The excitement of a foreign posting can quickly start to turn sour as the problems pile up and the pressures on relationships start to grow. Andrew McCathie looks at a new book that sets out a survival guide for couples shifting to another country.

It’s a hazardous business moving around the world. One of the first casualties of the stress can be the relationships, which in some case just seem to buckle under the strain of the upheaval in forging a new life as an Expat.

Someone always seems to lose out. Or at least thinks they have lost out in the deal to go and live in another country. Often enough it’s the person who has put their career on hold while making the shift to help further their partner’s work prospects.

It can of course represent the great chance to write that novel, acquire a foreign language or possibly boost educational qualifications.

Unfortunately, settling in can be a long and difficult process. Sometimes people feel like they are marking time and left at home with the small details of life, while their partner’s new working world unfolds.

That is often when the trouble starts: one partner at home feeling isolated away from all the props of home (often made worse if in country with a foreign language) while their better half continues to press ahead with their job.

The excitement of a few years living away from home can also turn sour very fast if for some reason the remuneration is not what people had thought it would be, especially when only one person in the household is working.

In attempting to mount a move around the world mistakes are inevitable. The trauma of the move can quickly set in when you try to work out just what to take, what to leave behind and what to dispose of.

Kids can make things even more complicated, in particular if they don’t settle easily into their new environment or if they were left behind at home base to finish off studies.

Of course it does not always have to be like that.

In her new book, ‘A Moveable Marriage: Relocate your relationship without breaking it’, expat writer Robin Pascoe sets out a survival plan for couples moving to follow a career in another nation.

‘A Moveable Marriage’ is Pascoe’s fourth book about families and couples trying to adjust to the pressures of shifting to new environments.

In her latest book, Pascoe seeks to identify the challenges facing relationships and to draw up strategies for dealing with dual career questions as well as moving children and the often complicated issue, which arise concerning housing.

You might find yourself in love with someone who sweeps you off to foreign posting only to discover that the relationship has really no chance of working or that in fact there is a third person in the relationship and that your partner is in fact involved with someone else. What do you do then? You are stuck in foreign country without all the support of home.

The wife of a Canadian diplomat, Pascoe also does not step back from some of the hard questions that often emerge as a result of the stress placed on relationships and looks as the isolation that some spouses suffer from as well as the additional tensions that arise over money, love and sex.

Equally problematic can be the relationship with headquarters back home. With this in mind, Pascoe also tackles questions about what to do if things are not going well at work for one of the partners.

Andrew McCathie is a former editor of Expatica Germany