides, shortening grant applications to meet word-count requirements, drafting sensitive emails, etc. My partner also often talks through ideas for papers, which I really like doing.

For some of these tasks, I am better at the software and can do them much more quickly, while for others my partner is asking for my help because he is slammed with work or has a tight deadline or needs another pair of hands and knows I will do a good job.

On the one hand, it feels like partners in a marriage should help each other when needed but on the other hand, sometimes it feels like I’m doing the work for my partner, when I have my own demanding job to do. So my question is, what is the range of “normal” within relationships for how much spouses help each other with their jobs?

The way you’re doing it — asking for advice on how to handle a thorny problem or to read over something you’ve written — is typical and fine. The way your partner is doing it — asking you to actually perform pieces of his job — is not.

Some of it is the cumulative effect. It wouldn’t be a big deal if he asked you once for help fixing the formatting on a PowerPoint. But when he’s regularly asking you to do what’s essentially admin support, that crosses a line. You’re not his administrative assistant, and if he needs that kind of help, that’s a problem for his workplace to solve, not a burden he should expect you to take on. It’s definitely not appropriate to turn to you because he’s busy and “needs another pair of hands.” That’s work. That’s something his employer is paying him for, not you, and maybe they need to pay someone who isn’t him but it should go to an employee, not a supportive partner who’s willing to do it for free.

Moreover, in a lot of jobs, there would be enormous confidentiality problems with giving a non-employee access to those kinds of materials.

You are not an “extra pair of hands” for your partner’s employer. You can be a sounding board and someone he can brainstorm with. You should not be doing his actual work.

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  1. Pop*

    I have to say, this is VERY weird that he asks for help doing these things! My partner and I regularly bounce ideas off of each other or talk about sticky situations – and my best friend and I do it even more often, working in the same industry – but I’ve never heard anyone expecting their partner to contribute to their work like this. I’m so curious about where your partner got this idea from or why he thinks it is okay.

    Reply ↓
        1. Nesprin*

          It’s funny how the more things change the more they stay the same.

          I know more than one couple where she’s the PI and writes the grants/papers and he manages the lab and keeps the grad students happy.

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    2. Antilles*

      I don’t think it’s weird to ask for this kind of thing *occasionally*. For example, if you’re preparing a major presentation, having a trusted person who’s not familiar with it look at your slides can quickly identify things that may seem clear to you but not to someone seeing it for the first time. Frankly, depending on the target audience for the presentation, a partner might be more useful for this sort of thing than a colleague who already knows the topic in detail. And even something like the Excel example could make sense if you’ve been really banging your head on a wall and want a second set of eyes.
      But even so, this should be the kind of thing that only comes into play for either uniquely tricky situations or particularly high profile items. It shouldn’t be happening “regularly” like OP says it does.

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      1. Sam I Am*

        I agree, but there is a big difference between asking your partner to look at a Powerpoint and give you feedback on the content from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the subject matter, versus asking them to make formatting edits for you.

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        1. Kevin Sours*

          I think there is also a difference between “hey can you do this one complicated thing you know how to do easily” and “edit my presentation for me”. There are instances were 15 minutes of somebody’s time can save you hours of flailing.

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          2. MigraineMonth*

            Even in the first case, though, there should be a plan for learning how to do the complicated thing. “My partner asked me to spend 45 minutes showing him how to make a pivot table” is better than “every couple of weeks my partner asks me to spend 5 minutes making a pivot table.”

            There’s a difference between asking for help to grow and asking for help to remain dependent.

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            1. Guacamole Bob*

              This really depends. I’ve been Excel tech support for my spouse for many years, though I really doubt it has ever exceeded like 5 hours a year spread across different instances. She deals with spreadsheets that come from different places and are often badly configured, and the tools needed vary – in one case it’s a bunch of VLOOKUPS to compare among spreadsheets, in another it’s text to columns to separate out last names or a SUMIF or pivot table to summarize the data or some date and time math.

              15 minutes from me can save her hours. She’s picked up some tricks over the years, but if I weren’t available it probably still wouldn’t make sense for her to learn the wide array of Excel tricks that would be needed since the issue is new each time and only comes up occasionally. But since I live in Excel daily, I am happy to help her out.

              OP’s case sounds like it’s more of a routine thing, which I would also be annoyed about.

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            2. Kevin Sours*

              There is an element of “is this ever going to come up again” to consider. But if it’s come up more than twice then it’s time to break down and learn to do it yourself.

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              1. Arts Akimbo*

                This is an important consideration. A long time ago, my mom typed one of my dad’s papers, and he just kept asking for “one more little thing” until she ended up researching and writing his entire PhD dissertation. The mission creep can be insidious. OP seems to have found herself doing her own high-level job and acting as assistant to her spouse in her free time.

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      2. Kt*

        Former academic here, in a hetero marriage fwiw. My non-academic spouse and I have proofread things for each other (CVs, resumes, not papers) and have talked through thorny emails. I showed him pivot tables, he has showed me formatting things in Excel.

        Neither of us would ever ask the other to set up a spreadsheet for work, or draft an email. No way. That’s work, not just an extra set of eyes!

        To be blunt, sounds like you’ve fallen into “faculty wife” role.

        Some folks are happy with that. Up to you.

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      3. Always Tired*

        I have called friends and asked “If I buy you beer, will you be my designated idiot for an informational session I’m working on?” But I wouldn’t like, expect someone else to make the edits. Just to tell me if I’m in the weeds or too complicated or the slide is too crowded.

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    3. Boof*

      it’s academics – everyone asks for help wherever and however they can get it. I don’t think its weird as written ie it’s SUPER NICE to have someone overread an email you’re not sure is coming off wrong, getting a fresh set of eyes on a paper you’ve looked at multiple times and are starting to be unable to see the forest for the trees to get the word count where it needs to be – but just becuase it’s “nice to have” doesn’t mean OP has to do it if it’s starting to be too much.

      Just I really don’t think what I see here is weird for academia. It would be weird if they were asking their spouse to say, actually start the draft of the paper (as opposed to do a final pass at the end), to generate the ideas (instead of be a sounding board to screen ideas), to come up with the class curriculum (vs help with software for polishing).

      I can almost guarantee their job has nothing that will support them in this, unless maybe they are a high powered rainmaker or providing some sort of essential service – source, I’m a doctor in academics. Only a few institutions will have support for proofing/writing papers, grants, and organizing slides, even though we’re being doctors on top of doing all this stuff (this matters because basically clincial care makes money, research takes money, academic institutions like the research but have to balance the books, so how much support they provide depends on how much they can justify it on whether it’s more efficient overall to pay someone else to do it). Mine is not usually one of them without a grant / award specific for that, and mine is no slouch.
      So, LW can feel free to say no to parts they don’t want to do, but it’s unlikely there’s someone else who will do it barring a grant or student to support it.

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      1. wittyrepartee*

        Yeah, it might be beneficial to them as a partnership for her to be taking over some of these things. If she enjoys doing them, and her husband would otherwise be really stressed over grading or staying up until midnight drafting emails- then it might make sense to be doing this work. HOWEVER, chat GPT is amazing for a lot of this stuff, and her husband should check it out for the email drafting.

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        1. Fragrant Moppet*

          Using ChatGPT can be problematic for many academics due to privacy issues and intellectual property concerns. It’s not an option for a lot of reasons — and the emails in question are described as “sensitive”.

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        2. br_612*

          ChatGPT, or really any AI at non-enterprise subscription levels is an intellectual property and confidential/proprietary information no no. It takes all of the input and uses it to train the algorithm.

          So scheduling grading probably okay. Emails are a maybe. Grants are an almost definite no. Grants would have unpublished data and plans for a project. That should absolutely not be sent through an AI that’s keeping the input.

          Also I’d argue that using generative AI on a grant application is way too close to academic dishonesty to fly. The granting institution likely wouldn’t be thrilled if they knew.

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          1. wittyrepartee*

            Yeah, I think the way one would usually use that tool is to make a de-identified first draft of an email that omits specifics, and then do the rest by yourself. It’s good at seeding the email so you’re not staring at an empty page. Similarly, you’d want to keep student data out of it, but you could easily have it spit out a weighted spreadsheet to enter student data into for your class.
            Also a good use: “please change all references in this syllabus to “Spring 2024” to “Spring 2025″ and update the dates in the grid to reflect a schedule starting Monday 1/27/2025.”

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          2. Quill*

            Yeah, you CANNOT put anything remotely connected to a student’s identity into ChatGPT, I just had to take that training!

            Reply ↓
      2. Elitist Semicolon*

        Many of the most prolific authors in my academic field were men who could only be that prolific because their wives acted as their secretaries/editorial support on top of raising the kids and managing the household. And as everyone else has pointed out, it still isn’t unusual for the partner (or partners) in academia to talk through their work with their non-academic partners.

        What stands out here to me, though, is that some of these tasks/examples are also things that an academic should be talking with their broader network about. Discussing paper ideas and grant proposals with other colleagues in the field is so important for multiple reasons, and it doesn’t sound like the OP’s partner is engaging with their broader academic community in that way. That’s going to work against them in the long run, so regardless of who is setting up the spreadsheets for course grading, OP’s partner would be better served connecting with colleagues on a fair bit of what’s described here. Yes, academics are busy, but we make time for colleagues because they make time for us. (And besides, those discussions about someone else’s work can be restorative.)

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      3. not nice, don't care*

        Explains why so many faculty try to dump work on any warm-blooded staff person they can bully into it. Yikes people, if you can’t manage the workload, get a diff job. Don’t force others into subsidizing your poor workload management.

