Why did my international marriage feel unequal?

[From my diary]March, 21 2021I often imagine that I and [my ex-husband] live abroad. “Abroad” I mean, neither in Germany, nor in Russia. Somewhere, which would mean “abroad” for both of us. To make us… I don’t know, how to say… equal?I often feel that my husband is in the better position by being a native. Not needing to translate back and forth in his head. Always understanding the slightest variations in the language. Being able to give a quick, concise, and short answer to a spontaneous question from a stranger. Having a community around him just out-of-the-box.Going abroad… would make us “partners in crime” again. “Isolate” us from the environment, make us unite in front of some common problems, such as bureaucracy, lack of language proficiency, daily routine surprises that all migrants inevitably experience.Now, I am just an appendage to his life, incompatible with the current environment.When one partner in a marriage is an immigrant in the other's home country, an invisible structural inequality sits in the relationship from the first day. Researchers studying intercultural couples have several names for this depending on the trajectory — migrant-spouse asymmetry, trailing spouse, immigrant intermarriage — but the underlying issue is the same. One partner is at home; the other is, however welcomed, structurally outside. The native partner rarely sees this, because being at home is unremarkable to those who are. The immigrant partner often does not name it, because the costs of naming it are too high. So it sits in the room, undiscussed, slowly shaping what the marriage becomes.What it actually means to be the immigrant partnerThere is an inequality in international marriages that has very little to do with how much the partners love each other, and very little to do with how supportive the native partner tries to be. It is structural. It exists in a marriage from the day one you build a household together, and it did not go away with time. In some ways it deepens with time: the longer I was an immigrant in Germany, the more clearly I saw what being a native actually consisted of — and how much of it I could not acquire, no matter how long I stayed.Illustration generated by Supportive StrangerBeing a native means having a community by default rather than by effort. It means understanding the language at the speed at which it is spoken, including the small jokes and the cultural references and the half-finished sentences. It means knowing how the bureaucracy works without having to research each step. It means being able to give a stranger directions without rehearsing the words. It means having parents and old friends and former classmates nearby, a whole social web that took decades to build and cannot be replicated by moving somewhere new. It means looking like someone who belongs, even before opening one’s mouth.I had none of this. I had a job, a home, a marriage, a language I had learned to a high level. But the out-of-the-box belonging my husband took for granted was not available to me, and no amount of effort fully closed the gap. I was always doing more work to be in the same room — translating, decoding, asking for clarifications, missing references, being a beat slower in conversations that the other people in the room were conducting in their own language. The Canadian psychologist John Berry, whose 1997 framework for understanding migration is one of the most widely used in the field, calls this ongoing labor acculturative stress — the cumulative psychological cost of living between two cultural worlds rather than fully inside one.This was not a problem of love or kindness. My husband could not see, most of the time, the labor I was doing, and the invisibility of it was one of the most isolating implications of it.A note on different paths to the same asymmetryIt is worth saying clearly that I was not a trailing spouse. (The term was coined in 1981 by Wall Street Journal reporter Mary Bralove to describe partners — almost always wives at the time — who relocated as a consequence of their spouse's job, often suspending their own careers in the process.) I did not move to Germany because of my husband. I had moved years earlier to do my Ph.D. We came together once I was already here. The relevant research term for my situation is closer to immigrant intermarriage: a partnership between a long-settled native and an immigrant who arrived independently.This matters because the trailing spouse literature, while extensive, describes a different trajectory — partners who relocate as a consequence of their spouse’s job or life and who, in some sense, can “reverse” the move by leaving. The asymmetry I am describing is harder to reverse. My move to Germany was my own life project, not a sacrifice made for someone. Going somewhere else would mean unbuilding the life I had built independently, not undoing a relocation I had made for him. The structural inequality looked similar from the outside, but the path into it was mine, not his — and that made the silence around it even more complicated. It was not a thing I could ask him to fix by moving back somewhere with me, because there was no “back” that had been his fault.The research on both situations — trailing spouses and immigrant intermarriages — converges on similar findings about the cost of unspoken asymmetry. The path in differs. The dynamic, once both partners are settled, often does not.Why the fantasy of a third country was so revealingThe dream in the diary entry was unusually clear about what was missing. It was not a dream of escape, or of a more exciting life, or of somewhere warmer or richer. It was a dream of symmetric belonging. A third country — somewhere that would be foreign to both of us — would do something the current arrangement could not: it would make us equal in our relationship to the surrounding world.Illustration generated by Supportive StrangerThis is why the fantasy kept returning. I was not really fantasizing about a different country. I was fantasizing about a marriage in which I was not, by structural necessity, the partner who needed more help. In which my husband would also need me, in concrete daily ways — to navigate the language, to figure out the bureaucracy, to read the small social cues of a foreign