The Life of an Expat Wife

Not always luxury and fun

So your husband has been transferred overseas. Many of your friends may envy the exotic, glamorous lifestyle they visualize you having. You may not have to work, you may be appointed a maid and a driver, your husband may receive a pay raise, leaving you time and money to shop, go to the salon, and enjoy long, boozy lunches with other expat wives. If this is your actual life and you are fulfilled by it, more power to you. Enjoy.

But many times the life of an expat wife is not all luxurious and fun. There are many factors commonly overlooked why an expat wives may have a much harder time adjusting to living overseas than their spouses.

You may be an independent woman with a solid career of your own that you are being asked to leave in order to make the move. You may have an incredibly hard time securing work in the new country for many reasons. Work visas may be extremely difficult to obtain. The new culture may frown upon strong, intelligent, powerful women taking jobs away from the men. Or depending on the local currency and salaries, it may not even be worth your time to get out of bed in the morning to make what works out, upon conversion, to be roughly 28 cents per hour.


Many expat wives leave behind a strong social network of good friends and colleagues, and move to a new country where the language barrier may make it hard to get much past hello. It is hard to make new friends in this situation. Expat wives more than ever may need to know they have friends to count on and open up to about the difficulties they are experiencing, only to find that there is not a soul in their new country that they can have a genuine, heartfelt conversation with.

A common complaint of expat wives is that they are unsure how to fill their free time. They may be used to working all day. Many come from fast paced corporate backgrounds, and use their time very efficiently. The household errands that need to be done are finished by 10am, and then what? The husband may be working longer hours than ever before, leaving an entire day to fill. On the flip side, many expat wives have expressed that they become much more independent, out of sheer necessity. They may wander the streets alone, exploring the new city. They have no problem seeing a film and going to lunch by themselves anymore.

And what happens if kids enter the mix? Expat wives sometimes end up with the brunt of the work helping the kids adjust, which can be a stressful, full-time job in itself. The kids may be resentful, sad, without friends at first, and many times their unhappiness gets directed at and taken out on mom. Pregnant expat wives need to navigate a new, unfamiliar medical system and need to be emotionally prepared to have their baby in a hospital or medical center they may not like, with doctors that they do not understand.

The life of an expat wife does not have to be lonely and unfulfilling. In time, with effort, it is of course possible to make friends and learn to love the new country possibly even better than the former one. With creativity, work is always available, whether you teach private classes or find work online. Many former expat lives, after the fact, look back with much joy and appreciation for the experiences they had.
I will leave you with a version of a prayer I have seen many times floating around the internet.

Look down on us, your humble obedient expat wives who are doomed to travel this earth following our loved ones through their working lives to lands unknown. We beseech you to see that our plane is not hijacked or doesn't crash, our luggage is not lost or pillaged and our overweight baggage goes unnoticed.


Give us this day divine guidance in our selection of houses, maids and drivers. We pray that the telephone works, the roof does not leak, the power cuts are few and the rats and cockroaches even fewer.


Please lead us to good, inexpensive restaurants where wine is included in the meal and the food does not cause dysentery. Have mercy upon us if it be the latter, make us fleet of foot, to make the loo in time, and strong of knee in case we have to squat. Also give us the wisdom to tip correctly in currencies we do not understand.


Make the natives love us for who we are and not for what we can contribute to their worldly goods. Grant us the strength to smile at our maids, even though our most treasured dress resembles a rag or they take bleach to clean our well-admired Persian rug.


Keep our husbands from looking at foreign women and comparing them to us. Save them from making fools of themselves in nightclubs. Above all, please do NOT forgive their trespasses for they know exactly what they do.


And when our expat years are over, grant us the favor of finding someone who will look at our photographs and listen to our stories, so our lives as expat wives will not have been in vain.


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