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        1. Boof*

          Academics is kind of terrible at recognizing that “other jobs” are an option – they’re sort of treated like “what you do if you can’t hack it” and not “actually necessary for most to go into if academics isn’t modeling themselves as an MLM”

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        2. iglwif*

          This is both fair and unfair, I think. Fair in that people, even in academia, should not offload the work they can’t manage onto unpaid spouses, children, or friends. Unfair in that it’s not faculty who control the presence or (mostly) absence of paid support staff, it’s the administration.

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        3. Nesprin*

          It’s really, really hard to manage the workload in academia- the workload is whatever you will bear. 7 years in you’ll either get tenure or you get to start over somewhere else.

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          1. Casino Royale*

            And a lot of institutions are cutting back on offering tenure at all nowadays–they’re just hiring more and more adjuncts because COST SAVINGS. And instructors can say “fine, we won’t take those jobs” but like…someone’s gotta teach those students especially as the old guard eventually dies or retires.

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      4. Frieda*

        Adademic here – my partner definitely reads things (proposals, article drafts) before I submit them if I ask him to; he has done copyediting and indexing for me in the past (since he also has an editing business on the side.) I have paid him for copyediting but the indexing he offered to do for free so he could learn how to do it more effectively. He has also done editing and research for friends, as paid work.

        I have also asked my young adult kids for feedback on my writing, partly because they sometimes ask me for the same and also because they’re good readers and writers. Certainly they can tell me if something is unclear! Occasionally I have written something about my parenting experiences and of course they get to read that and veto anything they don’t want made public.

        My partner moved out of academia and now a lot of his work is confidential but I still review emails for tone if he asks (and if the emails do not contain any information that he shouldn’t be sharing.)

        I would never ask him to set up a spreadsheet for me, write anything from scratch or edit in a substantive way, grade my students’ work, etc.

        Reply ↓
    4. Judge Judy and Executioner*

      Agree. My partner and I sometimes use each other as a sounding board for issues at work to get a different perspective. When I applied for a new job with a presentation component in the interview stages, he sat through a practice run and gave feedback. I can’t imagine him coming to me to help him do actual work. At one point, it was not unheard of for a wife to take on administrative duties for her husband, but I imagine his employer would not appreciate that he’s pawning off work on his wife. There could potentially be confidential information or personal details of students, which he should not be sharing.

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      1. wittyrepartee*

        In academics, unless you’re talking patient data- they won’t care. The administration will just be happy to be getting free labor.

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        1. Also an academic*

          The universities will absolutely care about student data, and FWIW, many universities prohibit faculty from uploading even deidentified student data to AI programs such as ChatGPT.

          Depending on the nature of the database work or the sensitive emails, OP/their spouse should be cautious about using ChatGPT for those tasks.

          Reply ↓
          1. wittyrepartee*

            Yeah, I guess it’s been my experience that student data got treated pretty fast and loose when I was a TA, particularly when compared to the security used for HIPAA regulated data. It might have been the university setting I was in though?

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            2. Raktajino*

              I work in an education-adjacent field, and have had a LOT more trainings related to data privacy in the last few years than I did a decade ago. I think there has been a push in the last few years in the US at the state level towards more data privacy. This is probably as a response to the increased data privacy laws in the EU, or at least responding to similar cultural concerns.

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            3. Academic Physics*

              It really depends is my impression. I’m at a university now where the students can be litigious, so we care a lot about FERPA. Not that there was anything slimy going on at the other places, it’s just that here we actually receive FERPA training.

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        1. iglwif*

          I am depressed, but not surprised, to hear that.

          My spouse and I both got our BAs and then stopped. Him because he’s a first-generation university grad and he decided he’d had enough. Me because I’m a faculty brat and absolutely not.

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    7. Beth*

      It’s not that weird in academia. I dabbled in academia for a while (got halfway through a PhD before noping out of being a professor). One of the factors in me opting out was the realization that in my field, the big-name professors were 1) almost always men, 2) almost always married to women who had some experience in the field, and 3) often quietly getting work from their wives. A few decades ago, he’d be a professor and she’d be quietly doing his typing, note-filing, translations, etc behind the scenes. Nowadays, it’s more common for him to be the big-name research professor and her to be the spousal hire who’s also technically a professor but is more focused on mentoring (both of their) grad students and handling (both of their) departmental admin responsibilities. Launching a career as a professor always involves some amount of luck, but as a woman who did not intend to marry a man, given the dynamics I saw in my field, I felt like I had even less chance than most of my peers.

      Reply ↓
  2. ZSD*

    Since the partner is an academic, he’s probably employed by a university, not a company. And while everything Alison says about how things *should* work makes sense, I think the reality is that lines blur like this much more in academia than they do in other jobs.
    That doesn’t make it okay for your partner to ask you to perform all these tasks. It does mean, though, that there may not be admin support at the university who would be expected to do this work. Academics are more often expected to handle all this stuff independently (or convince grad students to do it for free).

    Reply ↓
    1. ZSD*

      Also, in academia it’s common for the one person (faculty or grad student) in the department who knows how to code in R to do everyone’s R coding for them, or the person who’s a whiz at PowerPoint to jump in and help others with their PowerPoints. There’s just a lot more, “Hey, you know how to do this, so can you do it for me?”
      Again, that doesn’t make it acceptable.

      Reply ↓
      1. epicdemiologist*

        The letter writer isn’t someone in the department, though. In your example, all those people are on the university’s payroll.

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        1. ZSD*

          See what darlingpants says below. If one grad student helps out another, it’s not viewed as them helping out the university; it’s viewed as them helping out that particular grad student.

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          1. Elitist Semicolon*

            Yes, but those grad students are still in the field/part of the academic network. This is a case where the partner is relying most heavily on someone who is not in the field. That, in the long run, is going to keep the partner from developing relationships with that one person in the department who can wrangle R or the person at the university one state over who is better at 13th-century palaeography than anyone else and who will always help figure out a tricky word.

            Reply ↓
        2. Boof*

          It’s just a question whether as a spouse they’re willing to help out like that or not. There’s almost certainly no official payroll for any of this.

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    2. Arrietty*

      My ex absolutely used me for this kind of support during her PhD. (And then didn’t acknowledge me in her thesis, which was published after she left me. There’s gratitude for you!)

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      1. iglwif*

        Hahahaha my mom copyedited my father’s book back in the early 1970s, and was not in the acknowledgements of it when it was published.

        (Just 12 years after the pub date, they were divorced.)

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      2. ecnaseener*

        I’m reminded of a nonfiction book I read by a big-shot Ivy League researcher who thanked his wife in the acknowledgments for literally researching and writing first drafts of chapters. Nice that he acknowledged her at all I guess, but that sounds more like a co-author to me!

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        2. Wendy Darling*

          I wrote a section of a paper my PhD advisor published and was on the team that did the original research she used, but left the program to go work in industry before she got around to finishing and publishing it. I will DIE ANGRY about her not listing me as a co-author or acknowledging me anywhere. I know I left the field but I still did the work, you monster!

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      3. WeirdChemist*

        From the other side, my roommate included a long thank you of support for her fiancé in her dissertation acknowledgments (not even for the level of help described in the letter, just for emotional support and whatnot). And then they broke up because she found out he was cheating on her less than a month later…. So now that’s in there forever!

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        1. Wendy Darling*

          “Partners thanked in thesis/dissertation acknowledgements but you later broke up under extremely crappy circumstances” was practically a meme in my department. There were basically two ways it could go: Either you married the person and stayed with them for the next 10+ years, or the relationship catastrophically imploded in the next 18 months.

          Reply ↓
      4. Arts Akimbo*

        My mom didn’t get any acknowledgement for my father’s PhD, either, despite having written the thing. My dad changed a few words, stuck his name on it, and then didn’t even bother to put her name in it even as “Special Thanks.”

        Reply ↓
    3. arachnophilia*

      I came here to say exactly this! There is almost certainly NOT admin support to help with these tasks, and academics (particularly in faculty positions) often have to perform multiple jobs – service to department/university, teaching, and research (which involves preparing grant proposals). Each of these could be a full-time job – I mean, I do one of those as a full-time+ job – and I completely understand why the partner would be asking his spouse for help. Should the spouse do it? Maybe, but with boundaries, is what I would say.

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      1. anon for this*

        “Admin support” are being fired at many universities, even though we all do more than one person’s job and at much less pay. Mayhap faculty will just have to get their hands dirty.

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      2. I didn't say banana*

        I think that’s Alison’s point – if the job doesn’t include admin support, then the husband or the employer have to deal with the consequences, not the spouse.

        I have worked in academia and it certainly wasn’t the case that the person who was great at Y did Y for everyone – you’d never get your own work done!

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    4. darlingpants*

      Academia, especially pre-tenure, also has a unique spin where the university is benefiting from your time and expertise, but your career achievements (like your papers and your grants) are spun as being for your own benefit primarily (like if you publish as a grad student it will help you get a good post doc which is benefiting you and not your workplace), so his optics might be that you’re helping your husband’s career, not doing free work for a university.

      It’s a screwed up dynamic that helps perpetuate the power imbalances in academia, but it’s not 100% wrong. I had my husband proof read all my papers in grad school and help format my defense slides, and when I got an industry job I had to break the habit.

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    5. Alex*

      Yeah, I’d say asking for help with this kind of stuff is pretty common in academia in a way it would be bizarre in other work contexts.

      That said, it is also OK to say no! “Sorry babe, I can’t help with that at the moment, I’ve got work to do,” is really reasonable. You don’t *owe* him this kind of help. As an academic, he should be able to figure out how to get it done if you can’t (as in, he has plenty of peers to ask).

