The Trailing Spouse Reimagined: Stories of people transported by love

By Rylla Resler, Francesca Incocciati and Adriana Quarck

Based on dozens of interviews with men and women who have relocated to Switzerland for their partners' career, The Trailing Spouse Reimagined
explores the real challenges and true joys of life abroad as a trailing
partner. Expat readers everywhere will be inspired by the personal and
professional dexterity of these often-invisible travelers. Swiss readers
will learn about their neighbours from abroad. This book is for anyone
who has ever moved abroad - or knows someone who has. Read and be
inspired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bergli
• Release date: Oct 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9783038690016

Book preview

The Trailing Spouse

REIMAGINED

Adriana Quarck | Rylla Resler | Francesca Incocciati

The Trailing Spouse

REIMAGINE

D

Stories of People Transported by Love

This book was made possible by the generous support of:

Copyright © 2018 Bergli Books.

All rights reserved.

Text Copyright © 2018 Adriana Quarck, Rylla Resler, Francesca Incocciati.

All rights reserved.

In some cases, names, locations and other details have been altered in order to maintain the privacy of persons mentioned in this book.

Bergli Books received a structural grant from the Swiss Department of Culture, 2016–2018.

ISBN ePub 978-3-03869-001-6

ISBN Mobipocket 978-3-03869-002-3

To Kai, Catarina and Helena, loves of my life.

—Adriana

To my mother, a trailing spouse who gracefully moved

internationally multiple times with many children; she was

home for us, wherever we landed.

—Rylla

To Fabio, who teaches me daily the art of patience

and perseverance.

—Francesca

Contents

Foreword

Dear Reader

Knowing That Hearts Would Break

Don’t Worry, Go Ahead!

Feeling Like a Toddler

Small Things Loom Large

Learning to Listen

What Would Livia Do?

What Do You Do All Day?

No Job, No Badge, No You?

What Have I Done?

Time Flies, Have Fun

You Will Change, That’s OK

No Quiet Home

Like a Butterfly

You’d Think I’d Moved To The Moon!

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Our Stories

A Rite of Passage – Adriana Quarck

Transported, Transformed – Rylla Resler

I Like the View From Here – Francesca Incocciati

Foreword

Home is where the heart is.

—Ancient Proverb

A move to a new country for a new job is now, in this age of globalization, no longer exceptional. But we often forget that the effects on the people who relocate—and the partners and families who accompany them—can be immense.

In former times, moves abroad were mostly limited to men on deployments or diplomatic assignments. The rest of the family generally remained at home. This has changed with the emancipation of women, on the one hand, and the increased importance of men in family duties, on the other. Today few would consider moving abroad without their closest loved ones. This book is about these loved ones who have chosen to embark on a move to another country.

And there are so many reasons professionals move abroad today: multinational companies; the prestige of an international CV; global recruitment; digital networking; the interconnectedness of the world’s best research universities; not to mention the marked increase in intercultural marriages between partners of different origins.

At the same time, it is increasingly common for both partners in a romantic relationship to have a career—or at least strive to do so. And while in former times it was mainly a female fate to follow her partner, more and more men are today joining their partner on international assignments; they are now the ones who need to forge a new identity.

These men and women who trail along soon get to know the joys and challenges of their move: the frustrations of integrating in a new culture; periods of euphoria and great curiosity; the highs and lows of intense self-reflection; the openness of a global life and the narrowness of the closed communities of expats; rejection and crisis; and stress in their relationship, which often leads to a new closeness with their partners. This emotional roller coaster is tiring, but because of it, many people develop completely new—and often unexpected—ways of life. They discover new careers, new talents, a whole new sense of meaning, and new priorities. Many people leave home with the intention of staying only a few years and yet remain for much longer, if not forever.

The following stories of uprooted lives highlight this transformation: How the loss of one home can lead to discovering a new one. In this regard, the three authors take readers on an inspiring journey, unfolding through the stories of the fifteen people featured in these pages. The book in your hands presents fifteen journeys as diverse as the fifteen individuals who live them—journeys both impressive and touching.

The three authors, who underwent a similar journey themselves, offer readers the concrete moments that comprise the journeys: the split-second decisions, the light-bulb epiphanies, the departures and arrivals, the strategies and solutions. We see how language, children, and beliefs figure so importantly in integration. How the struggle for establishing daily structure is of utmost importance. How competent and brave persons suddenly stumble over banal, daily tasks. How mindfulness, humor and serenity, creativity and confidence, and particularly the support of friends and neighbors help in overcoming the challenges of a global move.

And finally, the priceless stories in this book offer us locals not only an opportunity to follow their fascinating journeys, but also teach us how to welcome these new arrivals, by helping us understand their challenges, their talents, and their reasons for making these difficult journeys across the globe.

Dr. Tanja Popović

Head of the Welcome Center

University of Basel, Switzerland

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our community. It is a community of people from all over the world who have left their homeland to move with their partners into a new life abroad. We have all faced the challenge of a drastic change and were open, even eager, to experience other cultures and other ways of life. We are men and women who have chosen to reinvent ourselves as adults, to discover talents even we ourselves never knew we had. Ours is a community of people who are more than trailing spouses, as we have so often been known.

