In A Moveable Marriage, Robin Pascoe opens up her heart and candidly describes her experience as a diplomat spouse who relocated with her family to multiple destinations for the first fifteen years of her marriage, before finally repatriating to Canada.
Pascoe highlights the major challenges that face relocating spouses and offers valuable tips and advice based on her very own story as well as the stories of many expatriate wives who contributed to her research for the book.
Misguided Corporate Policies
In the first chapter of the book, Pascoe criticizes the failure of the corporations in supporting the relocating families due to the severe lack of coherent family relocation policies. She outlines a set of strategies that the spouse could use to reach a win-win scenario that involves the three elements of the triangular relationship: The spouse, her husband and the company.
According to Pascoe, widespread corporate indifference and lack of effective family relocation policies are directly responsible -in some cases- for the breakdown of marriages and for numerous relationship problems that might require marriage or family counselling to rectify.
Relocation is a Challenging Task
As Pascoe points out several times, she did not write the book to disappoint the spouses who are contemplating relocation with their husbands, or to let them have negative and pessimistic expectations. On the contrary, the mantra of the book is to validate, inform, and ultimately empower the trailing spouses in getting their needs fulfilled. The spouse needs to be aware of the challenges that might arise after relocation so that she can overcome them successfully.
Reading the stories of the numerous spouses mentioned in the book, it becomes obvious that the relocating spouses do encounter a myriad of challenges and hurdles that need to be addressed by the couple in a quick and effective manner. Otherwise, the problems will fester and might eventually jeopardize their marriage.
The book highlights the major problems that relocating relationships entail and offers workable solutions and strategies to address each one of them. The major issues that Pascoe discusses are isolation and dependence on the other spouse, career objectives of the accompanying spouse, financial worries, parenting, love and intimacy.
A Moveable Marriage is filled with Pascoe’s own stories of ambivalent emotions, frustrations, hope, ambitions and compromises. In addition to her own story, the book also includes dozens of stories of other relocating spouses who joined their husbands in their voyages across the world.
Taking Responsibility
Pascoe stresses the importance of the spouse’s positive attitude in dealing with the whole experience. Her advice for any relocating spouse is to stop feeling victimized or helpless. What a spouse has to do, according to Pascoe, is to alter her attitude and way of thinking to take charge of her new position in the relationship and to achieve the best life she can.
The book also offers various practical and legal steps that a spouse can take to protect herself if the marriage goes wrong in the foreign destination. Some of the suggested steps are to be taken even before the relocation takes place as a precautionary action.
If the relationship between the relocating couple becomes tense after a stormy transition, the spouse is required to work towards restoring balance in her marriage. The last chapter of the book offers tips on restoring equilibrium in relationships that are thrown off-kilter by relocation.
A Moveable Marriage is a must-read for any expatriate spouse or a spouse who is contemplating relocation. The book is not an ordinary self-help book that is filled with unrealistic advice and ineffective strategies. Pascoe acknowledges the real difficulties of being in a moveable marriage and her book is full of fascinating insights into relocating relationships.
About the Author
As the Expat Expert, Robin Pascoe is well known abroad for her inspirational and informative articles, corporate presentations, and best-selling books. She is the author of five books on global living. Since 1998, her popular website, expatexpert.com, has served as an international meeting place, discussion group, and source of advice and information for hundreds of thousands of expats worldwide.
Source:
- Robin Pascoe. A Moveable Marriage. North Vancouver: Expatriate Press Limited, 2003. ISBN: 0-9686760-2-2
Amira Abozeid - Amira Abozeid is a freelance writer and translator based in the UK. She has a BA in Political Science and MBA in Marketing.
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