I’m an English Teacher Who Married a PE Teacher in Real Life

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kasey Kuiper, a high school English and journalism teacher based outside Chicago, IL. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m a high school English teacher, and my husband is a PE teacher. When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce recently posted about getting engaged, several of my friends texted me about the similarity between their Instagram caption and what we do for a living.

My husband doesn’t really get the hype about the engagement, but I think it’s nice to see two people genuinely in love. They’re nice people and don’t cause drama. We laugh that we’re the poor man’s version of Taylor and Travis, if anything.

I met my husband before he was a PE teacher

When I met my husband Marcus in 2014, I had just started teaching high school English. He had recently retired from the Marines and was using his veteran benefits to go to college. Neither of us was looking for a long-term relationship, but we had a lot in common and became fairly inseparable after our first meeting.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after graduating, and started talking to me about working in education. Because of his interest in things like working out, power lifting, and rock climbing, I suggested being a PE and health teacher. He was coaching wrestling at a local high school and really loved it, which gave him confidence in pursuing teaching full-time.

In 2018, the PE teacher at the school I was working at quit halfway through the year. Marcus had just finished college and got hired as the replacement. A lot of kids already knew who he was and that we were dating because he had been helping me coach some of the sports teams in his spare time.

It was really nice working at the same school together

We didn’t work at the same school together for long, but it was really nice when we did. We never really saw each other, but it was comforting to know we were in the same building together.

One time I hurt myself in my classroom and he came to help me because he was the PE and health teacher. He felt responsible for taking care of me because I was his partner and his coworker.

Some students didn’t know we were dating since we had different last names, but when they found out we were together, they’d get squirrely and excited. The students and our coworkers would ask all the time if we were going to get engaged, but it didn’t bother us. We ended up being together for seven years before getting engaged.

Even though we work in different schools, we understand what the other is going through

We teach different subjects and are in different school districts now, but we’re still both teaching high schoolers. We experience similar frustrations and successes with the kids, and it’s really nice to have a partner who knows what the other is going through.

I also really like being married to another teacher because we can bounce ideas off of each other. Marcus is the firmer of the two of us, so he’ll ask me for advice on how to soften his approach on certain things, and I’ll ask him for ideas for when I need to be firmer. We can give each other different perspectives on situations, too, which is helpful.

Being a teacher is a really consuming job, but we have a rule that we try not to talk about work when we’re home. We both work about 45 minutes away, so we call each other on our way back to talk about the day. It gives us an opportunity to vent, but then we leave it in the car. At home, sometimes I’ll need to grade papers, but other than that, we really try to have a clear work-life separation.

I would work at the same school as my husband again

It would be nice to work together again, but we both really love our schools and our coworkers. We’ve talked about it, and for now we’re going to stay in our districts. But we’re expecting our first child in a few weeks, and maybe in the future we’ll want to have a shorter commute and be closer to her.

An English teacher marrying a PE teacher is really great for a lot of reasons, both for Taylor and for us.