If a married couple moves because one spouse is relocated for work, is it correct to say the other spouse is following them? A listener wonders about the implications of the term “follow,” and how that dynamic works in today’s day and age. Married couples often view themselves as a team of two equals, and sometimes words like “follow” can connote unintended ideas of subservience. Grant and Martha point out that, as relationship dynamics change, so does our language. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Following Your Spouse”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Marza. This is Paula from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Hi, Paula.
Hey, Paula. How you doing?
Hey, Grant.
Thanks for calling us. What’s up?
Oh, I’m just so confused. I hope you can help me.
I work for a law firm, and one of our younger female lawyers, we’ll call her Susie, is leaving in August.
Her husband, we’ll call him Bill, just got a new job in Maine.
He’s going ahead in July to get settled, and then she’s leaving our firm and selling the house in Wisconsin, taking up stakes, moving to Maine.
And while we were chatting, I said, you know, I think it’s really admirable that you’re following your husband to Maine.
And she stopped, and her face kind of fell.
And she said, well, that’s not really what I’m doing.
And shortly thereafter, I was in the lunchroom with my coworkers, and I said, oh, Susie’s moving to Maine with Bill.
She’s following her husband.
He has a new job.
And everyone looked at me blankly, and I said, well, maybe this isn’t as current a term as it was in my day.
So she’s literally following him in that, in terms of time, he’s going first.
Right.
But people aren’t taking it that way when you say that.
Hearing something else. They’re hearing a kind of subservience on her part, right?
Yeah, but okay, I don’t get the subservient take on it.
That’s interesting.
Because your language of following one’s spouse or following one’s husband is pretty standard.
In the human resources business. If you look in all these different books on Google Books,
You’ll find that language used repeatedly, regardless whether it’s the man going first
To the woman going first.
But I could see how someone might go,
Oh, wow, that’s got double meanings,
And I don’t like one of those meanings
Because it makes me sound like I’m the obedient,
Subservient wife who does whatever my husband bids me to.
Right.
Oh, the old marriage dynamic.
Yeah.
Yes, the old marriage dynamic.
He’s the head of the household, and she’s following along.
Well, you know, I’ve done this twice, Paula.
My wife has come along with me twice to new homes
In new, faraway places.
And she’s a linguist and a lexicographer, too.
But I think she would also, she’s 30,
She would have some problems with me saying,
Oh, yes, my wife is following me to my new job.
Because she doesn’t see it that way.
She sees it as a team effort,
Regardless of who’s going first,
Both of us entering this new life
And this new place together.
It’s all part of the action.
She’s seeing that other meaning of follow,
As if she’s forced to walk 10 paces behind me in public,
You know?
Right.
So instead of going with you, she’s a camp follower.
Like she didn’t have any choice in the matter.
Right, right.
I’m picturing, you know, two animals yoked together side by side as opposed to a dog sled where Grant’s way up in the front.
So you’ve got a woman here.
She didn’t really take umbrage, but she was a little sensitive about it.
Yeah, she was a little down at the mouth.
So now you can see what her point of view might have been, right?
No, I really don’t get it, but I’m willing to acknowledge it.
Okay.
She probably feels more like they’re relocating the family, you know, that it’s a unit that’s going rather than a choo-choo train.
Right.
It sounds like she’s probably sensitive, and your other coworkers are sensitive about this idea of a woman following a man as if she had no choice.
Right, being the caboose, yeah.
This is a great question.
Paula, thank you so much for sharing this kind of difference between generations with us,
This difference between perspectives.
And it kind of gets to the meaning of the word follow,
But it also gets to the heart of how we’ve had this cultural shift over the last decades.
Well, thank you.
And you’ve encouraged me to maybe spruce up my language a little bit.
Take care.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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