trailing spouse n. a husband or wife who follows a marriage partner who takes a new job in different city. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Imagine telling someone how to get to your home, but without using the name of your street, or any other street within ten miles. Could you do it? We take street names for granted, but these words are useful for far more, like applying for a job or...
Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he...
DO you think that finding 2 citations from the same paper in the 80’s (same author??) and 1 from current qualifies?
Yes. There are hundreds more to choose from in other papers and books, but as they add nothing new to the understanding of the term, it’s not necessary to include them here. I would have used just one citation from the Wall Street Journal, but I already had the second-oldest one when I found the oldest one, so I kept them both.
I added another citation to buck it up.
“Trailing spouse” is a very common term in the U.S. Foreign Service community.
See http://www.aafsw.org/articles/working/porter.htm.