Category: expat partner

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Our Gilded Expat Cages

It starts as an adventure. We are young, ambitious, qualified, full of dreams. We feel powerful. We know exactly what our life will look like. We have big plans. We want to explore the world. We find a partner who shares our dreams. We fall in love and, together, we’re off to great places.

The first couple of moves go relatively well. We are childless, unattached, free to grab every opportunity that comes our way. Our career is our priority. Our independence is sacred. Our partner respects that. That both careers are equally valued is not even an issue. We’re on top of the world.

As the years pass, we start wanting to have a family. We decide to go for it and take a step – or two – back, career wise. Temporarily, of course. There is no regret; on the contrary, we feel fortunate, even grateful to be able to do that. We appreciate that our partner enables us to focus on taking care of our young family by taking over the burden of being the main breadwinner. We forget about our sacred independence for a while. We trust. Nothing can go wrong. We are blissfully unaware that that is not true.

Especially the first few years, we are busy with the children, the household, organizing the moves, making sure everyone is well adjusted and settled. We are still on track. We are still exploring the world. But with every move, it becomes harder for us to pick up where we left off, professionally. In every new place, local laws need to be navigated and work permits negotiated, careers that don’t “travel” well need to be reinvented and short-term moves don’t allow us the time to do any of that because, by the time the boxes are unpacked and the kids settled, it’s time to plan the next move – something which we are rapidly becoming masters at organizing, on our own. Soon, we have been away from the job market long enough to lose confidence in our ability to ever go back. If and when we do manage to go back to work, what we end up doing usually does not have much to do with the ambitious plans we had when we started our journey.

Thankfully, we are still equal partners in our relationship. We have access. The money our partner makes – which they always refer to as “our money” – buys us a beautiful home, expensive cars, designer clothes, exotic vacations and perfect manicures. But there is no equality in dependence, which just keeps growing in the background, imperceptibly, discreetly. Until someday it is right there in front of our eyes, in black and white, when we realize that we can’t even get a credit card in our name.

While these kinds of dependence relationships are not an exclusively expat phenomenon, expat life makes them much more likely. Expatriation can be disempowering, especially for women. The ideal of a dual-career family can only be maintained for so long when that family moves every few years, before children even enter the picture. Usually, the ideal becomes logistically and practically impossible. Usually, one of the two careers stays behind. I’ll let you guess which one. The power balance is transformed, but it’s a subtle process.

When does this start to bother us – if at all? Many partners, to their credit, behave in a way that it never does. But there are also wake up calls. For expats, this happens often when the relationship or marriage breaks down and the massive power imbalance is revealed. We realize how powerless we’ve become. The extent of our dependence is so terrifying that many choose to stay in failed, suffocating relationships, too scared to face the consequences.

There are many of us out there – with advanced Ivy League degrees, impressive work experiences, respectable salaries and all. We enter our gilded cages voluntarily. We put away our dreams and hang our prestigious credentials on the walls of our “home offices,” so that we can glance at them – not without a tinge of regret – when we pay household bills or schedule doctors’ appointments for our children.

So here’s my question. How do we get ourselves into this? Why do we disguise as “our choice” something that goes against all our principles? Is it love? Trust? Comfort? The urge of motherhood? More important, how can we stop making choices that render us powerless and dependent? How can we help others like us avoid making such choices? This is not a discussion about whether women can “have it all” in a modern society; this is about what goes on in our head. What are we thinking when, fully aware of the possible consequences, we willingly enter those gilded cages and give someone else the key?

A version of this post was published on the Huffington Post Blog.

Separate lives

 

I was introduced to the concept of separate lives more than fifteen years ago, when my then-boyfriend-now-husband, fresh out of graduate school, took a job as a consultant – in Paris. During the half year that I had left to finish my own degree, I stayed on in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was an interesting, thankfully short time with a lot of transatlantic back-and-forth, lonely weekends, long letters and emails, even a marriage proposal (I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder). When I graduated and moved to France to join him, I was convinced that things would
improve dramatically. I didn’t suspect that this back-and-forth would become a
permanent feature of our common life.
His job meant that between Monday morning (usually at some ungodly hour) and Thursday evening (at an equally ungodly hour) he was out of town. I hated Monday mornings. I was lonely and I missed him. He was often overworked and tired from all  the travel. At the end of his consulting stint of six years, I was, again, convinced that things would improve with the next job. But the next job ended up being in London, while our family was based in Vienna. That became a pattern: while my jobs were stable location-wise, his were not. Somehow it was never possible to have both work and family life in one location. Fifteen plus years and three kids later, our family qualifies for the title of cross-border commuting veterans. Managing our disjointed existence has become a habit; not one any of us is particularly fond of, but one which we have gotten good at.
It is not just our habit. My daily news feed on Facebook is strewn with postings from friends who are not where they are supposed to be – where their families live. Cross-border commuting is a fact of life. Sometimes it’s a good deal, sometimes a necessity. An opportunity may be so good that you are willing to tolerate the commute; or local jobs may be scarce. Often, working abroad is cheaper and simpler than moving your whole family: you don’t have to uproot them, disrupt your children’s education or take them away from extended family. It is less stressful to be able to devote yourself completely to your work during the week, when no one is waiting for you at home, and devote yourself completely to your loved ones on the weekend.
But it is also a demanding life – both for the commuter and for the ones that stay behind. If you are the commuter, your belongings are scattered across two places and a suitcase.
You are neither fully here nor there. You miss your family. You are often exhausted. If you are the “stationary” partner, most of the family responsibilities fall on your shoulders. Add to that a full-time job and career of your own, not to mention what happens when children are in the picture. You have to manage alone during the week and on the weekend you get what a good friend of mine called “a leftover spouse.”
Despite all the nice sayings about absence and its effects, this kind of lifestyle, especially when it is prolonged, can strain a relationship. Resentment and frustration can build up. People can grow apart. Your partner may resent the fact that you are not around when they need you; they may go up the wall when you come back and want to have a say on every decision (don’t they manage perfectly well when you are not around?); you may find being a “weekend parent” terribly frustrating. Sound familiar?
Have you lived the commuter life – on either end of it? Was it a good thing, a necessary evil or something you would rather never have to go through again?