Maybe The Loneliest Person In The Room

One of the European diplomatic spouses' associations invited me to speak last year. The room held thirty women and two men. These two sat near the back, polite, attentive, slightly braced. During the coffee break one of them came up and said something I have heard before: "My wife told me to come. I have no idea what I’m doing here."

He wasn't being rude. He just tried to say what he and others felt in that room. The diplomatic spouse infrastructure was built for women, by women. Most of it still is. Male spouses are still a small, growing minority across foreign services, some of them are active, trying to shape the agenda. But overall, the system has not caught up. Neither, in most cases, has the conversation about what it means to be a male spouse nor how lonely it may feel.

The shape of their loneliness

The loneliness male diplomatic spouses describe has a specific shape.

It begins with numbers. In any given mission, there is no critical mass, just one or two male spouses. No one to compare notes with on the particular oddness of being "the husband of" at the National Day reception. No one to secretly roll your eyes with when the guests at a dinner ask what’s on the menu. Female spouses in the same situation often know what to do.

Then there is the question of where to go… Female spousesfind each other within a week. Male spouses often go months before meeting another man in the same role. The established spouse networks gather around morning coffees, school-run circles, craft afternoons, charity events. All was designed by women, for women, in a different era of the foreign service. A man walking into that room is not unwelcome but he’s often out of place. While the meetings are not hostile, several men have told me they stopped showing up.

..and the question about who you are. Many men come into a posting with their identity heavily organised around work. When the job stops, or shrinks to a remote consultancy at odd hours, the social scaffolding that work provided disappears too. Female spouses, at least more seasoned ones, are often more prepared for this. The culture has been showing them the way. Men have not been rehearsed for it, and for them, the drop is sharper.

And lastly, the issue of their support system. Before the posting, many men rely on their wife as the main emotional outlet. Male friendships at home tend to be built around activity. Then the posting starts, and that wife becomes the diplomat under pressure. The person he used to lean on is now the one carrying the heaviest load, and his old friendships are not built for these kinds of conversations.

Why things don’t look so lonely from the outside

From the outside, a male diplomatic spouse often looks fine. He is articulate, well-travelled, frequently the parent doing school pickup. He makes jokes about being his wife's plus-one and is often admired by women in the community as the kind of husband everyone hopes for.

What is harder to see is the cost of holding all of that together without anyone to talk to about it. Men in this position tend to absorb stress. When pressed, the same person may talk about trouble sleeping, surprising irritability and a flatness that has lasted months. The professional vocabulary for this is depressive symptoms in the mild to moderate range. The everyday vocabulary is: what is really wrong with me?

Female spouses reading this may recognise the picture as the mechanism is the same. What differs is that the male version comes with fewer peers and a louder cultural voice expecting him to cope. The people around him often do not know to ask.

What may help

A few things, consistently, across the men I have worked with and the research that exists.

The first is a redefinition of what the work years are for. The men I have seen do best are the ones who treat the posting as a chapter with its own purpose, parenting, a project, retraining, a slower kind of professional life, rather than a pause in their real career. The pause framing does not survive a three-year cycle. The chapter framing often does.

The second is a structured arrival. Physical movement most days, a reason to leave the house that does not depend on the spouse's diary, and at least one person outside the diplomatic community. The aim is to build a daily rhythm that belongs to him before the posting builds one for him.

And last but, perhaps, the most important one: finding one other man who would understand. Someone who does not need to be explained what's going on. And the conversation does not need to be heavy, but it has to be regular.

A male spouse on a posting left alone with his loneliness for long enough starts calling it himself. That is too high a price. Which is why the silence around this has to end.

Photo by Syed Ali Aqdas on Unsplash