Surviving as an accompanying partner

Being an accompanying spouse in a new country can be exciting, but it is not without its challenges. Natália Šepitková discusses how to survive together.

Photographs: Meghna Nijhawan

Text: Natalia Sepitkova

Many internationals come to Denmark to support their partners in their career paths. They may hope to establish themselves in a new country quickly and start building their own careers, but that's not always the case. Sometimes they give up their well-established careers back home without clear prospects for career growth in a foreign country.

Meghna Nijhawan has her own experiences. She was born in New Delhi and studied in Chennai, India. Her background is journalism and communication, and she spent over a decade working in India’s biggest news organisations. And then she moved to Denmark.

Did you follow your spouse to Denmark because of his job offer?

Yes, I did. He worked in the regional office, and he got an opportunity to move to the HQ in Denmark. When we first found out that he had landed this role, we did a quick pulse check with colleagues who had also moved to Denmark from India. All of them told us that it would be challenging for the spouse to find a role.

Our initial thought was that maybe I would stay behind in India, and we would do a long-distance marriage. He could do this role for a couple of years and come back to India. But I just wanted to try out the job market in Denmark. While he was still getting his visa and his air tickets were being booked, I had applied for a role at Maersk. About 20-30 days later, I also landed the role, and I got my own work visa, my own ticket to Denmark.

That means you didn’t struggle with finding a job as an international spouse.

I think I lived in a bubble for two and a half years. I had heard of spouses struggling to find jobs, especially expats from non-EU countries, but I hadn't personally experienced that situation. But in late 2023, I was impacted by a company-wide layoff and reorganisation. That's when I started to live the nightmare of how difficult it is to find a job in Denmark.

I tried my hand at everything. I was volunteering, posting on LinkedIn, networking, customising my cover letter, and sending different CVs. Ultimately, I had to set up my own company to create employment for myself and pay my own bills. I think that was a heartbreaking experience, those seven, eight months when I was job seeking full-time. It taught me valuable lessons and gave me a good reality check of how things are in Denmark.

Is Denmark providing sufficient support to international spouses?

Denmark has several communities dedicated to internationals. But when I was unemployed, I was on LinkedIn sharing my story and struggles, I felt like no one was really catering to expat spouses. No one is really sharing their stories, or highlighting the challenges that they face and the invisibility of it all; and the fact that most of them are highly skilled and talented, but no one is really looking at them as a talent pool.

I also felt there was no community specifically working with international spouses from non-EU countries. And by non-EU, I don't mean America, Britain, or Australia. I mean Indians, the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, and people from Africa and Latin America. We have our own cultural nuances. We are deeply connected to our families. Some of us are taking care of them, even financially. We come from a very different cultural setup compared to Denmark. There was no representation on stage or in the audience of people like us, which is why I co-founded the community Pillion Expats.

“Don’t reduce yourself to the label of a spouse, wife or mother.”

Tell me more about it.

Pillion Expats aims to empower expat spouses by being the voice of non-EU expat spouses in Denmark. You cannot speak about internationals homogeneously because people from different countries and cultures have other challenges. We support them by sharing all the professional insights we have on job seeking, setting up a company, networking, CV review, and what to include in a cover letter. We empower them through the information and content we create.

We host many online and offline events, offering workshops on networking, financial independence, and freelancing in Denmark, to inspire them to think beyond jobs and realise there are options. We also do a lot of one-on-one sessions with expat spouses. My co-founder, Asavari, meets people every week to understand their struggles, guides them, and creates a tailor-made plan. We do this completely pro bono.

Do you think that women accompanying their partners have it even harder than men?

Absolutely, there's no doubt about it. When you become an international couple, and if your accompanying partner is a woman who has had to give up or pause her career, it can set her back by many years. My first role in Denmark was a junior role. The reality is that I'm probably five or six years behind my career trajectory, and I've had to make peace with it.

When your accompanying partners are women who don't have careers, jobs or businesses, they're forced to be homemakers, managing the entire household. And of course, there's nothing wrong with it. But sometimes that's happening against their choice. And I see that a lot in my own community. These are women who've probably worked hard to build their careers. They could be the first or second generation of women who went to work and gained financial independence. But when they're in a situation as an expat couple in Denmark, we're setting them back by a generation, forcing them to stay at home. And that is happening in a country like Denmark, where women have been part of the workforce for decades. So, we collectively need to figure out a solution and develop initiatives for them.

I believe inclusive growth benefits everyone, not just us spouses. Happier, supported spouses contribute to the economy and help retain the leading spouse, ensuring the best talent stays here long term.

What is your advice for international spouses?

First, create a strong community of your own. Don't reduce yourself to the label of a spouse, wife, or mother. Even if you don't have a job, aren't earning, and feel like your career is not progressing, try to build your own life and community in Denmark. Then, pick up your hobbies again. This is the best country to do that. If you like reading, create your own book club; if you like dancing, have dance nights with your friends.

Create a life for yourself, not linked to your partner or your child. Because I think that is what will give you that sense of home, sense of ''me'', even when you don't have a job. And of course, you may need a job for financial reasons, but at least you don't feel a sense of identity loss when you don't have a career right away.

The third is to embrace networking. Network with people that you find interesting, don't look at it through a transactional point of view. If you meet someone who has had an interesting career journey, you can reach out to them for a coffee chat, not to get a job or a referral, simply out of curiosity. Have that same sense of curiosity when you meet people at events, webinars, or workshops.

What can advance more opportunities for dual careers?

There are a few things. More visibility, more spousal programmes in companies as part of relocation packages, and more spousal networking programmes. I want to see more spouse-focused initiatives from the municipality, not just CV review or unpaid volunteer work, but internship programmes where they can work in Danish organisations and gain real work experience.

An acknowledgement of their presence in Denmark: it begins with collecting data on the challenges they face. Aside from having a CPR number, an international spouse who is unemployed is not part of the SKAT system, since they don‘t pay tax. They are also absent from the unemployment database because, technically, if someone has never held a job, they cannot be classified as unemployed. Non-EU spouses are ineligible for unemployment support, leaving them invisible in any official records. If they don’t officially exist, how can we even begin to address their challenges? Addressing this requires a collective effort to uplift their lives in Denmark.