News and Finance

A scenario: One spouse in a dual-income marriage receives a job offer in a distant town or city. Suddenly, it’s crunch time.

Does the other spouse stay behind to continue working in a position that pays well and is professionally gratifying? Or should he or she follow, settling into a job that fails to meet personal standards for salary, potential and intellectual challenge?

Finally, add this to the mix: a recession that has placed nearly 15 million Americans on unemployment and sends an average of 6.4 potential applicants scrambling for every job that does become available.

"It creates a double challenge, and it’s extremely difficult, especially now," said Laurel Sgan, director of the St. Louis Regional Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, based at Washington University.

The consortium is part of a national jobs network that matches candidates with positions at area colleges, universities and health care providers.

Decisions with the potential to value one spouse’s job over the other can also stretch a marriage to the limit.

"It goes straight to the question of family roles," noted Brett Newcomb, a therapist and instructor in the graduate counseling program at Webster University. "What is your role? What is my role? Who is the provider?"

Yvonne McNulty’s experiences makes her somewhat of an expert on the subject.

An academic and Ph.D. candidate now living in Australia, career decisions by McNulty and her husband have resulted in the couple criss-crossing the globe over the course of an 11-year marriage.

So frequently, in fact, that McNulty now hosts a website on the subject — TheTrailingSpouse.com.

"Being a trailing spouse is not for the fainthearted," she wrote in an e-mail response to questions. "Particularly if you are a career-oriented person where meaning and purpose in life drives you."

Sgan dislikes the term "trailing spouse," in no small part because she is in a unique position to resolve issues that arise over job relocation.

In a subsidiary role as the Dual Career Couples Support Director at Washington University, it is Sgan’s mission to assist better halves (whichever half that happens to be) to find gainful employment when the arc of a spouse’s career lands the family in St. Louis.

The program served just three couples in its first year of operation, 2008. The client base jumped to 15 in 2009.

Justin Bittner and his wife, Tricia Hendricks, were among those who took advantage of the program in their move last year from Chicago to St. Louis.

"Big planners," the couple nonetheless weathered a period of uncertainty when Hendricks "left a job without a job" after Bittner received an offer to work as an assessment coordinator Fontbonne University.

"That was tough for us," Bittner recalled. "We were not in a position where I was making so much that we could make it work."

Through Sgan’s efforts, the couple had a relatively brief stay in employment and economic purgatory. A month after Bittner started at Fontbonne, Hendricks reported for her first day on the job as a fundraiser for a local nonprofit.

Higher education, Sgan says, had a vested interest when it initiated programs aimed at easing the transition for couples and families on the move.

"Success at home can affect success in the classroom and the research lab," she pointed out.

Brown Shoe Co. believes the same holds true in the corporate sector.

When the firm folded the operations of its Famous Footwear division in Madison, Wis., into the St. Louis headquarters in 2008, Brown Shoe adopted a comprehensive plan to assist spouses and families through the transition.

Spokeswoman Erin Conroy said the company contracted with an outside management team to provide spouses of Brown Shoe employees with career counseling, networking opportunities and r