Trailing Spouses -- Who's The Boss? Many Husbands Find Themselves In Limbo When Wife Relocates For A Better Job

Richard Atkins gave up his $70,000-a-year post as New York City's deputy health commissioner last summer when his wife, Cynthia Samuels, a television executive, was transferred to Los Angeles.

Unable to find a new job after they moved, Dr. Atkins is fretting about the change in their marriage: Now, he has to ask his wife for grocery money.

"It's a very strange, unusual experience," he says.

Like Atkins, many American men feel torn between traditional social values and some demands of modern life, but few are torn more brutally than those who are following their wives as the women ascend the managerial ladder. And the numbers of such men are growing rapidly.

Women accounted for about 18 percent of corporate moves in 1992, up from 5 percent in 1980, the Employee Relocation Council says. By the year 2000, some experts say, a third of transferees will be female, and one in four trailing spouses may be men - up from 15 percent in 1990 and about 7 percent in 1985.

As the numbers of trailing husbands increase, more and more men, even those accustomed to a wife with a successful career, are finding themselves caught in an awkward sex-role reversal. The strain tends to intensify when a relocated husband can't find a new job and must depend on his wife's paycheck.

In the current unemployment-plagued economy, a trailing husband typically has a harder time finding work than a trailing wife does.

He usually is looking for a relatively high-paying job, and many traditionally male jobs - whether blue-collar factory work or white-collar middle-management positions - are harder to find and less portable than many traditionally female jobs, such as nursing and clerking.

The stress can turn a dual-career couple into a dueling career couple. Margaret Graham, a 43-year-old compensation manager in Raleigh, N.C., says her marriage broke up last year largely because her salesman husband never found steady work after following her from Baton Rouge, La., in 1988 to enable her to accept a better-paying job.

"After several years of supporting him, I decided I didn't want any more of that," Graham explains. "It is probably easier to stick to the old tradition of having the wife follow the husband."

Some companies are upset, too. They worry that they will lose prized fast-track female employees if career-minded husbands balk at transfers. At Mobil Corp., female managers often resign for fear that their husbands won't go along with a move. Mobil finds that a man generally will follow his wife only if she earns at least 25 percent to 40 percent a year more than he does.

Society's negative attitudes toward trailing husbands just "haven't changed that much over the past 10 years," says Derek Harvey, a Mobil human-resources executive.

Some men, of course, relocate easily for their wives' careers. A few become house-husbands.

Steve Thomas quit his job managing a restaurant shortly after his daughter was born in May 1989. Thirteen months later, his wife Therese, a dermatologist, moved the family from Albuquerque to work in Flagstaff, Ariz. Now, Thomas takes care of their year-old son as well.

"It's important that a parent be at home with a child for at least two years," he says. But after moving three times for his wife's job, he admits, "I have never been able to remain in one position long enough to find out how successful I might be in my career."

The trailing-husband problem is pushing companies to revamp their help for all such spouses - or "accompanying partners," as they also are called. The issue "came alive" for employers only "when this became real for men," says Arlene Johnson, vice president of Families & Work Institute, a New York research group. "As companies get serious about moving up women, they've got to get serious about the trailing-husband issue."

About half of U.S. companies now help relocated mates find jobs, usually informally, up from a third in 1986, the relocation council says. A common informal approach has been for employers to try to hire spouses themselves or to seek job leads from rivals and suppliers. The number of those with formal programs - such as individualized career counseling, has grown to about 20 percent from 5 percent in 1987, estimates relocation consultants Runzheimer International.

Impact Group, a St. Louis spouse-counseling firm with special services for trailing husbands, says its list of corporate clients has soared to 71 from 12 in 1989.

Such firms have their work cut out for them. Many men suffer for months over the double whammy of sex-role conflicts and extended unemployment.

"Trading places was hard on me," admits Ates Yegen, a 40-year-old printing-plant manager. He followed his wife, Umit, to Randolph, N.J., from Newtown, Conn., late last fall after she joined Ciba-Geigy Corp. as a medical researcher. The move made economic sense: He left a $45,000-a-year job that he disliked while her pay rose more than $25,000 to $105,000.

Ciba-Geigy paid $1,500 for Yegen to receive 10 hours of job counseling from Minsuk, Macklin, Stein & Associates. Though the Princeton Junction, N.J., outplacement firm revamped his resume, he had trouble finding a new job. "I always looked upon myself as the man and the provider," Yegen says. But as an unemployed husband, "you are losing the power, you are losing control," he says.

Several male friends were aghast that he relocated for his wife's job. "They said, `How can you do that? That's really a question of being man or not,' " he recalls. He himself resisted the idea at first because following her felt like "losing part of being a man."

And when he applied for a job with an East Rutherford print shop, the owner asked why he had moved. "I said, `My wife got a job here,' " Yegen recalls. "He said: `Who's the boss at home?' "

Smiling sheepishly, Yegen says he replied: "She's the boss." He didn't get a job offer.

