The Better I Get At Receptions, The Worse I Feel Afterwards

Hi,

I loved the first year of our diplomatic posting. I worked hard to fit in: I learned the small talk, mastered the safe topics and the ones to stay away from. I studied his country’s history and culture so I could speak about it warmly at receptions. I can recommend places to visit and things to try when people visit my husband’s home country. People at receptions seem to like me.

But lately I started dreading these evenings. I go, I perform well. My husband says I am wonderful at it. But I come home completely hollow. The better I get at these evenings, the worse I feel afterwards. What is happening to me?

A Spouse

***

Dear Spouse,

The answer is hiding inside the thing you just said: the better I get at receptions, the worse I feel.

What you are actually doing at these receptions

Every diplomatic spouse performs at receptions. She shows up, represents her partner’s country, and smiles even when she is tired. That is the common experience and it is genuinely draining. But you are doing something more than that, and it is costing you more than you realise.

You studied his country so you could speak about it as if it were yours. And you got so good at it that from the outside it looks like you belong. What nobody at the reception sees is the price you pay for that fluency. Not just the preparation, though that was real work, but something underneath it: every time you speak warmly about his country, you are putting yours away. Your own cultural references, history, and instincts go silent for the evening.

I call this pocketing of yourself. Your country goes into your pocket every time you walk into that room. And the more fluent you become in his world, the more invisible yours becomes, even to you.

The grief nobody names

This is what the accumulation looks like. Someone asks about places to visit and you answer about his country. Someone talks about culture or food, and you bring his country up. Someone asks where you feel at home and you pause for a fraction of a second, of course, his country! Each of those moments is small. Together, they are a kind of loss that has no name in diplomatic life.

Most diplomatic spouses lose one identity on posting: the professional one. You are losing two. Together with the professional identity goes the national one, the one you set aside every time you represent a country that is not yours. This second loss has no support structure. It simply accumulates, reception after reception, until the hollow feeling you describe becomes the only signal that something important is happening to you.

What your husband sees

He sees someone who is brilliant at receptioins. He watches you move through the room and he is so proud, and he tells you so on the way home. And you may not know how to explain that his pride, in that particular moment, makes the hollow feeling worse.

What is he missing? Everytihng! He experiences the same evening on completely different terms. He does not have to perform belonging. He simply belonges. And he has no way of knowing, unless you tell him, that what looked like your ease cost you something he has never had to pay. He is not being insensitive. He is standing on ground that feels so natural to him that he cannot see you do not share it.

What you may be doing to yourself

Here is what I see regularly in my work: the first person to minimise this kind of loss is usually the person carrying it. The hollow feeling comes and the instinct is to manage it quickly, to tell yourself it is not a big deal, that you chose this life, that there are real rewards, that other people have it harder. All of that may be true. But none of it cancels what you are feeling and carrying.

The exhaustion you feel is real. The system asks something of you that it does not ask of spouses who share their partner’s nationality, and the fact that you chose this life willingly does not make the cost any less real. You deserve to take it seriously, even if nobody around you has given you permission to do so.

What actually needs to happen

You need to stop managing the hollow feeling away and start naming what produces it. First to yourself, and then to him. Not as a complaint, and not as a problem for him to solve, but as the truth of what these evenings actually cost you.

Right now, he is coming home proud of a performance he watched and you are coming home hollowed out by the same evening, and neither of you is talking about the gap between those two experiences. That gap, left unnamed, is what grows quietly between two people who love each other and cannot understand why they keep missing each other after every reception.

He cannot see what he is not carrying. But he can learn to see it if you show him. Not the performance, but what is underneath it. The country in your pocket. The identity that has no place at his mission’s table. The person you are when the reception is over and the door closes and you are finally, briefly, just yourself again.

That is the person he married. He deserves to know she is still there, and what it costs her to show up the way she does.

P.S. If you recognised yourself in this letter and you need to talk to someone, you know where to find me.

Photo by Tamara Harhai on Unsplash