Allen Miller, who lives in Beijing, looks longingly at a photo of his wife and son who are still in Canada. Photo:Zhang Xinyuan/GT

Four months into her stay in Beijing, Carnisa Berry felt like she was suffocating. She had arrived with her family in the dead of winter, and at first it was the frigid weather that kept her holed up in their Shunyi home. As the months crept by, though, she realized there was something else going on.

"I wasn't helping around the house and I wasn't unpacking; I just couldn't accept the fact that I was in Beijing," Berry recalls.

Instead, she spent her days sleeping, watching TV and staring out of the window. It would be a full six months before she gained the courage to leave their house for the first time.

"Sometimes," she remembers now, "I thought I would die in that house." 

Three years later, Berry is doing worlds better, but her early, intractable depression shows the depths that so-called "trailing spouses" - a term coined in the 1980s to describe people who relocate to another city when their partner finds work - can experience, especially when moving to a new country.

Though no stranger to living overseas - her family, who originally hail from North Carolina in the US, had spent the previous four years in Dubai - she was reluctant about the move to Beijing.

"I loved Dubai - everything is written in English, so it's convenient, and the weather is pleasant, and the city is very clean," she says. She'd heard that Beijing, by contrast, was "cold and dirty."

So ingrained was Berry's resistance, that when her husband first got his job as a middle school teacher at Beijing City International School, she considered staying behind in the US with their two children to wait out his return. Quickly, though, she realized that wasn't an option.

"During that period when my children were separated from their father, my 13-year-old son, always a straight-A student, failed his first test, and got into his first fight, and my 11-year-old daughter lost her killer confidence," Berry recalled.

"Then I realized that my family could not be separated. Our children rely on both of us. So I gave up the plan of living in the US with my children alone, and decided to be a trailing spouse."

So describes the dilemma facing so many couples when one of them receives an international job offer - upend their lives for the unknown, or endure the pain of what may become a permanent split?

As more foreigners come to China to find work, it's a question that's become increasingly relevant for the local expat community.

Stephannie Tebow, a Beijing-based counselor said that relationship problems are high among expat couples living in China in her professional experience.

"A big problem with both trailing spouse and long-distance spouse situations is that couples lose touch with one another because they no longer have any shared experiences," she says.

Trailing spouses often feel lost and out-of-place because they don't have a job and are having a hard time adapting to life in a new country. Photo: IC

No sense of belonging

Though it may have seemed lifetimes away in her new role as a desperate housewife, there was once a time when Berry was a working professional.

Before her family left the US in 2009, Berry was a trained designer who worked as the art director at a CBS affiliate in North Carolina. Later, when her family moved to Dubai, Berry quit working to homeschool her children full-time, after finding out that there were no good, affordable schooling options open to them.

In Beijing, though, her kids were able to attend her husband's school, and after a three-year break from her job as a designer, the field had become so digitized, that she realized her skill set had become nearly obsolete.

With no job and no friends, Berry felt lost.

She tried volunteering at her kids' school, and even signed up for a cocktail social, despite the fact that she doesn't drink.

"But I didn't really connect with anyone," she says. "Trying to connect with people who I'm not compatible with just to have something to do only made me feel more pathetic and lonely."

Sometimes, after that first six months, she would try going outside to walk around the city, but the unfamiliar environment and complicated subway system confused her.

Even more frightening, she could feel her family drifting away from her.

Her husband had made friends quickly with the other teachers from his school, and with the other members of an American football club that he played with on Saturdays. Their children, meanwhile, also began making friends with their classmates, and spending their free time going out.

"I was really happy for them that they were making new friends, but I was also sad, thinking about what I would do," Berry said. "I already only get to see them at night, and now they are also gone during the weekends."

According to Tebow, this is a common sentiment for trailing spouses, who can become disconnected from their families and the wider community if the they don't invest in making connections locally.

These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that many trailing spouses feel that they have given up a lot for their partners to come here and thrive professionally while they are withering on the vine. "That can create resentment and conflicts in the family and cause them to drift apart," said Tebow.

"During that first year in Beijing, I felt very sad and kind of angry when I saw that my husband and kids had all developed new relationships and left me alone," Berry said. "But I stayed silent and kept my feelings to myself."  

The pain of separation

The alternative to trailing - separation - can be just as painful for couples and their families.

Allen Miller, 50, a teacher from Canada, moved to Beijing seven months ago without his wife and two children to ready things for their arrival.

"I am here as a scout, to find a job and an apartment first, and find a school for my children - all the preparations for their life in Beijing," Miller said.

He first conceived the idea when he began hearing of how much better the job market was in China. The fact that both his children are adopted from China was an added plus; moving here, he thought, would be a good chance for them to get to know the country better.

 "Our family has to be separated for this year in order to be together again," Miller says. "Great projects are built on pain."

However, Miller couldn't have imagined how painful it would be. Since being diagnosed with depression eight years ago, he has been keeping the ailment under control with medication; but after three weeks living alone in Beijing, the symptoms began to come back.

"I don't even want to come back to my flat after work, just to think I have no wife to kiss, no daughter to read with, no son to play with."

Things are also difficult for Miller's wife back in Canada, who's been under major stress managing their household by herself. 

"She has to shoulder everything alone, like renting the house out before they leave, and going to our children's school meetings," Miller says. "She complains to me a lot. I know it's very difficult for her." 

But at least they all know there is a definite endpoint to their separation. For 44-year-old Brit Rogan Roberts, who lives in Beijing while his girlfriend is in Taiwan, there remains no game plan as to when and how they'll reunite. The two met in the UK three years ago, and have been living apart for the last two.

"It's like we live separate lives, even though we speak on Skype every day," Roberts says.  "We have different plans, do different things and meet different people. We feel like we have drifted apart sometimes."

Roberts' girlfriend initially tried to start a new life as a freelance illustrator in Beijing, but having grown up in a small city in Taiwan, couldn't get used to the hustle and bustle of Beijing, nor its pollution. Likewise, Roberts, who works as a creative director and producer in the film industry, has also tried going to Taiwan, but couldn't find a full-time job there.

"The problem is that there is no plan at the end of this road," he said. "We decided this year, we would either move together, or find some other way, or just break up."

Coping with a new kind of relationship

Berry has finally adjusted after three years as a trailing spouse in Beijing.

"I am a spiritual person, and I figured that since God brought me here, he is going to have some amazing plans for me," she says.

Berry now sees her time in Beijing as an opportunity to find herself and to tap into another interest that she never had time to develop while she was working.

"I have always been interested in life coaching, so I've used this time to read books about it," she says.

"I even wrote a book about life coaching myself and started to host private workshops to empower other female expats in Beijing."

In addition to finding a new passion in their life, Tebow says that it's important for long-distance couples to create a plan for how they are going to incorporate one another into their daily lives.

"I worked with one couple who were both teachers, so once a month they appeared in each others' classes via Skype to teach some special lesson," Tebow says. "This kept them connected as they were planning these hour-long sessions and allowed them to get to know each others' students." 

 Berry said over the years, she has learned to pick the right moment and express her feelings to her husband in the right way, instead of balling up her feelings and projecting them on him like she used to, adding that they now have a date night every week to share their feelings.

Overall, she's optimistic about the years ahead.

"Although I still miss working and having colleagues sometimes, I am excited about what the future might hold for me. As long as our family stays together, we are going to be OK."