place. In which the two of us would be, as I put it then, partners in crime again, united by the shared condition of being outside, rather than divided by one being inside and one being outside.There is something quietly important in the word again. It suggested that this equality had once existed, perhaps early in the relationship, before the practical realities of one country dominating our daily life had settled in. The linguist Ingrid Piller, whose ethnographic study Bilingual Couples Talk (2002) remains the central work on mixed-language partnerships, observes that many international couples report exactly this trajectory: the first phase of the relationship — often conducted across distance, or in a back-and-forth, or before either partner had settled decisively into one country — feels more balanced than what comes later. The asymmetry tends to crystallize only after one partner has clearly moved into the other’s life. That is when the slow loneliness can begin.The cost of the elephant being in the roomWe never discussed the “multiculturality” of our marriage. Never discussed it as a problem or a challenge. It stayed that elephant in the room.This silence is one of the most common features of international marriages, and one of the most costly. Researchers working with intercultural couples have repeatedly found that those who explicitly discuss the cultural and structural dimensions of their relationship tend to do significantly better, over time, than those who do not. The silence is not neutral. It is itself a force that shapes the marriage. The same finding appears in the management literature on expatriate placements: large-scale studies of corporate relocations consistently identify the trailing spouse’s unspoken adjustment difficulties as one of the most common reasons international assignments fail. The mechanism is the same one I lived through, even though my path into Germany had been my own — when the asymmetry is not spoken about, it does its work in the dark.There are several reasons the silence happens, and looking back, I recognize most of them. My husband most probably did not see anything to discuss, because the asymmetry was invisible to him. I did not raise it because the practical case for staying was overwhelming — his job, his family, his language, his life, but also my own life that I had built here. Naming the problem would have seemed to require asking him to sacrifice something significant, or asking me to admit that the move I had made years earlier was costing me more than I had wanted to acknowledge. There was no obvious solution, so raising the issue felt like complaining without offering a way forward. There was also a reluctance to suggest that the marriage was, in some sense, harder for one of us than the other — because this can feel like an accusation, even when it is just an observation of fact.So the topic stayed unspoken. And the unspoken topic did what unspoken topics always do in long relationships: it accumulated. I carried the asymmetry alone. My husband did not know he was carrying half of something. The marriage became a place where one of the most defining facts about it could not be said aloud, and the inability to say it shaped everything else that did and did not get said.Why the native partner is not at faultIt would be easy, in retrospect, to frame the structural asymmetry as a kind of unconscious unfairness on the native partner’s part. That framing is mostly wrong, and it gets in the way of understanding what is actually happening in such marriages.The native partner did not choose to be a native any more than the immigrant partner chose not to be one. Living in one’s home country is not a privilege one exercises against a spouse — it is a default condition that comes with being there. A native husband or wife is not failing the other by being able to give a quick answer to a stranger, or by understanding a film at native speed, or by having parents an hour away. They are simply being who they are, in the place that is theirs. The fact that this causes the other partner pain is not the result of anything they did wrong.What the native partner can be responsible for is the noticing. The asymmetry is not a fault, but the silence around it is something both partners contribute to, and the native partner has at least as much capacity as the immigrant partner to break that silence. The conversation that would help is the one neither partner starts — and in most marriages like this, neither does, because both are doing the same thing: protecting the marriage from a topic that feels too large to raise.Looking back, the painful thing is rarely what either partner did. It is what neither of them said. The most consequential decisions in many international marriages are not the ones where one partner moved or stayed or learned a language or did not. They are the silences that formed around the question of whether being together in one country was sustainable for both, and what would need to be true for it to be.What it doesn’t meanIt does not mean that such a marriage is doomed because of the structural inequality, or that international marriages cannot last, or that the immigrant partner should never have moved. Plenty of international marriages thrive, and many of them include exactly the asymmetry described above. The difference is usually whether the asymmetry is spoken — whether both partners know it exists, name it together periodically, and treat it as a shared condition to be managed rather than a private burden carried by one.It also does not mean that the longing for a third country is a longing to leave the marriage. The opposite. It is a longing to be more inside the marriage — to recover a sense of equal partnership that the current arrangement has quietly eroded. The fantasy is about union, not escape.What it might mean is that the deepest unspoken question in such a marriage is not do we love each other? but do we both belong here? The first question is easier to ask, and easier to answer in the affirmative. The second is the harder one, and the one that, when left in the room undiscussed, slowly shapes the marriage into something neither partner has consciously chosen.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments.Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com