The term trailing spouse is used to describe a person who follows his or her life partner to another city because of a work assignment. The term is often associated with people involved in an expatriate assignment but is also used by academia on domestic assignments.
The earliest citation of the term trailing spouse is attributed to Mary Bralove in the Wall Street Journal (July 15, 1981) in an article titled “Problems of Two-Career Families Start Forcing Businesses to Adapt” p. 29:
Another personnel man remembers the promising executive he lost because her husband was a dentist who couldn’t find a good practice to join in the area. To cope with this problem, some 150 northern New Jersey employers participate in an employer job bank. The bank is designed to provide job leads for “the trailing spouse” of a newly hired or transferred executive.
The phenomena of expat trailing spouses is most apparent in the military, diplomatic, and other government communities as well as the private sector where the employer regularly reassigns their employees to new locations. In each case, the trailing spouse is required to relocate and as a result faces a range of issues that impact their personal and working lives.