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      1. Boof*

        Yep – I feel like academia, especially lower rungs, basically relies on paying people as little as possible and trying to get as much work as possible out of them. It’s “for the mission” but it easily has all the same problems of a toxic nonprofit or “but we’re family” corporate environment – not saying all academics but everyone needs to carefully evaluate what they’re giving, what they’re getting, and whether they want to keep doing that for the next year, 5 years, 10 years, etc. And if the answer is no, it’s ok to bail; when I was in grad school etc it always sort of felt like leaving academics was some sort of “failure” (it’s very bad at looking at other options as really viable) but it’s ok if academics is just a stepping stone to something else better if it’s not going where you want it to go!!!! So have a serious discussion with your husband if this is the right path LW, if you don’t want to keep doing this work and if he doesn’t have the bandwidth to do it himself either!

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      2. O rlly*

        The drafting emails part is really above and beyond, though. It’s one thing to discuss beforehand as needed, it’s quite another to actually do the writing.

        It also sounds as if this is something that the partner is doing regularly, which is pretty obnoxious. OP, I’m afraid your partner, while he may be overworked, is taking you for granted in a big way. Whether it’s genuine or weaponized incompetence doesn’t matter — hopefully you can lay down a boundary.

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    6. Samwise*

      Unless OP’s spouse is a department head or a dean/assoc dean/(maybe asst dean) or is a super duper rock star academic, there is no administrative support for this sort of thing.

      The spouse may have a graduate assistant, but typically it is not appropriate for a GA to be doing a lot of administrative support work– some, of course, but they shouldn’t be working solely as admins (Of course, profs will certainly throw this onto their GAs, but they shouldn’t).

      Also, I’d say what OP describes as core aspects of the spouse’s job are not in fact core aspects. They are the administrative piece of their job and they’re expected to do it, but the core aspects are things like: teaching (developing/revising the course, preparing for class, teaching class, grading, meeting with students), research (which includes writing grants), and service (committees, committees, committees).

      OP’s spouse could see if there’s a grant writing support office or person at their institution.

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      1. AnotherSarah*

        Yes–exactly this! I’m an academic and my husband is academic-adjacent and we do both of these things all the time for each other. And we tell each other when we can’t. The administrative support for academics is very low, usually. I’ll also say, and I don’t like this but it’s true, that for a lot of academics, they just don’t see the admin stuff as their job AT ALL. It’s not what we’re evaluated on, it doesn’t count for T and P, and it really takes away from the stuff we are evaluated on. For example, we used to have an admin person do our reimbursements for us. It’s kind of a complex procedure and because she did the whole department’s, she could do them fast. I need to do them maybe 2 times a year and the system changes every year and it takes me a long time to do it. But now I have to do them myself, which I do see, rightly or wrongly, as work I have to do that’s also somehow not part of my job. To be clear, it’s my responsibility. But it’s not part of the PD or any other evaluation criteria.

        Alison often writes here that busy high-powered people do get underlings to do parts of their job that feel like “well isn’t that the CEO’s job?” but it’s not worth her time to do it. Academia can be like that. I make 88k a year and I have to spend 3 hours on a form? When an admin could do it in 30 minutes? But that’s how it is.

        Obviously if the expectation is that the spouse does it, that’s not cool. But the idea that it’s not the prof’s responsibility….that kind of makes sense to me.

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    7. rabbitpotato*

      To add on to the folks talking about the culture of academia: There’s a *long* history of female partners to male academics doing work that’s seen as lower prestige (mainly technical work like OP describes), with male academics getting the credit. So I hate that this plays into a long-standing gender dynamic in this field specifically.

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      1. Red*

        Yeah, this was setting off my alarm bells as soon as I saw he’s an academic. I’m a female PhD student myself and there’s a *lot* of men in academia who intentionally dump administrative work on women – whether their colleagues or partners – and never acknowledge those efforts.

        To put it another way, the only couple in my family who have ever done things this way are my 90 year old grandparents, when my grandma would act as my granddad’s unpaid secretary. This is really unacceptable as is.

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      2. STEMProf*

        Came here to say exactly this. This *was* a very common dynamic – I think it’s gotten a bit less common in recent years but still quite prevalent among older academic men.

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  3. Purple Stapler*

    Well, this is a different twist on the recent Friday thread posts about employees regularly asking coworkers for help with tech stuff

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      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        It would change how OP approaches changing the dynamic. She feels responsible for helping him. She’s asking for outside relationship help because she doesn’t want to be his support staff and thinks she needs a professional opinion from AAM and the commenters to justify saying, “nope. I am not going to do those tasks because I don’t want to.” I think it’s been shown that women are less willing to say no to a request.

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      2. Consonance*

        I think it wouldn’t change the answer that Alison is giving, but for me it would change how I approach the conversation with my partner. If he’s just… disorganized? used to pawning things off on others? that’s one conversation. If he’s doing this to women because he thinks of women as admin support, or wives as an extra pair of hands, that’s a different marital conversation.

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      3. Ellis Bell*

        It wouldn’t change the specific steps for this one aspect; you’d just step back and let them do their own job more often, whatever the genders. However as a woman, if this was me, and I considered somehow becoming his admin to be possibly a symptom of sexism, I would probably run a full set of checks on the relationship including financial stuff, emotional labour and domestic duty stuff. If he’s so busy all the time because he’s scrubbing the grout in the bathroom and making dinner every night, that’s more of a “Honey you seem to be avoiding your job; is this software stressing you out?” conversation than a “Uh I think I might be pulling all of the weight in this relationship”. If it’s the former, sometimes training your partner on nifty software hacks is a kindness, if it’s the latter, do not do that.

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    3. Teapot Connoisseuse*

      That’s inevitably where one’s mind tends to go, although OP’s gender is unclear from the letter itself. But it’s very much reminiscent of that “my time is more valuable than yours” attitude.

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      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        This. OP does not want to do these types of tasks, but partner asked nicely and added compliments so it would be rude to say no.
        But it wouldn’t. A request is just that. It’s not an order. It’s not a statement about the condition of your relationship. “No, I don’t want to type up a spreadsheet after dinner. Sorry.”

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    4. Not for me*

      Not in my life. My husband helps me with similar things and I am female. He works in IT and I am an elementary school teacher. He helps me with formatting on PowerPoints, inputing data on a spreadsheet (de-identified), or even helping move furniture.

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      1. I didn't say banana*

        I mean, that’s gendered in a different way, asking a man to do the technology and heavy lifting…

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    5. sb51*

      I feel like gender played a massive role in how academia became Like That (expecting faculty spouses to do unpaid, unrecognized work), even if gender is not a factor for the LW.

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      1. Elsa*

        Yes, when I read this letter I immediately thought of the dissertation I read once which included in the acknowledgments: “And thank you to my wife, who typed this entire dissertation for me.”

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        1. Aldabra*

          My mom typed (on a typewriter) my dad’s entire dissertation. He was a very intelligent man, but also not great at spelling, or, probably, typing. So there’s only the one copy. I’m sure it took her hours and hours.

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        2. RC*

          My “favorite” example, I am dead serious: acknowledgments in the fairly recent biography of *Sandra Day O’Connor* started with “My wife, Oscie, was essential to this book… she worked over every word of the manuscript… it is a joint project of labor and love.” BUT ONLY ONE AUTHOR! (yes I took a photo of the page because ugh dude).

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        3. O rlly*

          There’s a whole hashtag for this, which regroups all of these tone-deaf acknowledgments to wives and girlfriends typing, editing, researching…
          : #ThanksForTyping

          I’ll add a link in a subsequent post.

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      2. your genderqueer dad*

        I agree with this – structurally/historically this problem has to do with gender, but as Teapot Connoisseuse said, OP doesn’t indicate their gender so I don’t know that we can conclude anything about this specific case

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      3. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Yes, this. Expecting spouses (or, in point of fact, wives) to do unpaid work for their husbands was ubiquitous not that long ago. So, yes, gender probably does play a role here. But OP’s spouse might not be doing it maliciously, he might just be oblivious to the dynamics.

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    7. IT-Man*

      No.

      I’ve actively helped my wife with more technical things like this for both her study and job (even though Google is right there) while there is very little she can help me with mine.

      Not everything has to be gender related, especially when a lot of it tends to be more skill related.

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  5. KeinName*

    The mentioned tasks are very much not the core part of the job of an academic. If I were OP I would not like to do all that, but these aren’t things you get tenure with or get papers published or get research funding. Academia also isn’t a company where you can say you have to much on your plate and to split the job into two FTE. The way you get admin support is to prove you bring in the big research money or you’re valuable in another way as a researcher. Essentially you’re working on your own reputation, and that academic is using his partner to focus on his research goals I guess.
    But I‘d guess also that he has no awareness that he gets more work out of her than she of him, and he might not notice if she’s doing more of the shopping or hoovering… so a talk is in order.

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    1. Snakesnacks*

      This. Super common in academia. However, I would say even for academics, writing sensitive emails is a Bit Much. Formatting spreadsheets/powerpoints is a definitely something I would do for my partner (also an academic, and I am also better/faster at these thing that him!), but editing grants I would say is not normal (but would be normal to ask a friend in the same academic sphere or grad student to do, so maybe that’s where he’s coming from?)
      All this of course, hinges on whether you WANT to do these things for him or not. If not, he can ask, but you should say no! And if he has a problem with that then that’s a marriage discussion, not a work one.