If you are considering or have already made the decision to move abroad because of your partner’s job and you are feeling insecure, welcome.

If someone close to you has moved abroad and it is still hard for you to accept his or her decision, welcome.

If you are a local, and are curious about what life is like for your neighbors who have just moved onto your street from very far away, welcome.

In this book, we have done our best to weave together our experiences with those of the many people we have interviewed; men and women who interpret their role of trailing spouse/ partner with curiosity, open minds, creativity, and passion.

We are Francesca, Adriana, and Rylla, and we too are part of this community. We moved to Switzerland with our husbands who had job opportunities here. The word trailing doesn’t fit us, because we didn’t trail anyone. (You’ll see we call ourselves accompanying spouses/partners in our essays.) We all moved by choice: a decision made in love. We were in fact, transported by love.

Adriana moved from Brazil to Switzerland in 2010. As a girl, she had dreamed of joining the navy and sailing the world. Life had different plans for her, and instead she became an advertising and public relations executive in São Paolo. She thought her chances of living abroad were finished. That is when, seemingly out of the blue, her husband came home and asked her if she wanted to move to Switzerland.

Francesca moved from Rome to Basel in 2009. She had always regretted not taking the opportunity to live abroad as a student, but then was presented a second chance. At the time Francesca was trying to balance life as a new mother and marketing executive—and was ready for a change.

Rylla arrived in Switzerland in 2008 after already having lived abroad both as a child and adult. Enthusiastic and open, she was also aware of the difficulties ahead. After a few years, Rylla decided to combine her experience of life abroad with her background in training and personal development. She designed The Expat Experience, a class about creating your life abroad with awareness and creativity. It was there that the three of us met.

In the class we heard heartwarming stories from so many wonderful people in the same situation; they had moved to Switzerland through their partners’ jobs. While our working partners were busy in their new assignments in Switzerland, we were often on our own. Some of us busied ourselves supporting our families; all of us began to learn about life in the streets of our new locale. In the daily challenges of living in another country, we experienced how difficult it is to uproot a life and to start again in a new place.

Listening to each other, we realized we weren’t alone. And we weren’t crazy. Everyone has ups and downs, good days and bad. And this is where the seeds of this book were planted. We knew sharing these stories could help others, and so we began collecting more stories.

We are honored to introduce you to this community. The wisdom, candidness, and sense of humor we found here has enriched our lives, and we hope it will enrich yours as well.

This is a book about travel, but not so much about physically traveling around the globe. You won’t find any tips on where to get the best deals on flights or how to pack boxes. Instead, it is about the internal journey we all take when we agree to move abroad. From the moment we make the decision to uproot our lives from the familiar, many things change around us, but more importantly, inside us. Even in this hyper-technological age, on a journey like this, we cannot rely only on outside support, but must travel deep into our hearts and souls.

This is also a book about love, because all the men and women we feature considered a move abroad a meaningful opportunity for their entire family. This may sound romantic, but moving abroad is very different from the plot of a romantic novel.

It is all about beginning again, resetting our lives as adults. Each person featured here came from different parts of the world, from a different culture. Some planned to move abroad briefly; others planned to stay indefinitely. Almost always things did not go as planned.

The people we have interviewed are young and old, from four different continents. They have different faiths and speak different languages. Despite this diversity, we are aware that they represent a narrow class of migrants: those who have relocated for the hope of a better professional experience. Many had significant support from the companies that moved them abroad in the form of assistance finding new homes, schools, language courses and more. In deciding to focus on this class of affluent migrants, we don’t mean to ignore those less fortunate, who undergo great material hardship in moving and living in another country. We firmly believe their stories also deserve to be told, but that would be another book, with different themes—a book which we would love to write at another time.

The following chapters are loosely ordered according to the process we authors experienced. At the end you will find three essays about the authors, by the authors. But read the chapters in any order you’d like; there is no right way to read this book, just as there is no right way to live life abroad.

Often people think that living abroad is sort of like being on a never-ending holiday. In fact, few things are as difficult as rediscovering our identities in the middle of our adult lives in a community where no one knows us. We are faced with so many questions: Who am I now? Of what value am I? Must I find job immediately, even one I don’t like? Am I only someone’s spouse or someone’s parent? The question, What do you do now? is, all of a sudden, so nerve-racking. Because for a while, we no longer know the answer.

We cannot fall back on who we were. Who we were, what we did, will not work in this new environment. But then the process of discovering ourselves begins. We learn what we have to offer, though it may vary greatly from our lives before. As we discover more about ourselves, everyone around us benefits. And yet this experience is unpredictable. No one goes through it in the same way or with the same timing. But with time we begin to feel more comfortable with the new person we have become. We have the power to recreate ourselves, even if this power has, until now, been invisible.

We have seen this invisible power in all the people we have written about and we invite you to be inspired by them too.

Warmly,

Francesca, Adriana, & Rylla

Knowing That Hearts Would Break

By Rylla Resler

Lynda is an intense woman of few words. Chiseled cheeks carved of stone, piercing blue eyes gazing at you directly, you know she is fully