I've only had to contact Paypal customer service once, and they did respond. How much time have you allowed for them to respond to you? They responded to me withing 3 or 4 business days.
As for getting your account verified: My other half and I are both verified. There are 2 or 3 ways for going about it. You can use a second checking account. We have a joint account and did not want to open a second one either. So, my other half simply registered with our savings account instead -- problem solved.
Also, not many people are aware of this, but if both you and your spouse have separate eBay id's and email addresses, you can link more than one email address to the same paypal account and pay for your separate auctions from the same account. That way you don't really need to have separate paypal accounts at all.