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    2. Bananagram*

      Yeah, fellow academic here, and Alison is definitely right, even if I disagree on the details. I’m even married to a non-academic, and I do many of these things! (The tilt tables on my grading spreadsheet: yeah, that’s not me.) But here’s the difference — it’s sparing, and it’s *always* either something he genuinely enjoys doing that I cannot do myself (editing chapters), or something that takes him 5 minutes and is way out of my skill set. And I check each time to make sure he’s okay with the request.
      LW, you don’t have a work issue, you have a relationship problem, I’m sorry to say. But I think it’s pretty fixable. I’m sure he’s overworked, and you are caring and supportive to help. But you should stop at the things you enjoy, and only when you feel you have the time. He can either use ugly powerpoints just like the rest of us, or hire an assistant, or figure out how to make them elegant himself. But depending on you isn’t sustainable.
      Good luck!

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      1. Bananagram*

        oops, sorry, KeinName, nesting fail! my comment was meant to stand alone. totally agree with you, though. :)

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  6. Kate*

    As an academic, I agree with the gist of Alison’s response but not the details.

    Admin support? Hahahahaha. Unless he’s at a top-20 $$$$$$$ U.S. school, no, a university is not going to have paid support staff for individual professors to fix your PowerPoints and deal with your gradebook. You’d be lucky if you could even access a onetime training on specific software when you arrive. If there’s a center for teaching (etc.) there MIGHT be staff available for a one-on-one to train you in the gradebook or LMS, but to train YOU, not to do it for you on an ongoing basis. When it comes to PPT, it’s highly unlikely that the contract includes an expectation to teach with a specific software, so don’t expect any university support there either.

    Shortening word lengths, drafting sensitive emails . . . 1) I am not an AI booster but these are both things AI is aces at and 2) they are fairly basic aspects of an academic’s job. Producing texts that communicate in a particular way is the primary way academics establish our credentials and qualifications (yes, even outside the humanities, everyone has to publish or perish and that involves producing texts that communicate to a particular standard.) If your spouse is so overwhelmed by these basic tasks, I would question whether he’s going to be able to function in an academic job. If he thinks he’s well qualified to function in an academic job, then I would conclude that he just doesn’t want to do the work and prefers to get you to do it for him. That does not seem like great spousal behavior to me, and I’m sorry.

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    1. toolegittoresign*

      Yeah, my husband works in sales and is not great with Microsoft Office, so I used to help him when I could with some things like formatting but now we’re both thrilled he can either ask the AI to do it or ask the AI how to do it. But if AI hadn’t come around, I would have suggested he take classes at the local library or Adult Learning Center on Word, Exel, etc.

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  7. Not Tom, Just Petty*

    Is the task something that could be done by executive assistant?
    Is the task something that he could learn to do more ably by watching a tutorial?
    If you answered yes, you are his support staff.
    Is the work something that would check the boxes for an internship?
    If you answered no, you are his support staff.
    “But you do it so much better/quicker/more neatly. But you are soooo good at it.”
    Yes. Because you had to learn to be quick, effective and presented well because you didn’t have a personal assistant or misappropriated intern.

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    1. iglwif*

      You are correct … but OP’s spouse is in academia, which means unless they are very high up in their department at a pretty well funded institution, there are no interns and no support staff at their disposal.

      Is this good? Absolutely not. Is it reality? Absolutely.

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        “My school won’t give me the support staff I need to do my job” sucks, but isn’t justification to make your spouse be your unpaid support staff, in my opinion.

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        1. iglwif*

          Oh I agree!

          I was responding to the idea that OP’s spouse should be delegating this work to their paid executive assistant or intern instead of to OP by pointing out that these people almost certainly don’t exist.

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  8. Forrest*

    I have also made an Excel spreadsheet for my (academic) partner! My partner had an extraordinarily complicated marking scheme with five different elements all marked out of a hundred, weighted differently, and supposed to be turned into a mark out of a hundred, and as an arts person had no idea how to calculate it. I wonder if part of this is the way academics are hired for being brilliant researchers in very specific areas, and then just suddenly put in charge of budgets or managing people or running committees without adequate access to training or support.

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    1. Forrest*

      (although if your spouse needs help with PowerPoint AND Excel AND writing — er, thats taking the piss a bit. STEM prof needs help with writing / arts prof needs help with Excel is a bit more usual.)

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      1. A. Lab Rabbit*

        I work in a highly technical field (analytical and quantitative chemistry) and the number of colleagues I have who don’t know how to do basic things in Excel and PowerPoint is much higher than the number who are fluent. Don’t assume that because someone is in a technical field, they are good at all technical things. MS Office is just never taught in most places.

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        1. metadata minion*

          Yeah, those are really not skills that particularly go together, despite both being “techy”. I can’t code to save my life, and am firmly in the humanities bucket in terms of interests and aptitudes. I am also an absolute wizard at Excel. And conversely my sister is a scientist and does all sorts of extremely shiny data visualization stuff, but I have no idea if she’s particularly good with Excel, because when you work at that level you’re using specialized software.

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            1. bamcheeks*

              — at Excel, but I got there slowly. I’ve worked with people in certain professional careers like academia and medicine there is a known thing that there is much more of a cliff— you spend fifteen years being a great researcher or surgeon and not managing any people or budgets, and then you step up to a role and suddenly have a £20m budget and responsibility for 40 people. In other roles, all of that happens much more gradually and with more opportunities to demonstrate competence (or incompetence) before you move to the next level.

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        2. Mockingjay*

          My present company is the first one in my 30-year career span to offer and encourage all staff to take MS Office and writing courses, available free in the company intranet. At most businesses, basic computer and word processing skills simply aren’t taught or TPTB don’t think there’s enough ROI to justify such a course.

          One complicating factor – even if you are trained, if it’s something that you don’t use everyday, you will quickly forget most of what you were taught during that lunchtime online course. So of course you turn to someone else for help. (I freely admit Excel is my nemesis.)
          The issue here is who you should turn to.

          Same as you would for a coworker, I think OP should deflect most of these tasks. Use variants of “what have you tried,” “I can’t help you right now,” “have you searched for a template; there are plenty of free ones online,” and “why don’t you ask colleague to review, they are in your field and can grasp nuances that I can’t.”

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    2. There Will Be Cats*

      The days of a prof having his wife type up his manuscripts and keep his professional calendar are over.
      Yes, it’s true that academia has slowly removed a lot of admin support positions, and this is something academics have complained about. But the solution is not to have their partners do it.
      Also, a lot of the things you say you’re doing wouldn’t even be admin support level- they’re something a prof would have a post-doc or senior grad student do. If your partner can’t ask them because “it’s not their job”, well, it’s not yours, either.

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    3. Samwise*

      Your partner should see what kind of LMS the school supports and ask the tech department for assistance in setting up the gradebook in the LMS to do what they want it to do.

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  9. Rainy*

    This is unfortunately historically a part of being an academic’s partner, especially because the academic in question was typically male and their partner was typically a wife. She ran the home, raised the kids, organized the dinner parties and schmoozefests, typed the manuscripts, served as a research assistant (usually unpaid, even when the wife herself held an advanced degree), and for her troubles, occasionally got a species named after her (sometimes under her formal married name, which was *just his name with a Mrs on the front!*), and sometimes had a monograph dedicated to her.

    However, things aren’t always traditional because they’re good, and I think this is one of them. If it were me I’d back way off on offering substantive assistance. LW, if your partner needs assistance putting together lectures and slide decks, they need a TA. If they need help analyzing or visualize data, they need an RA. You are neither, and you have your own career. If your partner wants that kind of assistance, they need to write it into their grants or ask their department for it.

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    1. Dr. Cubicle Farm*

      I came here to say this! It sounds like the partner has somehow imported the outdated and sexist model of “faculty spouse” into 2025. Don’t do this for him.

      My partner and I are both academics, and he asks me to proofread his papers for him before sending them back out to journals, but that’s just a few times a year, and in return he listens to me talk through ideas or gives me presentation feedback. But it’s mutual and we’re both doing about the same amount of work for each other!

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    2. Medium Sized Manager*

      There’s certain things that make me happy to live in a modern era and “doing all of the work so my husband looks good” certainly tops the list. Incredible how the myth of “women didn’t have to work” persists despite scenarios like these.

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      1. Rainy*

        Part of what drove this dynamic was sexism, obviously, but what’s fascinating to me about it is the layers of that sexism. A: When we talk about this particular phenomenon, the wife in question often had an advanced degree in the same subject as her faculty spouse but found it hard or impossible to get a job in academia as well as outside it. B: The amount of labor involved in that faculty position was (just like today) more than one FTE, but the salary was enough to support a household, so the spouse was free to contribute their effort to something that they were often (see above) also educated and passionately invested in.

        C: Let’s maybe just mention a common power differential in this kind of situation, where the spouse of a faculty member had sometimes gone straight from being their student and research assistant to being the same person’s *wife* and research assistant. Yikes.

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        1. iglwif*

          Yeeeeeeeep. A, B, and C all played out in my family at various times!

          My father had just gotten a new tenure-track job offer when he married my mom (wife #3), who had finished her comps and needed to start working on her PhD dissertation. They moved across the continent and to a new country for his job, and she got sessional work in a related department, the proceeds of which paid child support for my older siblings, his kids with wife #2. He was supposed to support her in writing her dissertation, but ~somehow~ that kind of never happened, and although she later got another master’s degree, she remains ABD on that PhD to this day. She also copyedited his book, along with all the other stuff that Faculty Wives Did In Those Days. She’s not in the book’s acknowledgements (I have checked).

