She Doesn’t Want To Leave The Posting

Hello,

We are leaving our first posting in a few months. Almost four years. I watched my wife arrive uncertain, struggle, then find her footing, and somewhere last year start feeling at home here. She even says it is her second home now.

We are going back to my headquarters and I am looking forward to my new job. For me, it's home but for her, it feels like another posting. I can't share this excitement with her, and I feel bad about taking her away from here.

She says she is not angry with me. But last week she said she did not want to go, and I did not know what to say back.

What do I do?

A Diplomat

***

Dear Diplomat,

You are editing your excitement and she is containing her loss, and you are both doing it out of consideration for the other.

The result is that you are going through the end of this posting separately, without actually being in it together. This is worth sitting with before you do anything else.

What is happening between you

The posting is ending for you differently than it is ending for her, and the difference matters. You arrived four years ago with your role already waiting, a purpose the system handed you from the first week. She arrived with none of that. Whatever she has now, that feeling of home, she built from scratch alone. That took most of the posting. She is leaving the first place abroad where she stopped feeling like a guest. It is a lot to lose.

You, meanwhile, are going home, and you know exactly what that means. The pull forward makes sense. The posting gave you what postings are designed to give to a diplomat, and now there is a next exciting chapter. She is on the other side of that same moment, and you both know it, and neither of you is saying it.

What you may be missing

You said you do not know what to say back when she tells you she does not want to go. I think you are looking for the words that will bring her closer to where you are, something about the possibilities, what HQs will be like for both of you. You are trying to close the distance with information and enthusiasm she could just share if only she would.

Her loss is not a misunderstanding you can correct. She knows headquarters will be fine. She will adjust, because she has already proved she can adjust. What she said last week was not a question about the future. It was an honest thing about now and what leaving will take from her. Again.

What to do with that

Stop trying to get her to your side of this and go to hers first. Do it before you say anything else about headquarters, before your reassurances and enthusiasm. Ask her what she will miss most, and then listen without offering the next city as a substitute. Let her tell you what these four years actually looked like from where she was standing, because you were both living inside the same posting and you may not have seen all of it.

I know your knee-jerk reaction may now be: “Scary, what if she says something that makes me feel guilty?” And I would say: yes, you might. But if you sit through this guilt, which is not really yours, you can give your spouse the best gift in the world. As Virginia Satir once said, “the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them.”

You will be surprised that it will also open the door for your own experience. You will need to tell her about your excitement with the move, something you have been keeping from her because it felt wrong to say out loud. It is the other half of what is true right now. A million gains and a million losses, rarely arriving in equal measure for both people, almost always at the same time.

She already knows she is going. What she does not yet know is whether you have understood what these four years cost her, and what leaving them takes. Help her feel seen and support her through this loss.

P.S. If you want to talk about how to go into the next chapter with both of you in it together, you know where to find me.

Photo by Esther Tuttle on Unsplash