Most trailing spouses are women, but in the last 15 years a new trend in the expat world is ramping up: the male trailing spouse.
Who are those men?
Defying convention, these men are pioneers in unchartered territory: not only do they support their wives’ career, but at the cost of their own financial independence they support the home and household. They go shopping, they cook, they clean, they raise children and help their wife cope with the stresses of work life.
Talk about going against the most common stereotypes!
So how does life look like when you’re a stay at home dad in a foreign country?
Neil
I’ve had the pleasure to interview one of them. Neil Edward Kelly is an Australian who moved with his wife to Basel, Switzerland 10 years ago.
Transitioning from a full time activity – professional consultant – to raising 2 little children in foreign Switzerland was not a smooth ride, to say the least.
As I heard it so many times from other trailing spouses, Neil experienced episodes of stress and anxiety before sliding into deep and chronic depression. With support of both professional attention and his fellow ‘hausmänner’ (male accompanying partners) he slowly regained his sense of direction and self-worth.
No wonder. The job of trailing spouse is tedious, currently badly paid (if not paid at all!) and most often completely undervalued in the community and by employing corporations.
You can’t help but feel deeply unhappy if you define yourself by what you do, by your position in society, by the money you make.
So when you suddenly have to change country, give up your job and become a stay at home adult, deprived of any support network, isolated by the language barrier, ignorant of the local customs, you’re deeply shaken in your identity.
Anne: Can you tell us a bit more about your experience as a male trailing spouse?
Neil: When people see me for the first time, accompanying the kids at school excursions, staying at home to take care of the household, the first reaction is suspicion.
A stay-at-home man? He must be lazy or stupid, he must have a disability that keeps him from work or might be just a bit weird.
A man involved in children’s activities? Cooking, shopping, cleaning up the house? Always surrounded by children? What kind of man is that? Can we trust him? What if he “liked” young children a little too much?
There seems to be an immediate suspicion of the man seen to be doing ‘woman’s work.’ I’ve noticed that there is almost a kind of “racism” developed by other stay at home mums and working dads.
It’s not unusual for male trailing spouses to find themselves on the fringe of social and corporate events.
Because of the language barrier and cultural distance, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) for the expatriate trailing spouse to find a way to ‘break in’ to the local community.
But even in expat circles, stay-at-home moms very often consider me with some condescension. Sometimes I get a sense that they pity me, or see me as a lower life form. They offer ‘advice’ on how to decorate the house or arrange the furniture.
Anne: Is there any advantage to be a male trailing spouse compared to a female one?
Neil: Are you familiar with “Superwoman”? There is an ideal of the “super” mom, expected to be omnipresent: volunteering at school, training the soccer team, chairing the parents and friends committee, holding on a job, always impeccably dressed up and capped, cooking delicious meals for her family, decorating with taste her interior. The loving mother, dedicated wife, dynamic and positive woman.
Well, stay-at-home men are not under the pressure of being a “Superwoman”. That’s the only positive thing I can think of.
We’ve also started to get a bit of media attention and I think we are in a good position, being newsworthy because we are male. We might be able to draw attention to the experience of all expatriate spouses and maybe help change community perception of the home-maker.
Anne: What has been the most difficult in your transition in Switzerland and in your life thereafter?
Neil: Without any hesitation, I’d say it boils down to cultural adjustment and social integration.
The difference between the Australian culture and the Swiss culture is huge.
Here are just a few examples:
First, the language barrier. When I went to the supermarket at the beginning, I had no idea about what was in the packet. I found it very unsettling. The same would happen at the chemist. The names of the drugs are all different.
Greetings are not the same from one village to another. When greeting people – and Swiss people are not very flexible or accommodating as listeners – your pronunciation must be precisely as they expect (including inflections of the local dialect) or they are likely to shout “Was??” (What??). I was surprized that they seem to have difficulty comprehending other Swiss dialects – even when the regions are very close by an Australian sense of distance. Australia is a very multicultural place and people speak English with a broad range of accents and inflections, so it was a bit of a shock to find such narrowness here in Switzerland – where the local people have difficulty understanding each other.
Even a trivial thing like walking in the street is not straightforward. In Australia we cross people on the left-hand side. In Switzerland, it’s on the other side, similar to the car traffic.