          Fast forward ~12 years from their wedding. My father has had tenure for a while and has been, and then stopped being, head of his department (that was a whole saga). They now have 2 kids together, his older kids are in or through grad school, and my mom continues to do sessional and part-time teaching work in continuing ed and other departments that are not my father’s department. (Her PhD that she didn’t finish is in the same field as his.) He starts sleeping with one of the PhD students he’s supervising, and [long and ugly story short] my parents get divorced and he marries the PhD student, who does finish and defend her dissertation, with his help. He has to change departments because of the ~situation~ but doesn’t lose his job as a result of his relationship with a PhD student under his supervision.

          He retires when he hits retirement age, she gets a teaching job. For some time all three of these people are teaching at the same not-super-large university [it’s bigger now, but had ~16K students at the time], which is why I spent more money to go to an entirely different one in another province XD

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          1. Casino Royale*

            Okay if you hadn’t mentioned province (so I’m assuming outside the U.S.) I would have honestly guessed that this was my alma mater because it sounds just like my department head/advisor.

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            1. Academic Physics*

              Me too! I know of a situation relatively similar that played out in Massachusetts about 7 years ago.

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        2. AthenaC*

          The other tricky thing is that if the male academic does more, better work because of his “faculty spouse” being amazing, then she (and the kids, if applicable) indirectly benefit(s) because it makes him a better provider.

          So I can see how the web of self-interest / social expectations all get tangled up in this, but of course that doesn’t make it okay.

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    3. out of step with the z*

      I’m a man, in case it matters … and when my spouse was working, I definitely did some admin support work for her job. We both benefited. Maybe it’s not strictly fair. Maybe I should have drawn a line and refused. But I was invested in her success and the kinds of deliverables I could knock out in a hurry were things that would have taken her a lot longer, and would not have produced as good a result.

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      1. Rainy*

        When people aren’t talking about you or your situation, you don’t need to defend yourself. No one is judging you. :)

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    4. HannahS*

      This is a valuable point. I can’t exactly get what I want to say into words (ironically because both me and my husband are in busy periods at work and I am quite sleep-deprived) but here’s my best try:
      I am a female physician. What I observe among my male colleagues (and especially among my male colleagues who are also fathers) is that they feel entitled to a lot more support from their female partners than my female colleagues and I get. So I’ve had conversations where a male colleague with a kid the same age as mine will tell me that they don’t get up at night with their kid, because they can’t afford to be tired at work. Like. Every female physician I know gets up at night with their kid. And we just…manage. It sucks. But we do it.

      I’m trying to get at the idea that it can be true that the job is designed to have a second, unpaid person pitching in, and it can also be simultaneously true that the OP’s partner’s female colleagues are just managing without using their spouses as unpaid labour. And as Rainy said, there are other options for the OP’s partner.

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      1. Boof*

        Eh, I think we have to be a little careful especially with very young kids – gender preference may be a really real thing that isn’t automatically terrible if it’s what everyone is ok with. I don’t know how old the kids in question are but even tho I’m the main earner, a physician, and my husband was a stay at home dad with our last one I still was usually the one up at night because i was breastfeeding and trying REALLY HARD to keep up supply (like, honestly, probably way too hard but being a physician kind of selects for people who will try super hard for something once they set themselves on it). Also male physicians here at least still get a lot less parental leave – which irritates the hell out of me but it’s still the culture – so IDK we’re a way off from equality or even equity probably but it’s not necessarily individual sexism driving it

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        1. HannahS*

          Honestly, I started to write out a whole bunch of thoughts, but then I deleted it and landed on this: the reason why men in heterosexual relationships (on average, I’m not talking about you specifically) get more support from their partners than women do doesn’t matter if it’s driven by individual sexism or by culture and institutional sexism. It’s still being driven by sexism in my field, and it’s a point worth considering for the OP.

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        2. Working Mom*

          I think the point, though, is the “can’t afford to be tired at work” part. Female physicians can’t afford to be tired at work any more than their male counterparts, but they often have to figure out a way to deal with it anyway if they are still the ones getting up with their kids some or all of the time. That applies long after parental leave is over and children are weaned, unless you win the sleep lottery and only have children who always sleep through the night in their own bed from a very young age.

          Whether it’s individual sexism or not, it’s still part of a system that frequently works better for one gender than it does for another. Especially because this is an example of the ways those same female physicians have likely had to work harder under more difficult circumstances to have the privilege of being taken less seriously and earning less than their male colleagues.

          In a more equitable system, both parents would be accommodating their child’s needs, even if the child preferred one parent over the other. I have a 4 year old who still wakes up and needs help getting back to sleep, and who has always preferred me. When it becomes clear that it’s a phase and not a one-off situation, my husband and I figure out together who is going to do what so that everyone can maximize their sleep and rest. Sometimes that means I do all the middle of the night stuff because my kiddo falls asleep faster and I can roll with that type of sleep disruption for longer. But if that’s the case, it usually also means that he takes on more household and childcare stuff (especially on the weekend) so that I don’t wear myself out doing it.

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      2. Hey there*

        This a an excellent point and one I’m always making to my partner- when he’s looking for something, he asks me. When I’m looking for something, I look for it.
        It sounds so simple but it’s, like, a mind-set. S the last time he asked me where something was I automatically was like, oh I’ll look for it when I get home. Soon as I got home I said did you look in (obvious first spot to look). He said No and had the nerve to chuckle. Well, dear reader, since that day over a year ago I’ve dropped all urgency around his asks. I just wait, and then guess what – he figures it out. Be been using this technique with more and more people and it’s been working like a charm. Women are socialized to carry out others requests – jumping, be enthusiastic! I am now giving these gifts to myself. Like wow, you’re busy? I’m busy too!

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    5. CommanderBanana*

      Yeah, I highly recommend Googling “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady, published in New York Magazine in 1971.

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    6. Academic Physics*

      I’m reminded that in the opening of Bertrand Russels’ history of western philosophy book he thanks his wife, for all her help compiling this massive text. It’s unfortunate we will never know how much she contributed to the work, but I could believe a lot of dynamics would, in the modern era, necessitate a co-authorship at least.

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  10. Apex Mountain*

    I’d say if you enjoy doing this and helping your partner, keep at it (Alison’s caveats about privacey et aside)

    It sounds like the frequency might be more of a problem than the tasks themselves..

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  11. Free Sophia Tolstoya*

    LW, your partner should not be asking any of this for you but I also want to highlight some tasks you listed that are particularly problematic. I work in higher education administration.

    1) Putting together spreadsheets for marking: Grading information is protected by FERPA. This isn’t something you should come anywhere near. Also many universities have software that protects student data that faculty are supposed to be using for grading.

    2) Drafting sensitive emails: If these emails are sensitive, you should not be drafting them. It’s one thing for him to ask you to read one over that he really needs an extra set of eyes on but if the emails contain any sensitive information (like say are communications with students about grades which again federally protected information), you should not be involved at all. He needs to be drafting these things himself and it should never be because he needs an extra set of hands.

    Also a lot of what you’re describing are core competencies with his job. He should know how to use excel and powerpoint and also to be able to edit a grant down to fit into the word count. These are all skills we expect of our students. Frankly, that’s nonsense that he’s having you edit his work down for word count. He can google how to use excel and power point if necessary.

    Using your partner as a sounding board and asking for advice (particularly for thorny issues or when you or your partner are thinking through something) is fine. Asking you to produce or edit something isn’t.

    It’s 2025 and you have your own career. A romantic partner is not a secretary.

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    2. Lisa*

      I agree with everything you said, but for #1 if the task is “create grading spreadsheet” and the faculty spouse is the one actually inputting any student data, that’s not a FERPA problem. If the task involves seeing/manipulating student marks then that is a no-go.

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      1. Academic Physics*

        Because of how I do grading I understood this as working with the grades themselves. That’s because Canvas lets me export all my grades to excel, then I typically do the math in Excel because it makes morse sense to me.

        I also agree with you that it depends on how much information the spouse has access to. But if the spouse has access to even a blank spreadsheet, yet populated with students names? That seems like it could be a FERPA violation as my impression was that you’re not even allowed to confirm someone is in your class.

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  12. Caramel & Cheddar*

    “For some of these tasks, I am better at the software and can do them much more quickly”

    Well he’s certainly never going to get better and quicker at this if you keep doing the work, LW!

    “while for others my partner is asking for my help because he is slammed with work or has a tight deadline or needs another pair of hands and knows I will do a good job.”

    These are productivity issues for his manager to handle. It’s not your job to fix his workload or help him with his time management. I realise that him being in academia might make the “manager” piece weirder, but ultimately these are problems for him to work through in his workplace, not to bring home and have you do.

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  13. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    Be forewarned that there can be bad relationship consequences from this – not just the imbalance, but the nature of the help. If Partner A gets Partner B involved whenever a particularly unpleasant or stressful task comes up, then Partner A may come to link Partner B with the stress subconsciously. No good can come from this!

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  14. Teapot Connoisseuse*

    Partner is definitely overstepping the boundaries of what’s reasonable with the actual admin work. I used to happily check the wording of my husband’s emails if he asked (bc English isn’t his first language and he lacked confidence, though he did get to the stage where he’d internalised me sufficiently to spot mistakes by native speakers), but he’d have got short shrift if he’d asked me to do an actual part of his job.

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  15. Lacey*

    Yeah, my husband and I will occasionally ask each other’s advice on a workplace issue.
    But it’s almost always an interpersonal issue (Brad from Sales is a BIG jerk, how can I reply that will be professional, but not a doormat?) and not a work issue (Hey Babe, if you were designing this ad, would you use the horizontal or veritcal version of the logo?).

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  16. A large cage of birds*

    This would be very odd in my marriage.

