bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 25–26
McGill University Professor of Management, Nancy Adler, recently completed a study of the lives of spouses posted abroad. Sponsored in part by the U.S. Peace Corps, Proctor and Gamble and CIDA, Professor Adler interviewed more than 200 wives. She recently spoke to the Foreign Service Community Association. In our last issue Professor Adler looked at the difficulties facing the spouse who is posted abroad. Professor Adler concludes her piece on the ’Portable Life’ with an examination of the adjustment process and the return home. She puts forward some recommendations on coping with life on posting.
The employee’s frequent absence compounds the difficulties a spouse has in adjusting to life in a new environment.
Having just started a new job, the employee often works long hours, exacerbating the situation. Further, many foreign assignments include regional responsibilities and a great amount of travel. The wife has just given up her friends, activities, and, in many cases, a job or career to follow her husband and family overseas. Often too, the husband continues and increases his involvement in the job, often to the near exclusion of his wife, and separation and lack of support cause numerous complaints.
The husband’s work usually leaves him least available during the first few months abroad, exactly when the wife needs him the most to help with the logistics of settling in and to provide companionship and support. Unfortunately, the pattern of absent husbands and isolated wives reinforces itself in a vicious cycle. As more problems build up at home, many employees have less desire to spend time at home. By their own admission, many employees spend more time in the office and traveling than is necessary or required by the job. As the wife’s situation becomes more difficult, the husband, often feeling guilty at the realization that his career causes the situation in the first place, increasingly avoids home.
Following the initial period of adjustment, the wife faces the hardest task of all: creating a meaningful life overseas. She must identify what she wants to do and find a way to do it in the foreign country. For women who follow their husband from country to country, it becomes the search for a meaningful portable life.
Being a transient, I tried to develop those things because… it is very difficult for me to have a career. And luckily, I am not a particularly career-minded person. I want to take experiences and opportunities as they come. I want to learn different things, and I want to try different things. I mean I only have one life. So a career and stepping up the ladder isn’t important to me personally. But it is important for me to take skills that are portable because, being a transient, you have to have something that you can grasp hold of, that you can take with you, that can be a certain continuity.
Creating a meaningful life overseas remains the most neglected aspect of the spouse’s overseas move. People talk about the initial cultural shock, learning a foreign language, and adjusting to the new culture. But adjustment is only half of the challenge; it brings a potentially negative situation to neutral, not to positive. Adjustment only brings the woman to the point where the foreign environment no longer constantly frustrates her; it does not provide motivation, direction, and a meaning to daily life overseas. Introspection and life planning remain necessary for the spouse to answer the questions: What do I really want to do? What would I be happiest having accomplished during my years in this country? How can I continue doing the things that I find most important even while I am no longer living at home?
The answers to these questions vary. One woman becomes an artist, another becomes a counsellor to expatriate families, a third teaches English to immigrant children, a fourth does extensive volunteer work, and a fifth starts her own business. Many simultaneously remain highly involved in raising a family.
… you start to understand the people around you… It is a new world that opens up to you… You start to see all the small differences that you wouldn’t notice if you were just a tourist for a month or so in the country. When you live there, slowly you get to know the people much more, the civilization, how they are and why they are like that and then I think it is very enjoyable. You are gaining something, it is not just giving.
Today, more and more frequently, the questions centre on identifying ways to continue a career while overseas.
Expatriates often remember their home country as a more wonderful and perfect place than it actually is. As things get rough overseas, as they experience culture shock and the difficulties in adjusting to a foreign culture, they dream of how easy and good life will be when they get back home. However, in reality, re-entry often presents more difficulties than the initial move overseas. One woman, who had lived in a number of foreign countries, captured the difficulty and the disillusionment of returning home saying:
Coming back was … the most difficult move of all. Why was it so difficult?… Because… you change, the country changes, the people change. You are expecting… that you are coming back to your place and that you will feel good right away… It is not true. You come back and you feel like a foreigner in your own country… People deal with you as if… you are different. Even the way of speaking the language. So you feel cut off completely and it is your own country. The roots that you were not really consciously, but somehow, dreaming with. You know everybody needs some kind of roots and you come back to these roots and you don’t feel well with them. (A British woman) I was in England recently. I was sitting in the train and I watched two English mums coming from the corner shop, standing and talking. And I said to my husband, “I know exactly what they are going to do, they are going to go home,… have a little lunch, … have a little sleep, and then they will watch a little bit of tele and maybe do some ironing, then they will get dinner”. is a pity that I am not able to do that anymore. I’m wanting more from life. I am pleased that I have changed, that I have matured, and I have developed, but sometimes it would be easier if I had stayed content with that life. We don’t feel we can go back to England. We have been gone too long… They have changed and we have changed.
Expatriate wives have a range of suggestions for coping with cross-cultural transitions and creating a meaningful portable life overseas. The strongest recommendations include: know yourself and what you want out of life; take responsibility for creating the type of life that you want to live. Also important: treat the move as permanent no matter how temporary. Keep at it (persevere), and be patient.
Some recommendations focus on what the wives must do for themselves, others need the assistance of the organization and the employee. For example, wives must ask themselves what they really want out of the move; the company needs to include the spouse in a predeparture site visit and, if possible, in selecting a house; employees, to the extent possible, need to limit their travel during the first one to three months overseas.
Most recommendations work best if all three — the organization, employee, and spouse – commit themselves to making the transition successful.
Many companies now interview the employee and spouse prior to an international move. They screen out couples with high probability of failure, including couples with excessive alcohol and drug use, indications of rigid and inflexible personalities or lifestyles, lack of communication among husband, wife and children, and inappropriate or inadequate coping and stress management mechanisms. Research has shown that the worlds of work and family overlap. Companies that screen couples recognize that the quality of home life will affect the employee’s ability to perform at work, and similarly that the very nature of an expatriate assignment will strongly influence the family’s day-to-day way of life.
While many organizations do an excellent job of handling the physical logistics of the move, few facilitate the spouse’s creation of a meaningful life overseas.
Companies usually leave it to the couple, and unfortunately, frequently to the wife alone, to identify those aspects of her life that she finds most important and to develop ways of incorporating them while overseas. This search, rarely being an easy task, is better addressed explicitly by both members of the couple than left to chance. Perhaps creating a meaningful portable life is the one area in which the most can be done to improve the overseas move from the perspective of the spouse, the employee, and the company. A
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 25–26. Read the rest of this issue →
