Admin_Adham
Jump to Key Points For doctors marrying doctors, one of the best things about the relationship is a shared appreciation for the challenges of the job and the time constraints that come with a career in medicine.
“We both understand what the career demands and what we both did to get here,” Lauren Fine, MD, an allergist/immunologist in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who has been married to Matthew Fine, MD, male and female reconstructive urologist for 20 years, told Medscape Medical News. “This includes the appreciation for the need for space when we come home emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted and need a few minutes to ourselves.”
Dual-physician households, which, according to a 2024 study, account for 26.1% of couples (doctors married to other doctors), are relationships where work-life balance and the fight for time is a constant.
About Medscape Insights
Medscape continually surveys physicians and other medical professionals about key practice challenges and current issues, creating high-impact analyses. For example, Medscape Physician Mental Health & Well-Being Report 2026 found
- 77% of doctors surveyed are married or living with a partner.
- 81% of physicians in our survey said their marriages are good or very good.
- Only 1 in 5 doctors reported their marriage as poor or very poor.
“Our lives can be really busy, between various work schedules and getting our children to their activities,” said Supriya Rao, MD, gastroenterologist, who has been married to fellow gastroenterologist Allen Hwang, MD, for 16 years. The Boston-based couple are the parents of an 11-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. “We have to switch things around a lot and rely on outside help. We also have twice the number of call weekends, which adds to the juggling.”
- Dual-physician couples = 26.1% of physician couples; work-life balance often strained.
- Shared career demands + emotional exhaustion improve mutual understanding at home.
- Couples matching/tandem recruiting may reduce residency location stress.
- Median med school debt ≈ $215,000 each; dual incomes aid loan repayment.
- Clear financial goals, flexible scheduling, and task division are key for stability.
Ob/gyns Radhika Sharma, MD, and her husband Scott Curtis, MD, who completed their residency training together, share a Sheboygan (Wisconsin) practice, are raising two children, and also host The Double Scrub, a podcast in which they talk about life, relationships, and medicine. For them, time management and scheduling is key.
“We really do plan our schedules in 4- to 6-month chunks, and we also need to maintain flexibility as things can change very rapidly,” said Radhika. “The key to making this work is being patient and understanding, and I will tell you, this has taken time. We constantly have to be ready to pivot and problem solve.”
Training Is Challenging as a Couple
For married medical students and residents, location can be a challenge, though “tandem recruiting” for residents is available, according to the National Residency Matching Program.
Shawn and Shelem Justesen, MD, third-year medical students at The Idaho WWAMI program, a partnership between the state of Idaho, the University of Idaho, and the University of Washington School of Medicine, hope they will ultimately match at the same residency program.
“I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t concerned about this,” said Shawn, who met Shelem during their undergraduate studies. The two, who are dedicated to practicing rural family medicine, got married before being accepted into medical school. “We plan on doing couples’ matching and that does provide some assurance we will be near each other, but we would really love to return to Idaho for residency, even with the limited options in our home state.”
Given the stresses facing couples, Harsh Moolani, MD, MPH, now a neurology resident at NYU Hospital in New York City, and his wife Anupama Balasubramanian, now an anesthesiologist at New York Presbyterian-Cornell in New York City, created CouplesMatchTool in 2022, with the hopes that the tool would reduce the stress of creating a couples’ ranking list.
“The match process is one of the hardest processes any couple can go through,” said Moolani, who married Balasubramanian last year. “There aren’t that many resources and that’s difficult because when you go through couples match, you’re not only trying to determine your own future, but if your partner doesn’t get an interview where you want to go or to a region you want to go to, it shuts down that area.”
For Moolani, landing residencies in New York City was a first choice for both him and his wife, something he feels quite fortunate about.
“While we both landed where we had hoped to be, the process led to lots of hard conversations and spreadsheet crunching,” he said. “We also had to figure out how to maximize the chance of being together and do service to the hard work we had done to get to that point.”
Double the Debt
Debt loads from medical school are another big challenge for doctor couples, with some facing a median $215,000 (each) in debt, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“Being married to another resident provides two incomes, and this helps us pay for our expenses while we continue to pay off our loans,” Moolani said. “Anytime I look at my co-residents who are surviving on a single salary in New York City, I don’t know how they do it. It’s hard. You always are aware of the financial pressure.”
Building Something Together
Once in practice, married physicians can amass a solid financial future, and the wealth-building potential can be impressive — over time. However, at the beginning of setting up a practice, those numbers can look quite different.
“Right now, we’re putting most of our savings into building our practices,” said Sameena Rahman, MD, an ob/gyn, menopause specialist, and founder of GYN Sexual Medicine Collective in Chicago who shares an office with her husband of 17 years, an interventional pain/sports medicine specialist. “As a couple who are both in private practice, that’s our focus, unlike a lot of people in private practice who start with another partner. Ours is 100% coming from us.”
No matter where you are in your physician trajectory, it’s critical to remain transparent about your individual (and mutual) financial goals.
“It takes a real discussion of what your short-term and long-term goals are and how you plan to get there,” said Sharma. “I would say that it’s easy to grow into an attending salary, and sometimes difficult not to grow out of it. It takes a lot of honest and challenging conversations, especially if there are student loans, a house, or children in the picture. I think it’s equally important to have non-negotiables when it comes to financial goals and try your best to stick to them.”
Career pivots can also be undertaken more smoothly when doctors are married to doctors since there’s a deep understanding of the stress of the profession.
“I was working as a hospitalist 12 years ago and I was becoming burnt out,” said Rahman. “My husband urged me to start my own practice. He told me I could work in his space and that he would cover my overhead — all to bring my zest for medicine back.”
In the end, what is often high-stakes for two-physician couples is that the pressures on each can be almost identical — which means clear divisions of labor at home can be blurry.
“Most doctors are able to prosper in their careers because they have a spouse at home that takes care of everything in terms of managing the home,” Rahman said. “What’s challenging for us is that I’m helping my husband run his pain practice and I’m running my gyn practice and the household, too. My husband is my business partner; he’s my life partner, and the father of my kids. All of this can get challenging.”
No matter the pressures, Moolani said, it’s a gift to be married to another doctor.
“There’s a lot of gray area in medicine and, when you have a partner in medicine, you can talk not only about how an experience felt but ‘Did I do the right thing?’” he added. “Being able to talk about it clinically with someone who understands the whole spectrum makes you feel seen in a way that’s hard to get from someone who isn’t in medicine. When you come home to another doctor, you feel a level of freedom to be your authentic self.”
The experts cited in this article had no relevant disclosures.
Lambeth Hochwald is a New York City-based journalist who covers health, relationships, trends, and issues of importance to women. She’s also a longtime professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