    We’re in completely different industries. We ask each other excel questions (around excel functionality, not building tables for one another), to read over emails that may be difficult, or occasionally proofread. We’ll talk over work problems with eachother like you would with a friend but they’re mostly office politics or inter-personal questions where you just want another ear. He’s never asked me to do any actual work for him or vice versa, and I would likely balk at any request like that. (Not only because I don’t know anything about teapot engineering!)

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  17. Exhausted*

    I am a consultant and work primarily within academia. The things that academics, especially male academics, as their partners to do is weird. I have received reimbursement requests from spouses, questions about processes, and even “ideas.” The lines in academia are endlessly blurry. I think it’s up to you, as the partner, to set some boundaries. My partner has a blue collar job and I do not assist with it :)

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  18. HannahS*

    Oh wow, no, this isn’t typical at all! My partner and I do what I imagine most people do: talk about the difficult (or nice!) parts of our days, occasionally ask each other for advice when navigating thorny interpersonal stuff at work, and we proof-read each others’ job applications.

    Doing actual work tasks for your spouse is very, very odd. I get the drive to support him, but I would draw a line at actually doing his work for him. “All-hands-on-deck” support, to me, means that last week I did all the daycare pick-up, drop-offs, and cooking because my husband was working either early or late or both all week. Or I’ll ask him to do our child’s entire bedtime and my laundry because I still have work to finish up in the evening.

    Granted, we both work in confidential jobs where it would be illegal to share work materials. But even so, if we’re in a busy period we mainline caffeine, miss out on leisure time/sleep/socializing and get it done (or, in healthier workplaces, talk to your boss and ask for more support.)

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  19. An academic*

    There is a long, long tradition in academia of wives doing substantial amounts of work for their academic husbands for free and without co-authorship. That said, it doesn’t make it right.

    However, it’s so strange to read that “his company is paying for” his work. I’m a professor, and if you need something that the university doesn’t provide for everyone, you have to figure out how to make it work. You get time by cutting corners on things like service (the stuff you do for the university like serving on committee) and teaching, and you get money and staff by bringing in grants.

    My own experience has been that you’re always expected to do more without anyone asking or caring if those expectations are reasonable. If your colleague is able to publish N papers and get $X millions in funding, why aren’t you? Never mind that they are browbeating their postdocs into working 80 hours a week or burning themselves out at both ends. It’s really unsustainable and disadvantages anyone who doesn’t want to devote every waking hour to their research.

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  20. Abe Froman*

    This is a very interesting question! I would sometimes help my spouse with formatting of things like spreadsheets and word documents because: A. its not something she’s very used to doing and B. I really really enjoy making spreadsheets look nice.

    On my side, I tend to be more like OP: I often need to have a sounding board, someone that can ask a clarifying question, or even just pretend to listen to me so that I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself while I think something out.

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  21. Insert Pun Here*

    This is not normal in most jobs. It is very, very common in academia (which is not to say it’s okay.)

    Unless the partner is a star prof or (maybe) a law professor, there is not going to be any admin support here. This is not how academia works. There is probably not much in the way of “confidential” info here either, unless the partner is talking about students, in which case FERPA comes into play. But in general, an academic’s ideas belong to them, not to the university. (Other exception would be anything patentable/subject to the university’s tech transfer policy.)

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  22. epicdemiologist*

    Beyond the confidentiality question, there’s an accountability question as well. The university will not be pleased if they get sued for the results of an error or bad decision, and they find out the work was being done by someone they didn’t screen, didn’t hire, and didn’t train.

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  23. Academic Brat*

    He should not be regularly asking you to make spreadsheets and fix formatting for him. But I think the culture of academia makes it easy for these things to seem reasonable to him. I come from an academic family and we regularly draft difficult emails for each other, read drafts of others’ papers, etc. (I did used to help a lot with my parents’ Powerpoints as well, because they are technologically incompetent). But this is all reciprocal labor. I would certainly balk if my partner was trying to make me do administrative work for him rather than both of us relying on each other for constructive feedback.

    But an average professor is definitely not going to have an administrative assistant to do these things for him. So that is not going to be a workable solution. He will just have to learn to do his own work. (Which is too much work for any one person, because academia does not value professors properly. But that’s not something he can solve by relying on you).

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  24. Amber Rose*

    It sounds like this isn’t uncommon within the realm of academia, but that honestly doesn’t matter. The question that needs answering is do you, LW, want to keep offering this level of free part time work? If not, then it’s time to have a work/relationship boundaries conversation.

    I could tell you that almost every spouse ever does this, and you could still not want to and I would support you in that because this is your life. You get to choose. If you’re tired and burned out, then stop. This isn’t your job, there’s no consequences here for you except for your partner’s reaction, and if he doesn’t react well, that’s also good information to have.

    As an aside, my husband has on occasion taught me Excel skills. He doesn’t do all the work for me, but will demonstrate with some of it and then check that I’ve understood. If your partner is that bad at the software, I think it’s time for teaching rather than taking over.

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  25. Mutually Supportive*

    It’s also making it much harder for his single colleagues to look like they’re performing well, as they won’t have spousal support (unpaid admin) to draw on. So yes, a quick sense check or conversation about how to handle a tricky subject (but with no identitying details), the kind of thing that you might chat with a good mate about, but not Doing The Work for them!

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  26. No academia for me...*

    I left academia after grad school because I prefer a collaborative, team environment and the next steps in academia are very lonely and isolated. You basically sit in your office by yourself writing grants. You have grad students who depend on you but you can’t bounce ideas off them like you can a peer. You also have no one to learn from, like a boss or mentor, really (too much politics mostly, if they do give you one). So this may not be a good fit for him. Sometimes the attitude of academics towards people who leave academia is kind of snobbish; maybe he’s being affected by that and thinking that leaving academia is a failure, and not a valid path.

    And/or, he may have a skills deficit if his own PI did not model good PI behavior. Needs help with cutting word count? Can’t do a powerpoint? Doesn’t know how to manage his time efficiently? Why didn’t he learn these things in grad school or his postdoc? If he hates them/is not good at them, why did he go into academia? Writing is central to a PhD, so is time/project management. Who wrote his dissertation, gave the presentations that went with it, etc? It’s worth thinking about how he made it through his PhD. Did he do the work himself, or did he have a lot of “help”? The PhD is supposed to be 100% your own work. If he’s struggling this much now, it’s possible something went wrong earlier on.

    As for the rest, he doesn’t know how to draft “sensitive” emails? This is a skill you learn over time by doing, isn’t that how you learned? He’s lonely now as a PI? He needs to find peers to bounce his ideas off of.

    So, consider that you may be “enabling” him to not realize how much he is struggling, by doing all this for him. He needs to recognize that as a PI, he needs to learn to manage his time and do all the core parts of his job, himself. As others have said, if you do it for him, he’ll never learn… this “you’re better at it” thing is central to why women do so much more housework and emotional labor and now he’s found a way to use it to get you to do the menial tasks of his job, also…

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  27. Jam on Toast*

    There’s a whole sad and infuriating collection of academic dedications where entitled male professors blithely thank their wives for their ”assistance” preparing their book manuscripts and research projects. You know, the quick, easy jobs like retyping their entire manuscript 3 to 4 times or translating some obscure Latin manuscript into English or organizing their research notes for the past twenty years. All in between the dusting, and the vacuuming and raising their 3.2 children, of course.

    Reading your question immediately brought to mind this unequal, unsung work. Your work and your skills have an immediate, professional for your academic spouse. Their grants are better written and more likely to be funded. Their powerpoints and excel documents are properly formatted. Their workload is less arduous and their professional interactions are sensitively managed. What a great state of affairs for them.

    But how do they reciprocate?

    Because nothing in your letter suggests that they are offering an equal return of tangible professional support. I’ve been married a long time, and I know that the balance of support shifts between a couple over time as crises come and crises go. That’s to be expected. But this doesn’t seem like that at all because your description makes it sound like you’re doing all the work to make their professional path smooth and blemish-free at the expense of your own professional success. And quite possibly, your romantic relationship, too.

    I’d encourage you to think about how you would treat this person if they were a co-worker and not your spouse. You wouldn’t do their work for them, would you? Of course not. You’d take steps to point them toward training resources like LinkedIn or training workshops. You’d ask them what steps they’d already taken to solve the problem. You’d talk to them and identify the pattern you’ve seen and tell them what you will and will not do if this problem happens in the future.

    I think you need to do that here. Depending on how long this has been going on, they may not like the new regime you’re trying to institute, but I’d encourage you to remember their partner, and they’re yours, too and I think you deserve better.

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  28. ThatGirl*

    Yeah, this would be weird in my marriage. And my husband does work in academia – but he’s in student support (counseling), not a professor. We talk about interpersonal work stuff, and if he ever wanted me to proofread a PowerPoint or something I would be glad to, but actually doing the work is a bit beyond the ken. It is interesting to me to read all these “oh that’s totally normal” responses.

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  29. Tired*

    This is so quaintly old fashioned… it’s a running joke/wry truism that academic’s jobs are still designed as if they have a wife at home taking care of everything there and acting as a loyal secretary/typist/copy editor/research assistant as well. Sadly universities no longer pay well enough to buy two people, and society has changed, but some people still hanker after the old ways or even advise others that’s how it SHOULD be. Hopefully the spouse can see the problem once it’s pointed out & they can renegotiate their lives together so that the balance is better!

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  30. Bibliovore*

    What your partner is asking of you is actual ‘work’ not ‘help.’ That said I did help my husband in a work capacity when we were newly married- answered the phone, took messages, put together tip-sheets, organized sales materials. He PAID me! I got 20 percent of his bonus.

