The Trailing Spouse: What happens when you give up your career to support someone else’s
Exciting life abroad, tick. Hitting rock bottom, also tick.
It was a Tuesday night in Paris in winter. The Irish bar by Montparnasse station was packed, full of an assortment of anglophone accents: Australian, Irish, English, only occasionally interrupted by French. I stood next to my husband, surrounded by his new colleagues. I was deliberately drinking a little more than usual to calm my nerves.
Introductions were made around our circle. I forgot all their names almost as soon as they said them. I stopped paying attention, lost in my thoughts, rehearsing what I’d say to the dreaded question I knew was coming.
The passive partner
I’m a trailing spouse. It’s taken me four years to accept this label, and I still haven’t said it out loud. And while I’m usually not one for labels — they can be dangerous and limiting, putting yourself in a box—it’s helped my mental health in a lot of ways to know there’s a category of experience in which my life fits.
The reason for my reluctance is this: ‘trailing’ sounds so… Redundant. Passive. Like following behind. That is not what I ever wanted to do.
And yet, as I stood in that bar beside my impressive, successful husband and his impressive, successful colleagues, my year of trailing caught up with me.
“And what about you, Chloé? What do you do?”
An awkward laugh escaped my lips. “Oh, I’m just a writer,” I replied, my cheeks blushing under the attention. With a flick of my hand, I dismissed my answer as anything but interesting. “Nothing as impressive as my husband!”
Playing second fiddle
My career has always been so important to me. I once dreamed of big bright offices, chic corporate ensembles, and a high flying executive career when I was in school — long before I knew what that meant or what I wanted to do.
At 24, I found my dream job as a marketing coordinator for a science faculty at a university in Sydney, Australia. I would’ve been happy in that job for a very long time.
But two years later, I was living in Paris, going from dream job to unemployed.
I learned quickly that when you’re the trailing spouse, your career comes second to the primary income earner’s — and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have working rights in the country to which you’ve moved.
A symphony is made of many smaller parts
Years later, I sat in a café with a friend in Nice, chatting over coffee. I was in a very dark, sad, lonely place.
My career had come to a grinding halt, and I was growing resentful. I felt dependent on my partner. I had no income of my own. And I was starting to realise I had no idea who I was anymore. I was not the same adventurous, optimistic woman that moved to Paris all those years ago.
My friendship with Jessica was new. We were still getting to know each other. But she asked me a question that seemed impertinent at best for such an early stage of acquaintanceship: “Why do you keep dismissing yourself when I ask you about you?”
Jessica’s question pierced right to the heart of my emotional state. It took me a few seconds to answer. I wanted to be honest, but I’d never been asked so directly before.
“I don’t know what to say about myself anymore. I guess because for so long, I’ve felt like I’m playing second fiddle to him and his career.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she nodded, though not unkindly. “But a symphony is made of many parts. You might not hear one individual instrument but you’d sure as hell notice if it was missing.”
Trailing Spouse Syndrome
I was in the midst of what I now know to be a common phenomenon for many people in my position: Trailing Spouse Syndrome (TSS).
It’s not a clinical diagnosis, but TSS is a tidy way of packaging the symptoms that come with giving up (or at least, putting on hold) one’s career in order to support their partner’s abroad. It’s characterised by loneliness, depression, and a loss of self-worth and identity.
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, and that helps combat the loneliness. According to a survey by InterNations, the world’s largest expatriate network, 60% of trailing spouses struggled to give up their career in order to move abroad, and 65% didn’t like being financially dependent on their partners.
But what do you do when you don’t have a choice? What do you do when a professional life isn’t on the cards for the foreseeable future?
Success is not the same thing as happiness
After long months of contemplation, I think I’ve arrived at my answer: reinvention. Reinvention, and redefining what success looks like.
I think it all comes down to this question: why are our careers such a huge part of the way we define ourselves? Why does professional success sometimes feel like the only success? Why do we constantly compare ourselves with our friends back home?
I can’t answer these questions for anyone but myself, but it probably has a lot to do with our upbringings and the internalised values our family and our culture instill in us. In a capitalist society like the one I grew up in, financial wealth and its outward trappings are the number one sign of a successful person.
And how do we achieve such a thing? Obviously, our careers. And how do we judge our success? Often by comparing our progress with our friends of a similar age and experience.
But that’s just the thing: we might be similar in age, but we are no longer of similar experience. A life abroad changes everything. It’s no longer fair to compare ourselves with people back home because their careers have taken on a completely different trajectory.
Not better or worse. Just different.
Personally, I still struggle not to judge myself for not being on the career pathway I imagined I would be all those years ago before I left Australia. But I’ve since learned that success is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness is something one cultivates from within.
I’m now trying to cultivate emotional wealth; to be content with what I have, and not what I don’t. And that includes a career.
