You Knew What You Signed Up For

“You knew what you signed up for.”

If your partner is a firefighter, police officer, paramedic, or another first responder, you’ve probably heard some version of this. Maybe it came from a relative at a holiday dinner your partner missed. Maybe it came from a friend when you admitted you were tired. Maybe you’ve even said it to yourself at 6 p.m., doing bedtime for your young kids for the third night in a row, after days on your own, when you’d give anything for an extra pair of hands and someone to hug you. It’s usually meant kindly, but it lands like a door closing. It suggests that because you chose this life, you’ve given up the right to find it hard.

You haven’t. Every time the person you love leaves for work, you know their safety isn’t guaranteed. They show up on the worst day of other people’s lives. They see things most people never will, and to keep doing the job, they learn to become numb to some of it. They go days on little sleep and high stress. And then they walk back through your front door, where family life is waiting.

The very skills that make them good at their job, like staying calm, setting feelings aside, and compartmentalizing, don’t always switch off at home. The same steadiness that gets them through a call can feel like distance across the dinner table.

That shapes your life too.

Research is starting to show what partners have known all along. In a study of partners of police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and military personnel, about 1 in 5 showed signs of moderate to severe secondary traumatic stress, the strain of absorbing a loved one’s trauma. Nearly half said they had little or no support for what their partner’s work brought home.¹ In a survey of 4,500 police officers, 43% said their work frequently interfered with family life,² and in a survey of nearly 2,000 wildland firefighters and their partners, almost 8 in 10 regularly felt stressed by long absences during fire season, and 6 in 10 often felt secondary to the job.³ In other words, this work affects you too, even if it’s rarely acknowledged.

So if you love your partner, and you are also exhausted, lonely, or angry sometimes… of course you are. This lifestyle is hard. And the truth is, none of us really knew what we were signing up for. Every family’s experience looks different, and this is one of those things you can’t fully understand until you’ve lived it. Even if you thought you knew what you were signing up for, that was never the same as knowing how it would feel. And you deserve support too.

Jamie

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