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  31. Dust Bunny*

    I am not an academic but I was raised by someone who was one for awhile and have lots of friends and relatives who are . . . and he needs to learn to use the software.

    No, they’re not really a core part of his job, but they’re tools that he needs to do a core part of his job. He doesn’t have admin support, and that includes you. A lot of us have jobs where we are our own admin support and we learn to use whatever software we need because we need to learn it, even if we’re not naturally that interested in or comfortable with it.

    I think it’s reasonable to occasionally get a fresh pair of eyes/ears on something to see how the wording lands, or see how well it can be understood by someone who isn’t already an expert, but he shouldn’t still need you to set up spreadsheets or write whole emails for him.

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    1. Dust Bunny*

      Even in the 1960s my dad typed his own papers, and my college classmates and I just dove in and learned to use Excel well enough, if not fluently, without much help.

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  32. Been There*

    Can’t help but wonder if OP’s spouse was one of those guys who charmed girls into doing his homework for him when he was a student.

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  33. DataGirl*

    I work adjacent to academia (medical education) and unfortunately, this is not uncommon. It’s always an older male physician/faculty member whose wife is doing his admin work, and it is never appropriate. Not only is it a potential HIPAA/ FERPA violation if any personal identifiable information is accessed (for example, “drafting sensitive emails” for the OPs’ situation), it circumvents oversight, and can be a legal mess if/when discovered. Plus there’s the general yuckiness of male professionals dumping their tasks on their wives / work wives. Please stop doing this, OP.

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  34. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    OMG if you are in the United States he needs to take the FERPA training today! And actually pay attention to what it says. If he is giving you access to anything, especially anything with student names, grades, etc. it is a huge breach of confidentiality. Like, he could lose his job. I can see talking through paper ideas, and fixing a power point slide, especially if it’s something time sensitive. But everything else needs to stop.

    I’d ask him why he doesn’t bring these tasks to his department assistant? I work in higher ed and every department has at least 1 academic admin assistant. Our job’s are to help with things like spreadsheets for courses, grant applications, etc. Tell him that he needs to stop relying on you for this and either figure it out himself or find the right people to help him that work for his university.

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  35. Yes And*

    Early in my wife’s current job, I helped her design and program some fancy spreadsheets, because she knows I genuinely enjoy geeking out about designing and programming fancy spreadsheets. But – and here’s the crucial difference from OP – she watched me do it, learned how to use the formulas I was using, and hasn’t asked me for help with the same problem twice.

    “I’m better at this than my partner” only goes so far. What does it say that he hasn’t made the effort to learn?

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    1. Sillysaurus*

      Yep, I taught my husband how to use conditional formatting. Now he does it on his own. This seems totally normal and okay to me. I would also gladly teach a friend who asked, and I’ve certainly taught many coworkers.

      If I were the LW I’d be saying “you stay at the computer, I’ll talk you through how to do it so that you can do it next time.”

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  36. StressedButOkay*

    My husband is a software developer and all around very knowledgeable about computers just in general. The view times he’s asked if he could help or I’ve asked for help was very, very related to his particular mind set – mostly when Excel would bite the dust, or I couldn’t find the formula I needed, etc.

    I don’t think he’s ever done it more than a handful of times and certainly not for a long amount of time each time. But the help was more “fix an issue I’ve been banging my head against” or “find an easier tech solution to X” than any actual output I’d present at work.

    OP, I think it’s time to pull back, he needs to be able to carry his own weight at his own job.

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  37. Sylvia*

    My ex-husband and I worked in the same place, in nearly the same role (I was junior because he had been there 1-2 years longer), and on the same software development team, and he never asked me to do his work for him. We would test things for each other from time to time, as would other people on the team, but that was it.

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  38. OlympiasEpiriot*

    I — a non-academic — have asked a life partner to teach me something they know that will improve my ability to do a job. I have also taught something to a life partner.

    Asking them to DO it??! Aw hellnoooo

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  39. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    OP: I recommend you train him in those aspects of Excel & PPT he can’t / claims he can’t do. Discussing ideas /problems with him is fine, as you enjoy it and it sounds like he reciprocates that for your work.

    I’d dial back to that amount of help, because you are not a uni employee and he should not expect you to do an actual part of his job. Also there maybe confidentiality issues, since the uni did not choose or vet you for this work.

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    1. e271828*

      He should take an actual course in these skills, not get his spouse to “train” him. It will go a lot faster and better with a trained, organized teacher instructing him.

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      1. Academic Physics*

        Super doable, I agree! I’ve been at a few universities now, and all of them offered access to training tools for these skills. Either online webinars, or access through the product pages.

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  40. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    He’ll never learn Excel or PPT competently if you keep doing it for him

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  41. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

    I have had to point out to a few executives over the years that we can’t assign work to spouses. It’s a very old, disrespectful, and cheap-ass mode of getting things done.

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  42. Boof*

    My mom was an academic physician; I am an academic physician who started off trying for a PhD and gradually aborted to a masters and MD. I am still a bit bitter at “pure” academia.
    I think sometimes my dad helped my mom by listening to talks and proofing papers. My husband is now a stay at home spouse, mostly because he got fed up with elementary public education (what he did for his career for a while) and I can support us; but he + his mom who lives with us does truly help me work 50-60 hrs a week and not have the home fall apart and get the kids to all their activities etc. That being said he doesn’t help me with most my work – I think because most of it would take longer to explain how to do it than it does for me to do it myself XD So I don’t know that that’s a fair comparison – that being said we’ve had to have occasional “Reset” conversations where I was starting to feel resentful about (whatever) and it’s hard to have a proper convo when you’re already grumpy but we get there and things that aren’t working well get adjusted (so that I have time to exercise, or maybe I just need to let some notion go, or whatever, just have to identify what the real problem is and it can’t just default to “well I’m earning money so you need to do everything I want the way I want it” obviously, but on the flip side it’s hard to tell what work someone else is doing / what’s a reasonable request for more when only things that aren’t done are obvious)
    So if you don’t like doing these things LW feel free to have a reset conversation and your spouse can figure out how to do it themselves, or what they can let slide, or even if they actually want to stay in academia if they’re so overworked and tenure (? IDK what situation is and if they’re in the “close to getting it now or maybe someday possibly it could happen if they sacrifice a firstborn and are very lucky” )

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  43. iliketoknit*

    When my partner and I were both in academia, we were in the same field, and we read/edited each other’s work all the time and did things like help shorten applications to fit word limits. We both did those things for each other and we both had the same level of expertise; also, these were the type of things we’d do for any colleague in the field. We might have done it for each other a little more than for someone we weren’t partnered with, but it was generally part of the gig.

    The rest of it… that’s your partner’s job. It is not the expectation that your colleagues would do that kind of work for you – maybe someone would let you use a PPT they’d developed or share a grading spreadsheet, but they wouldn’t build or customize those things for you.

    I don’t think anyone should expect their spouse to do things that their professional colleagues wouldn’t do.

    And this gets weirder when you’re no longer in the same field. My partner and I are in different non-academic fields now, and very occasionally I’ve answered his questions about a resource that I use regularly in my job that comes up occasionally in his. Or I’ve run an argument by him to see how it reads to a lay person. But that’s it.

    We talk about our work a lot and offer input into things where relevant – talking through paper ideas would fall into this category for me.

    But there is no reason at all that I can see that you should feel obligated to create spreadsheets or fix PPT formatting or edit down grant apps (in this context) or draft sensitive emails (?!?) (tbf, I have very occasionally read some of my partner’s drafts of sensitive emails when they want an outside perspective on whether they’re being too harsh or too submissive or similar. But they *draft* the email themselves!).

    If you want to do these things, and it doesn’t raise any confidentiality issues, that’s totally fine. But it is not normal or expected that you do these things.

    (I say not normal… there is a venerable tradition of men academics relying HEAVILY on the unpaid labor of their wives, but it dates to a time where women were unlikely to get hired in academia themselves, and I think for most such women, this was the way they could do some of this intellectual work. It’s generally considered at best out of date and at worst exploitative today.)

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  44. CzechMate*

    I work at a university. Your husband can 100% get a TA, GA, or RA to do most of those things.

    The sensitive emails thing reallyyyyyyyyy gave me pause. If he’s having trouble sending serious emails, he needs to talk to his boss or another colleague in the department. That is one of the most important aspects of his job, so he needs to figure it out. It is 100% a FERPA violation to have a spouse helping with that, and he could lose his job and open the university up to a lawsuit.

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  45. e271828*

    LW, give your partner a Microsoft course as a gift. If PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and word processing are part of his job, he needs to skill up. If he cannot edit his own work, there are classes for that, and he needs to skill up. He can also pay people edit grants or articles for him.

    Getting the spouse to do the boring work (the editing, the slide-making and organizing, the footnotes, the index, etc.) is classic male academic BS and he should not be doing it. I am not loving the vibe here at all. You’re doing your job and he gets you to do the scutwork parts of his, too? Ugh.

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  46. Jasmine Clark*

    This is very concerning. You’re doing so much work for him that you really deserve to get paid for it. It’s not fair that he relies on you this much! Plus, I question whether or not you’re supposed to have access to sensitive info that’s part of HIS job, not yours.

    This is one of those questions where the fact that you felt the need to ask it shows that deep down, you know something isn’t right here.

