There is a lot of discussion right now amongst internationals in Denmark about the “Forgotten Gold”. The term, coined by Lynsday Jensen, editor of “The International”, refers to all those highly educated yet invisible immigrants to Denmark. They are qualified, skilled and ready to work and yet employers don’t see them. Eventually, many give up and leave the country.
Some of the Forgotten Gold were originally recruited from abroad for a specific role, who then struggle to find further opportunities and build their careers.
And then, as our editor Narcis Matache pointed out in the newsletter last week, there are those who came to Denmark as spouses. For this group, “the path is even harder – especially for women, whose careers often spiral into endless internships, part-time gigs, or roles far below their qualifications”.
Yes.
I have heard this group, who I belong to, called other things. Like “trailing spouses”. Trailblazing spouses, a friend always says.
It takes a lot of trailblazing to be an accompanying spouse of a partner who accepts a job abroad. I didn’t fully appreciate that when my wife accepted a job with a well known international toy company here in Denmark. When we arrived here in January 2024, it felt to me like a combination of being a fresher at university and being on maternity leave. Everyone’s a bit naive, trying to figure out this new place and suss out all the people they meet. You can see the look in people’s eyes, the same one you’re transmitting to them: Will you be my new best friend? You’re also wrestling with other anxieties: How do I navigate the deluge of new admin I have to do? Where am I going tomorrow and how do I get there? Will I be happy here? Will this ever feel like home?
If you have children, as the accompanying spouse you will become the provider of all child-related care and admin while your spouse is consumed by the pressures of learning a new job in an unfamiliar land. You will be the one who talks to the school or childcare provider, figures out how the hell to make a doctor or dentist appointment and wipes your offspring’s tears while they emotionally adjust to their new lives abroad. You will be the one who shops and cooks and cleans and washes clothes and learns how to use a myriad of apps to sign your kids up for extracurricular clubs and pay for them. You will do all this without the family support you might have been used to back home and you will frequently feel exhausted and overwhelmed.
“It feels like all I do is clean my house and deal with the kids,” I’ve heard so many accompanying spouses say. If you’ve already been through maternity leave, you feel like it’s happening again, only with all the above crap instead of nappies and baby wipes. If you’re still literally wrestling with nappies and baby wipes, there’s a whole other layer of work and isolation involved. Once the initial excitement of a move is over, and you’re left holding all of this as the trailblazing spouse, things can get a bit dark, and in Denmark it’s literally often dark outside anyway. I remember the months of April and May 2024 as being particularly black.
Not all the trailblazing spouses doing all this unseen work are women, but because of the nature of careers, work patterns and childcare in our still pretty sexist society, a lot of them are. Maternity leave all over again. If you’re an accompanying spouse who’s a man, you can feel doubly othered, without the status of a job but unintentionally excluded from international circles made up mostly of women.
As a new accompanying spouse, I very much felt like I was trailing, not trailblazing. Not waving, but drowning. I gave up a sensible career in education I’d spent two decades building to accompany my wife here. It was a huge decision but she had spent years supporting my career while I worked 70-hour weeks. She absorbed the stress I carried home most days, whilst still working full time herself. It was her turn to take the lead. And I knew I needed to do something different with my working life. The money I earned and the status I had wasn’t enough to compensate for how it was impacting my health, well being and lack of time spent with my kids in the UK.
But still, it was hard. A trailblazing spouse has so much to offer – often the Danish language ability and the knowledge of and contribution to the wider community that the partner with the job doesn’t have. But they have the income and the steady employment that can be almost impossible for the accompanying spouse to attain, even if they manage to secure paid work of their own, because they are juggling everything else. This can be the reason behind accompanying spouses taking those internships or part-time roles or roles below what they are qualified to do.
Often, those kinds of roles are just what you have to do anyway in a new country to ensure you don’t have gaps on your CV, to build connections and community, or simply to stop you going insane. I’m sure some people find keeping their house gleaming and baking bread, trad wife style, to be deeply fulfilling and spiritually uplifting. All power to these people, but I’m not one of them. So I had to find work. I worked for free, for many months, in various very part-time gigs that I was overqualified for but loved, until eventually I started earning some money from them. But there was a time when I worried I would never find meaningful, paid work here and that giving up my safe, socially valued career had been a stupid, reckless decision. Currently, I have less professional power and status, and I earn far less than I have in a long time, but I’m building something new, in a new place, that in the long run will be better for me and my family. That is worth fighting for.
