The Most Expensive Thing You Wear On A Posting

There is a version of you at every diplomatic reception who is doing very well. She is composed, asks good questions, and always remembers names. And yet, she is completely alone in a room full of people.

The performance is a form of care

You are the partner of someone who represents their country. Your mood, candour and even visible exhaustion carry weight beyond the room. A bad evening at the wrong table follows your partner into the office. An unguarded comment in a spouse network, where everyone knows and judges everyone, lands differently than it would with people back home. Your political views? You left them back home, it is safer that way. 

So you perform. It protects the posting, their career, and your relationship. It is, in its own way, a form of care.

And here is what it does to you

Every reception has a correct answer about how the posting is going. You give it. Every official or semi-official encounter has a script you have to follow. So you do. After a while, the public version feels more practised and the private one feels harder to find. Some spouses tell me they no longer know what they actually think about things and whom they actually like. They have given the correct answer for so long that the real one has gone missing.

The person you were before you learned to pocket themselves at the door is still there. But you have not let her out in a while. And somewhere along the way you have become afraid that if you did, she would not be welcome.

Specific kind of loneliness

My research shows that the isolation of diplomatic spouses is a serious matter. The life they are living, however amazing, provides constant social contact while removing the conditions under which honest connection can form. You cannot be straightforwardly tired. Nor can you afford to be in a bad mood or feel sick. You build your social networks based on what your partner does and needs to do their job well. 

This is a particular kind of loneliness: difficult to name because your life looks so full. And also hard to fix because when you cannot be honest in any of the rooms you are in, the contacts accumulate but the connection does not.

The permission

People talk about loneliness as a question of proximity and access. On a diplomatic posting it is more often a question of permission: who you are allowed to be with, in what rooms, and with how much of yourself showing. The performance loss, the part of yourself you set aside to protect the role and the image, is one of the least discussed losses of this life.

How are you coping with this? Where do you take the version of you that does not have to be polished?

I would like to know.

Photo by OurWhisky Foundation on Unsplash