Swiss people are not used to introduce strangers to each other. I’ve had the experience quite often, where I happen to be out with some Swiss friends and we meet others who they obviously know. My Swiss friends will talk to their acquaintances without acknowledging my presence or introducing me to them. I will have to wait, completely excluded till my friend has finished their other conversation before speaking to me again. From an Australian cultural point of view, it’s just ignorant and rude, but in Switzerland one has ‘compartments’ of life that are kept separate.
Another cultural trait impressed me when I first arrived in Switzerland. It is normal practice here for people to stare at strangers without acknowledging them. I often have strangers staring into my face, and I feel compelled to smile or nod or indicate some sort of greeting – but they don’t respond and just keep staring with a blank expression. In many parts of Australia, this would indicate aggression from the other person – you could expect they are about to punch you in the face or something. Here, it’s part of the culture, I think it’s some sort of mutual recognition of being there, but respecting your difference and your privacy or something.
I remember one of the first days at my children’s school. I introduced myself to another woman as you would naturally do in Australia ‘Hi I’m Neil”. She answered, shocked “But I’m not your friend!” and walked away.
Believe me: it’s one thing to know intellectually that there are cultural differences and another to go through them in real life.
Anne: How did you overcome those various challenges?
Neil: I’ve had to redefine myself.
And while redefining myself has been quite painful, it has given me some extraordinary insight into my own strengths and weaknesses
… as well as the slim edge between functional and dysfunctional that is always there in expatriate communities.
About ten years ago I started to meet regularly with other expatriate ‘hausmänner’ (it’s the male equivalent of ‘house wife’ in German, it’s sort of self-deprecating as it’s not an ‘official’ word). We’ve managed to sustain and build a fairly strong group. We try to cultivate a nurturing, supportive and inclusive attitude in a fairly ‘corporatized’ expatriate world that is quite empty and even hostile at times.
We are fairly disorganized but have managed to maintain a weekly get-together for a shared meal.
Finding a restaurant to gather is a struggle though. Believe it or not: restaurants have refused to serve us when they realize we don’t all arrive at once, all order at once, and our children can get a bit noisy.
We’ve tried to create special times for different sorts of conversation and support. One thing we’ve done quite successfully at times is to instigate the rule of ‘the talking stick’. The idea is that anyone with ‘the talking stick’ gets to express themselves without interruption or contradiction. Our experience is that new arrivals need to rant for about 18 months! Through this time, they gradually learn how to listen as more new-comers get a turn at the talking stick. When there’s a lot of people who want a turn, we enforce a rule “don’t Bogart the talking stick!” Given the level of stress that male trailing spouses experience, it does take quite a while to teach people how to listen.
Healing doesn’t come from talking but from being heard!!
Whether men are happy or not as trailing spouses depends on a number of factors, some research has been done on this issue. Adjusting to the culture is very important and the adjustment has to be to the expatriate culture as well as the local culture. Men also adjust in different ways depending on where they are in terms of family life (young kids, teenagers, college students or ’empty nest’), on what sort of career they previously had.
Interestingly, I found that there were 2 categories of persons, reacting differently according to their status before relocation.
The PIP: previously ‘important’ people, having left behind high powered jobs, financial independence and a wide social network
The POP: previously ‘ordinary’ people. For those ones, the expat status is more prestigious than their previous occupation. But I’ve noticed that they were depreciating themselves considerably in comparison to their wives.
There’s also a big advantage in having the right attitude, to treat the experience as an adventure, a learning experience and to be willing to change your attitudes and even values to survive in the new culture.
Besides the lunches and the intense ranting, we try also to make contact with the working men.
On the first Monday evening, every 3 months, we meet up in a bar providing a mix of business and stay at home men.
Ironically, this proves to be a unique place for working men to socialize without talking about work!!
We are also at the moment, moving toward creating an official organization to support the male trailing spouses as well as the broader expatriate community. With a formal group, we think we can also make a difference within the broader expatriate community – for cultural adjustment, social integration and basically having a stronger sense of community – that really doesn’t exist here.
If you want more information and/or live in the Basel area, you can contact Neil on facebook [angryexpat], email: neil.kelly@bluewin.ch or call him at his studio on +41 (0)61 751 16 93
Now over to you: as a male trailing spouse, what’s your experience?
If you’re a woman, we want to hear from you too. Do you know other male counterparts? Are you best friends or worst ennemies?