So how do we better support spouses who feel like they’re just trailing to recognise that they are trailblazers and always have been? Some of the answers sit with the companies hiring internationals. These companies need to recognise that they are bringing not just the employee with the job to Denmark but the whole family. Some do this very well, building a whole network of support around international families. Others have a lot to learn. There are also difficult questions about what qualifies someone for permanent residence and citizenship in Denmark. Between them, the spouse with the job and the accompanying partner may meet all the requirements for this. Individually, they’re likely to struggle. I’m not sure what the answer is here but it’s an issue that needs more consideration.
It’s helpful too if municipalities offer support to accompanying spouses, especially those with larger numbers of internationals living there. Some are trailblazing themselves at this, even employing specific staff to welcome and support the international community and running large numbers of community events. I feel very lucky that I live in one of them,
Other answers lie in the partnership at home. There is a brilliant podcast hosted by American psychotherapist Esther Perel, where couples discuss their relationship issues. In one episode, a young woman and her pastor husband discuss the impact of his calling on their marriage. I’m about the least religious person you’re likely to meet, but the questions the couple navigate – whose career matters most, what is the deeper meaning of that career to themselves and in the relationship, what is the degree of involvement that one person has in the professional world of the other and what is reasonable – all sound uncannily like the ones accompanying spouses have to wrestle with. One partner has a “calling” and the other partner follows them, often at great personal cost. At some point, a decision has been made about whose career, at that specific point, matters most. The partner with the job relies on the trailblazing spouse to basically clear a path through life so they can focus on the new job.
The pastor’s wife discusses how her husband’s job feels like a third person in their relationship, her role a bit like a part in a drama that’s become so much larger than the script originally suggested. Like her role in her husband’s religious community, the accompanying spouse’s labour is often invisible, not only to prospective employers but to their spouse. Over time, the spouse who accepted the calling needs to accept there will be a renegotiation of what is reasonable for the trailblazing spouse to take on, a readjustment of the scales so the burden of clearing the everyday paths isn’t mostly carried out by them. An acknowledgement that the trailblazing spouse needs to be freer to build their own life in the new country and that takes time.
But the third set of answers sits with us, the trailblazing spouses. Nanna Hauch, a psychotherapist whose experience as an accompanying partner led her to found her business Expat Hero, believes we need to focus on what we can control and build support networks with other internationals while gradually working to connect with locals. It’s ultimately about that sense of belonging, what feminist writer bell hooks in her book Belonging: A Culture of Place calls our “place in this world…a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place.” We will not find this by isolating ourselves, by becoming bitter and blaming others or internalising the sense that all we’re doing here is trailing. As Julia Jones, a coach and expert in cross-cultural competencies, says, “We cannot create connection with people and understand them, if we blame them for making us not feel ok and demand they change. That just gets us into a fight that leaves everyone worse off than before.”
My work with Last Week in Denmark has been vital to my own sense of belonging. I know I’m making a contribution that’s helpful to other internationals here. I’ve learned so much about my new country’s history, politics, society and culture as a reporter. I’ve met many Danish people over the past year who have given up their time to speak to me for articles when they didn’t have to, welcomed me into their homes and their businesses and shown an interest in me in return for the interest I showed in them. I’ve also been really humbled by hearing the stories of other internationals, some of whom are part of the LWID team, and how hard they have worked to build lives for themselves here in Denmark. I think of the trailblazer who, when finding there was no international network for others like them to share knowledge and build community, set up a local network that now has hundreds of members and runs regular social events. Or another trailblazing spouse, a mother of four, who gives up the little free time she has to run book groups in the community so children from international families can read stories in their native language and their parents can build relationships with other adults. Or another who, knowing that being informed is the first vital step to feeling connected to, then being able to make a contribution to, Danish society, set up a free newsletter that now has over 30,000 subscribers and the backing of the Danish government. What all of these people have in common is determination, self-belief and a refusal to take no for an answer, even when life was at its most difficult. They believed they had something to offer and they could belong, and in the end, they did.
Trailblazing spouses: we need to hold our heads high, be proud of all our achievements and recognise the value we have to our communities, because we belong here. We might not feel it today but one day, sooner than we think, we will. And there are always far more people out there rooting for us and eager to help us than we realise.