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  47. GirlieePop*

    My dad is an absolute whiz at Excel, and I think everyone in our family has asked him for help at one time or another in the course of doing our jobs. I’m a writer, so I have helped everyone once or twice with reviewing and important document or a sensitive email. I think that’s normal. But this amount/type of work is pretty wild! If LW’s husband is too busy to do all of his work, the solution is to find a solution himself or put it on his employer to find a solution, not…this.

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  48. Port*

    In the nonprofit where I work, the male volunteer leadership who work in academia as their career are way too comfortable delegating the kind of work that I don’t see women and nb volunteers hoisting off on others. It is not attractive.

    There’s also a dynamic in my office where instead of learning how to do a thing—like properly search our database, manipulate data on a spreadsheet, or find files in our file system—some of my coworkers just ask me to do it, and those things just become my job over time. That too is unattractive.

    If I had a partner who leaned into their incompetence the way LW describes, I would become less and less attracted to them. Competence is hot. Incompetence just takes advantage of those around you.

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  49. Ess Ess*

    An easier way to look at this is if your kid came to you for the same help with homework. Would you do this same work on their homework that they are supposed to turn in? If they ask for advice on how to solve a problem, that is reasonable help. If you are writing their paper/doing their actual assignment, that is absolutely not right.

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  50. mango chiffon*

    There is a huge difference between “Do you know how to do X in Excel” and doing it himself afterwards and “Can you do X in Excel for me, you’re just better and faster at it.” How is he ever going to get better at something he struggles with if he just hands it off to you every time? Also sensitive emails? This seems like something you should not be involved in as many people have mentioned the legal reasons.

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    1. HonorBox*

      “How is he ever going to get better at something he struggles with if he just hands it off to you every time?”

      This. Is. Such. A. Great. Point.

      Especially because he’s in academia. Let’s say a student asks him a question. Then asks again. Then asks again. Because asking him is easier than learning it for themself. He’s likely going to stop answering the question because the expectation is that they’ll learn it…

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    2. Rainy*

      You absolutely can be! Don’t have a pet, though, and keep all your houseplants and books in your office on campus.

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    3. Catherine*

      Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I quit my PhD. My field was more conservative and hidebound, so my married male classmates were genuinely delegating research and admin tasks to their wives (editing, proofing, reimbursements, some grant applications, grading for 100 and 200 level classes, LOTS of translation of both texts for research, one guy’s wife handled all his foreign language correspondence with a research partner using his name). I felt that as a single woman I wasn’t sufficiently competitive in the field because I couldn’t manage all that work myself.

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      1. Academic Physics*

        Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! I can see why you felt that way.

        Also, if I found out one of my TA’s was asking their wife to do their grading, oh wow. The consequences that would have followed…

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  52. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

    Yeah, as almost everyone else is saying, you are doing too much for your spouse, LW.

    I say this as an academic myself, and as someone who has a spouse who is an academic. There are things both of us are better at than the other. Talking things out–fine. But doing the actual work? What’s reasonable is to show the other how to do something once, maybe twice. Then let them do it on their own. Sure, sometimes my spouse will ask me if something is possible in a particular software (so they don’t drive themselves crazy trying to do something it won’t do), or for me to show them one small thing quickly–but they’re still doing the actual work.

    Your spouse needs to budget their time better or get their department chair/dean/whoever is their boss to take something off their plate or see if there is a student employee who can do some of the more administrative stuff. Or not try to do everything they’re trying to do. Have they got tenure? Then they can chill, at least a little bit. Formatting powerpoints and organizing their grading is DEFINITELY NOT something you should be doing for them.

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  53. HonorBox*

    Across the decades I’ve been married, my wife and I have been sounding boards for one another. We’ve been a disinterested set of eyes to make sure something we’ve written actually makes sense to the outside world. And there have been times when I’ve asked her for help in formatting something for a PPT or making a spreadsheet actually spreadsheet. The difference here is that, aside from the sounding board aspect where we’re just having a conversation as we take a walk, the rest of it is few and far between. She’s not sitting down at my laptop, or me at hers, more than maybe once or twice a year. I’ve remembered the formatting and formula tricks she’s shared with me. We’re not regularly doing aspects of one another’s job for them.

    And here’s the thing… she DID work in academia for awhile. Aside from the regular conversation aspects, I had less involvement with her work than with any other role she’s had.

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  54. vscolorado*

    Partner and I are both academics and will routinely turn to each other for things like a “tone check” on a sensitive email, help simplifying a complicated figure, or a quick read through of a short piece of writing that needs to be accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. We might also chat about ideas for papers.

    But, we would never ask each other for the kinds of basic administrative support that lw mentions – making powerpoints and spreadsheets are basic parts of our job and everyone should have the skills to do this.

    If lw’s partner really can’t do these things efficiently he should be hiring students (RAs or TAs) who can to help him out. If he can’t do basic things like making powerpoints and spreadsheets himself and also can’t bring in the funding to hire someone to help, he might be in the wrong line of work.

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  55. Everdene*

    My partner is in finance and I am in third sector. We will sometimes help each other with delicate emails or proof an important bit of writing (or job cover letter!) but that’s as far as it goes. The confidentiality of our (very different) clients and huge variations in fields wouldn’t support much else.

    I have 2 stories though. Once, in a fit of huge frustration I wrote a proposal paper for his then employer on how to better allocate annual leave (The number of days a/l for the whole team was less than maximum number allowed leave x number of working days pa AND parents always got priority dates). He declined to share this paper with his boss.

    Second story, I once had a boss who chased me on a piece of work “because I need my wife to check it”. I was raging as I was a SME and she apparently “has good grammar.”

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  56. Jay (no, the other one)*

    Just finished reading a biography of Katharine S. White, who not only edited her husband’s work but also managed his correspondence and constructed their lives so he could write his books. He was E. B. White and the books were “Stuart Little,” “Charlotte’s Web,” and “The Trumpet of the Swan” in addition to collections of columns and a humor treasury. This was (and probably still is) the role for many female partners of male academics and writers.

    That said, this is a relationship problem more than a work problem. My husband is a scientist. I’m an MD who was an English major in college. I proofread my husband’s undergraduate thesis and his PhD dissertation as well as many of his papers. When he was in academia, he used to tell his students to find an editor and said it was so important he married his. He’s now a working artist and I still often proofread/edit his artist’s statements and letters for submission to juried shows. It never feels like I’m doing his work, and that’s what jumps out at me from this letter. No matter how “normal” this is in the partner’s setting, the OP feels like she’s doing his work, and that’s not good for the relationship. Resentment is poison for a relationship. Even if other people are doing it (and they are), the OP can tell her partner that she feels – taken advantage of? I’m not sure what the emotion is. Whatever it is, they need to talk about it.

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  57. Raida*

    I would say that if it’s repeated for things that aren’t “I’m so busy” that it’d really be worth finding some training for him, and even going along too.

    Excel? Easily a dozen options for his work requirements.
    Power Point / Layouts? Fantastic, there’s little rules of thumb he can learn to be able to go through to ensure his slides are looking good and consistent.

    After doing that, and saying “You run through this first then show me and I’ll tell you if there’s anything I reckon could do with tweaking” and build him up to know he’s competant at those skills and tasks – yes, that’s just training him and you’re not his manager, but these are the ones that he just needs to get his head around and some confidence.

    Then, you’ve freed up some time, so you won’t feel like it’s *a lot* when he’s asked for help with drafting something sensitive or shortening a grant application.
    And again there’s business writing skills courses for this, he can again learn some rules that he can apply to his work and ask your opinion of the final draft or how to solve a particular *segment* of the writing instead of working through the whole thing IE “This part here, I just, it’s not working, I don’t know, I really just hate it.” and you both can focus on the (more fun and interesting and satisfying) puzzle of those.

    And then, hey, when he’s just *really slammed* at work, you can remind him that he’s got the skills, he’s got your support, and you’re happy to help him when he needs to do three things at once!

    And all this training? These can be thoughtful gifts apropo of nothing (not birthday present when he’s hyped for something not work-related) and you can do them together to refresh your skills, too.

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  58. Lalitah*

    OP, this sounds very much like a phenomenon described in a BuzzFeed post https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ishmaeldaro/thanks-for-typing-with-your-two-aching-fingers.

    I think your partner needs to realize he’s using you as administrative support when he asks you to put together ‘a spreadsheet to organize marking for courses, fixing up formatting on PowerPoint slides, shortening grant applications to meet word-count requirements, drafting sensitive emails’.

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  59. Captain Swan*

    Occasionally, my husband will ask me for help with doing something in Excel or some other Office product. I have a black belt in almost all of them, so that’s to be expected.

    But I would estimate that it happens perhaps 4-6 times a year and takes me usually 15 minutes or so to go through it with him. so not nearly the same as this scenario.

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  60. Sneaky Squirrel*

    My partner and I draw the line verbally – throwing out ideas on how to approach an excel formula, checking tone on an email. I would never physically touch my partner’s work and vice versa. Even looking over my partner’s shoulder, I would ask first because the nature of the work might be sensitive to the organization.

    I’m assuming LW and partner work from home which makes it easy to have a sounding board. Ask yourself if whether the assistance you’re providing is something that you’d do if you were both working onsite in your respective employer offices. It would probably be okay to call or text partner and ask them how to approach a task. It wouldn’t be okay to talk over the phone about confidential employer data, or to email the partner a powerpoint to make edits.

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  61. Child labor*

    When I was a kid I used to help my mom grade papers and clean her classroom. But I did that because I was bored and I found grading fun.

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  62. Dido*

    This is insane. is your partner paying you a portion of his salary?

    Also, I’m not buying that you’re better at the software your partner regularly uses in the course of his work and can do his job duties so much faster than he can. That’s weaponized incompetence, babe.

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