A Memo for a New Diplomatic Couple: Go Without Disconnecting

You will receive a lot of documents before this posting: shipment rules, immunisation schedules, the security briefing, the post report. This one is a different kind of material. It’s about what the two of you need to think and talk about before the farewell drinks and boxes start taking over everything else.

Take it as a memo for going on a posting without disconnecting from each other. This week covers two heaviest conversations that set the tone of everything that follows. Next week's memo will turn them into practical arrangements. Start here, because the arrangements don’t work until these two are discussed and agreed on.

Why we are really doing this

A posting often reorganises a couple into two different lives lived at the same address. One of you carries the career that determines where you live and for how long. The other sets an entire life around it. That imbalance is built into the structure that hasn’t changed for centuries. But you are not the 19th-century couple it was designed for. That’s why agreeing on your own reason to join this life matters. It gives you something to return to when the two lives start to feel far apart, and rather quickly.

So write it down. Each of you, separately, draft a few sentences in your own words about why you chose this posting. Write about what you hope it will give your family and relationship, and you personally. Read them to each other. And then try to come up with a joint why. This will be your reference point in the evening, a year or two down the road, when one of you asks if any of this was worth it. Return to your couple’s why every year. Write a fresh version on every new posting, because the reasons change and so will you.

Allow the question of what success for your couple looks like to sit inside this same conversation. Not just personal success like a promotion or a better lifestyle, but something that will make your couple stronger. Some couples spend the entire posting pulling in different directions because they never said which one they were chasing. If you don’t define it together, you risk running two separate missions under one roof and calling the strain between them a communication problem.

What this posting will cost each of us

Every posting takes something from each of you, and the two losses are rarely equal or even visible to the other person. Even if it’s hard to imagine from here, try to say what each of you may be walking into. For the diplomat, a high-stakes job that runs at high speed and leaves little room for anything private. For the spouse, the loss of a job and perhaps a career, and far less time once the role of family CEO takes over. The proximity to ageing parents. The stability the children had.

In my experience, while the diplomat, consumed by their job, often manages to push the losses away, the accompanying spouse feels them more, and the resentment builds. When it’s kept secret, the resentment tends to harden, and it rarely ends well. Discussed together, before you leave, that list stops being a grievance one of you is carrying alone and becomes something the two of you are holding together. This is what separates supportive partners from a couple falling into the old trailing-spouse arrangement.

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They say diplomatic life is a journey of a million gains and a million losses. The gains tend to be visible, socially legible and easy to celebrate. The losses are often invisible, even to the person carrying them, and most invisible of all to the partner who is not paying them. The two conversations in this memo sit right in that gap.

The couples before you tended to push these two questions aside, hoping the posting would sort them out on its own. It rarely did. Trust me, these conversations will help you make the losses visible, and so manageable. Try to have them before you go, or once you arrive, before the whirlwind of the posting takes over. And do not thank me. I really want you to succeed.

Photo by Micah & Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash