By Miranda Green

Published: September 18 2008 14:18

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7587b8f8-8303-11dd-907e-000077b07658.html

When Stuart Lloyd-Hurwitz and his wife Susan sat down last month to watch the Olympics with their three children at home in London, the reality of their complex family allegiances hit home. Stuart is American, his wife is an Australian originally from the UK and each child was born on a different continent and holds three passports.

“My son had to explain to us who should be cheering for which athlete in which lane, and it all became somewhat complicated,” laughs Stuart, one of a growing band of spouses who follow their partner’s business career around the globe, sometimes with dizzying speed.

In recent years, banks and corporations have been moving their top executives from city to city in a way previously seen only in the military or diplomatic service, and relocation companies estimate that up to 2 per cent of multinational corporate employees are working abroad at any one time, with the majority of companies expanding their overseas postings every year. But the modern spouses of these executives – the vast majority of whom are women – are unlike the diplomatic or military wives of yore in attempting to fashion mobile careers of their own.

Stuart has spent more than a decade inventing and then re-inventing his own working life every time his wife’s high-flying career in property investment has led them to a new location. In the long run, the family intends to settle in Australia permanently, with one more move likely in the meantime. But up to this point, Susan’s jobs have taken the couple, and then, as a daughter and two sons arrived, the whole family to four cities involving five moves.

“I’ve lost count, to be honest,” Stuart laughs, describing the journeys of his life so far, from his home town of New York, to his first job with Oracle in San Francisco, to business school at Insead near Paris where he met Susan, then to Sydney, back to New York, back to San Francisco, then Sydney again, and now London. Each of the moves since he followed her to Sydney after their marriage has been dictated by his wife’s career. The couple rejected only one assignment, to Hong Kong, and have been able to cope with lead-in times as short as two or three months every time.

“We’ve been very lucky to do this when we were young enough to be able to withstand the moves but old enough to have the seniority to make it worthwhile financially,” he says. “Each time it has been a great city and the Insead alumni [network] has made it lot easier, with professionals and friends to plug into wherever you go.”

As a business consultant, Stuart has managed to either find employment or clients everywhere the family has washed up, and his career has thrived. But not all so-called “trailing spouses” are so fortunate: corporate employees who give up their own hard-won position to accompany a spouse find it increasingly difficult on each move to slot into a small pool of top jobs; and many lack the drive and the business qualifications to make a success of their peripatetic life.

A study published in July by Nina Cole of Ryerson University in Toronto revealed that although 60 per cent of spouses are employed before expatriate assignments, only 20 per cent find employment while abroad. Lack of work, combined with culture shock, leaving friends and family, and the other stresses of transition for themselves and their children, can make trailing spouses miserable.

Relocation companies and human resources departments tend to offer practical help with everything from household removals to arranging and paying for the children’s schooling. But a growing body of research and a rising clamour from activist spouses is emphasising that the needs of the relocating employee’s family are often forgotten, with disastrous and expensive consequences for the individuals – and the employers – if the posting has to be curtailed.

The most recent global relocation trends survey from GMAC Global Relocation Services showed that family concerns accounted for 89 per cent of overseas assignment refusals and spouse career concerns for 62 per cent. Family was offered as the reason for 28 per cent of early returns, making it the most common trigger.

A report by Yvonne McNulty reveals an even more serious problem. McNulty is an Australian business researcher and lecturer who gave up her own job at PwC, the proffesional services firm, to follow her husband’s career to Chicago, Philadelphia and then to Singapore and resourcefully turned herself into an expert on the very same challenges she has faced.

Her four-year study, completed in 2005 and still the most detailed survey on the subject, showed that the challenge of maintaining their own parallel career was the number one concern for the partners of executives on the move, with worries about ensuring a good education for children also a major factor (see opposite). Resentment at the failure of multinational corporations to provide adequate assistance was bitter and widespread. More than half of the spouses in McNulty’s sample who were unable to find work in the new country faced visa or work permit restrictions, and some had been left in this position because of poor advice or mistakes by the relocating employer. Several admitted they had resorted to working illegally or jobs that risked harming their career just to find some purpose to their daily lives.

As one of McNulty’s respondents explained pitifully: “I’m a second-class citizen in my own home. I’m not living my life, I’m living his.”

Debra Bryson, co-author of A Portable Identity: A Woman’s Guide to Maintaining a Sense of Self While Moving Overseas, has tried, with her collaborator Charise Hoge, to devise a self-help plan for both women and men who find themselves experiencing the unpleasant psychological side-effects of being transplanted. Bryson and Hoge met when both had been “trailed” to Thailand, and their book contains illuminating observations about the culture shock they experienced. For example, they say that in Bangkok the status of women was vastly different from what they were accustomed to in the US.

Bryson urges organisations to provide early warnings – preferably pre-departure – so that suffering spouses, even if they are surrounded by plentiful domestic help and the often luxurious trappings of the expatriate lifestyle, understand that their unease is normal.

“If you give people the information before, then they will know what’s going to happen to their sense of identity and it won’t be this big surprise and taboo,” explains Bryson. “Really, it would be abnormal for it not to have an effect.”

Some go under completely. “I’ve seen lots of things: alcohol, affairs, relationships disintegrating,” says McNulty, who estimates that about eight out of 10 of the trailing spouses she meets feel lost, and find their life of comfort and leisure empty. “The majority repress it, become resigned to the situation, become charity work junkies or shopaholics.”

But in spite of the psychological challenge, others, similar to Lloyd-Hurwitz, Bryson or McNulty herself, either start off with or manage to create a portable career.

Jeff Porter is another. From his home in Prague, he works online for the Washington-based US Department of Agriculture. His wife is a diplomat and the couple has been on the move for nearly eight years. In an attempt to create a practical, employment-focused network for people like himself, he set up www.trailingspouse.net in 2004 and hopes it will help accompanying partners better plan their mobile careers.

“If you are in this lifestyle you need to be thinking about it as an ongoing issue,” he advises. “Wait until you are moving or actually there and it’s too late. You have to find ways of repackaging what you do and taking it with you. Some people’s skills are not suited to that but you have to be creative. It’s best to get out of the mindset of getting a job in the local economy and think about the wider global market or selling back into your country of origin.”

Porter, like Lloyd-Hurwitz, hates the description “trailing spouse” even though he has used it in the name for his online network. “It’s descriptive but pejorative,” he says. But he seems relaxed and accepting of his life and the adaptations that have been necessary.

McNulty says that this flexible response is more typical of male spouses. “They tend to do a better job of it,” she says. “The men just get on with it, whereas the women tend to sit at coffee mornings for the first year and moan. The men feel it as well but they seek out solutions independently and don’t tend to look to the sending organisations.”

Lloyd-Hurwitz agrees, perplexed by a question about whether he has any role as far as his wife’s employers are concerned: “They’re not hiring me, they’re hiring her.” He insists that he and Susan never planned their life like this – the original discussion about moving for Susan’s work occurred over a memorable sushi lunch and it just evolved from there.

And most of the side-effects for his young family have been positive, or at least amusing. After more than two years in the British capital, the children still say “coffee” and “hotel” like true New Yorkers, but otherwise veer towards English or Australian pronunciation, he says. “The accents are quite hysterical.”