I Don’t Want To Lose Her On A Posting. Or Before
Hi,
I’m excited that my wife will join me on a posting this time. It’s my second and her first. She’s happy about the destination and looking for schools for our sons and apartment for us. I’m watching her do it, thinking: she has no idea what she’s walking into.
I’ve seen it happen to other couples on my first posting. The spouse who arrives full of energy and gradually loses it. The diplomat who comes home to someone he no longer recognizes. I’ve watched colleagues lose their marriages and I’ve told myself we are different: we talk and we are solid. But underneath that, there’s a fear I can’t seem to shake. What if the posting takes her from me? Not through conflict or betrayal, but through everything it asks of her that I can’t fix?
I haven’t said any of this to her. I don’t want to plant doubt in something she’s genuinely excited about, and I’m afraid she may not follow me then. So I keep smiling and I let her plan. Am I wrong?
A Diplomat
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Dear Diplomat,
Last week I heard from a spouse who is doing exactly the same thing in reverse. She is excited, she has a plan, she is presenting confidence to her diplomat because she does not want to be the one who complicates his happiness. She is waking up at 3 AM and telling no one. You are watching your wife prepare and hiding a fear she does not know you have. You are, right now, two people performing readiness at each other. And the posting has not even started.
What your silence is already doing
This is worth sitting with. The silence between you is not neutral. Every week you do not say "I am terrified of what this might do to us," you are teaching yourself that this fear is not something you can bring to her. You are practising a particular kind of aloneness, and you are doing it before anything has gone wrong.
Your fear is well-founded. The structure of diplomatic life does remove things from spouses that cannot be replaced by love or good intentions. The career she may not be able to continue and the income she will likely lose. The professional identity she built over years, which may be dismantled in the first year. You cannot protect her from this by being a good partner or research your way out of it or plan around it. Some of it is simply going to happen, and watching it happen is going to be hard.
But what concerns me most about your letter is this: you already know all of this, and you have decided to carry it alone. That decision, made from love and protectiveness, is the beginning of the pattern I see most often in diplomatic couples who arrive at my door two or three years into a posting.
One partner, usually the diplomat, has been privately managing their fear, their guilt, their awareness of the cost. The other has been privately managing their own doubts, their own losses, their own adjustment. They have both been protecting each other so carefully that they have stopped actually being with each other. By the time they realise what has happened, the distance has become a habit.
What changes when you both stop performing
The couples who had a great experience on posting still faced everything I mentioned above. What was different is that they faced it together. Starting before the move, while there was still solid ground beneath them, they found a way to say to each other: I am excited and I am also frightened. And that opened the door to being in it together.
One thing you are not seeing is that your wife may already know more than you think. People sense what they are not being told. She may be reading your silence and filling it with something, reassurance, or worry of her own, or both. She may be protecting you just as carefully as you are protecting her.
What would change if you told her what you told me?
P.S. If you need help preparing for that conversation, you know where to find me.