Staying home - caring for two school-age youngsters, cooking and cleaning house - he began eating too much and sliding "into a deeper depression," he says. He recalls that when he fetched his daughter, a first-grader, at her new school, "I was the only man" among 30 mothers. "They looked at me in a strange way."

His worried wife often called him several times a day from work.

It was "a whole second job to bring him up to feeling better about himself," says Umit Yegen, a 37-year-old physician. "Men feel like they're defined by their jobs." Two weeks ago, Ates Yegen finally resumed working full time, as a $45,000-a-year production manager at a Union City printing company.

The couple's difficulties aren't unusual. Worried about a role switch and economic dislocation, men are "much less likely to leave the old location" and follow their wives without lining up a new job first, says Marjorie Shorrock, president of Resource Careers, a Cleveland spouse-counseling firm. But, says Joanne Waldman, an Impact Group counselor, remaining far away from the new locality "hinders your job search."

The deep anxiety that can delay a trailing husband's move and re-employment is evident as seven men meet in Manhattan. CARE, the international relief agency that employs their wives, has brought them together to tell them more about its plan to move its headquarters from New York to Atlanta in August.

"The idea of going through a formal job search in a new community is really daunting," frets Alan Bremer, a corporate video producer.

"I have been with the same company for 13 years. Am I going to be able to find another job?" Arthur Goldstein, a school administrator, sadly agrees: "I can't live in an uncertain world like that."

CARE is offering formal job-hunting support to spouses, once they agree to move, but Goldstein isn't satisfied. "The support has to come sooner," he insists, "because uprooting is a major upheaval, especially in this economy."

Increasingly, employers are going to great lengths for a trailing husband to retain a female transferee and help save her marriage.

Two years ago, James and Mary Nurre and their two toddlers moved from Marshalltown, Iowa, when Monsanto Co. promoted Mary to a higher-level accounting position at its St. Louis headquarters. James left his $25,000 post with the Iowa auditor's office.

Nurre says Monsanto provided $1,000 for his job search in St. Louis. He used the money to prepare and mail several hundred copies of his resume. But between May and November 1991, the 37-year-old accountant says, "I ended up only getting three interviews." His joblessness created marital and economic strains, he says, and the Nurres considered returning to the Des Moines area.

Nurre complains that "Monsanto didn't get serious" about helping him "until they realized they were running a strong risk of losing my wife." By spring 1992, Nurre's complaints persuaded Monsanto to explore internal job possibilities and hire Impact Group to help him seek work locally, Monsanto officials and Nurre say.

But last July he got an accounting manager's job with a large maker of vegetable oils and livestock feed - in Omaha. The Nurres' marriage nearly broke up. Nurre says he asked his wife to quit Monsanto and follow him to Omaha because "she had a marketable resume." She says she refused because she had just won another promotion and a $7,000 raise to $45,000 in St. Louis.

"It was hard," says Mary Nurre, who is 28. "We had to decide: Is one career more important than someone else's? Or is someone else's career more important than the marriage?"

Last November, Nurre moved back to St. Louis. He says he ultimately left the Omaha firm because job cuts were looming there.

Nurre's bosses then agreed to pay Impact Group another $800 to give Nurre more customized assistance. "To attract these super professional women, we are going to have to meet demands" to better help their husbands, says Valentino Martinez, Monsanto's manager of professional staffing. Martinez adds: "As slowly as we responded, we worked out their situation." On March 1, Nurre began a $30,000-a-year job at Wetterau Inc., a locally based food wholesaler.

Other employers also are trying harder to help trailing spouses. Ameritech Corp. eases a working spouse's transition by giving a transferred employee up to $1,000 a month so that he or she can commute long distance for a year.

At Sprint Corp., Timothy Stockwell, director of relocation management, anticipates "greater pressure to do a whole host of things" for trailing spouses as more and more of them are men. The Westwood, Kan., telecommunications concern already spends up to $4,000 to replace a relocated spouse's lost income for 60 days. That helps transferees return to full productivity in an average of about three months after the move; it had taken six. Now, Stockwell says, Sprint is doing more to hire spouses itself.

Marriott Corp. is trying to make that internal placement task easier. Last month, it installed a computerized job-posting system that tracks its managerial vacancies nationwide. Both employees and trailing spouses can apply for the openings.

American Telephone & Telegraph Co. set up four U.S. out placement facilities in 1989 to handle widespread downsizing, and last June began a formal policy of inviting trailing spouses to use the four "resource centers," too. Each person gets a job counselor plus many open-ended services, including computerized job banks, secretarial support, a reference library and an office-like setting to come to every weekday. Two more resource centers, opened in January, also assist trailing spouses.

That job-aid package "played a big part" in deciding to relocate, says Kevin Crowe, who resigned as a general manager for a Chicago metal-stamping company last fall, two months after AT&T transferred his wife, a district manager, to Liberty Corners, N.J. The 38-year-old Crowe had never prepared a resume before and, he says, feared "moving into the unknown." The outplacement facility, he adds, lessens his sense of desperation about being jobless and "helps me uphold a professional image."