What If You Realise This Life Is Not For You

Every so often a diplomatic or expat spouse tells me, in a lowered voice, that they think this life may not be for them. They say it as a confession, as though they've failed a test everyone else has passed. The first thing we always do together is work out what they actually mean by that. Two very different things hide inside that sentence. Either this life doesn't fit them, or the person they are living it with doesn't. These are not the same things, and telling them apart changes everything that comes next.

When it is the life

Some spouses aren't made for posting life, and that's simply true. Not good or bad. Following your partner without asking questions is less and less possible, and quite a few people aren't willing to give up their own life to do it. Others go once and then decide to stay in the HQs and wait until the children are older. If you're one of them, you have the right to know that about yourself, and the right not to be judged for it.

Diplomatic life asks a lot from you. Constant relocation. The loss of your work and often your career as you knew it. Raising children far from anyone you love, and building a social world from nothing every few years only to leave it behind. For some that's a fair trade. For others it's too much, and neither answer makes you better or worse than anyone else.

You can be capable, adaptable, good at all of it, and still reach a point where the giving up outweighs the getting. That's an honest reading of what this life takes, and you're the only one positioned to make it.

When it is the couple

Then there's the other version, and it's harder to say out loud. Many modern diplomats understand what this life does to a spouse. They're open to arrangements. They don't expect the posting to be paid for in your sacrifice. But some can't let go of the older setting, where they are the career and you're meant to revolve around them.

This is the partner who wants you in their orbit. Not to share the posting with you but to be followed into it, your life arranged as smaller circles around theirs. Their career is the centre, and everything else, including you, is expected to keep moving. You can do very well inside that arrangement. You can volunteer, study, arrange everything and make everyone think you've done well. But it may leave you hollow after a while if the orbiting goes only one way.

The posting doesn't create this imbalance. It just reveals it. When the pressure of the posting arrives, it shows how much partnership was already there, or how little. A couple that arrives with real consideration for both people can be hit hard by the reality on the ground and still hold, because their couple is the centre. A couple where one person's priorities are the only ones that count won't survive diplomatic life, and the posting will get the blame for something that was true before the plane took off.

The hard part is that both situations feel the same from the inside. Both leave you depleted and doubting yourself, which is why so many spouses spend years getting better at a posting when the thing that needed to change was the couple.

What you are allowed to do about it

It sounds like Captain Obvious speaking, but for many spouses I have to repeat it. You're allowed to reach your limit rather than push past it. You're allowed to negotiate how much you follow, or whether you follow at all. And if you go, you can decide to step out of diplomatic life entirely or opt out of parts of it, without owing anyone a long explanation or being judged for it.

None of that is done alone. Some couples decide one partner stays behind for a posting while the other goes. Some agree on a base and shorter rotations. Some live apart for a while and build a way of doing it that holds. It's two people looking at what one of them can carry and deciding together, rather than one person adapting until there's nothing left to adapt. And if the imbalance is in the couple, you're allowed to ask for it to change, and to expect the asking to be heard.

What may help

Before anything else, one honest question. If the postings stopped tomorrow and you were home for good, in a city you chose, near the people you love, would this relationship feel different in the way that matters? If the answer is yes, life is the weight and the couple is sound, and there's real work you can do together. If the answer is no, that you'd still feel unseen at your own kitchen table, then the posting was never the thing, and some part of you already knows that.

But knowing which of the two you're in isn't the same as knowing what to do about it, and neither answer sends you straight to the door. It's never too late to come as a couple and try to level the playing field. For every couple that means something different, and the work is to move the conversation off "what's wrong with you" and onto "how can our couple be a better place for both of us." Separation is the last resort. It exists, and sometimes it's the honest answer, but it's the end of the list and not the start of it.

In September, I'm starting a support group for diplomatic spouses called "Seen Again". It begins on the first Tuesday of September, for spouses who are not understood by their partners. If you're sitting with the question of what makes this life, or this couple, hard to stay inside, come and join us. It's a small closed group that runs on confidentiality. It may help to be with people who understand you, don't judge you, and let you hear your own voice.

Check more here and book your free discovery call to sign up. 

Photo by Jonah Townsley on Unsplash