The Impacts on Marriage Relationships of Indonesian Female Domestic Workers’ Overseas Employment

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact of women working overseas as domestic workers on their marriage relationships. It describes the variety of marriage relationships among FDWs by providing narratives of each marriage in relation to the following issues of significance which emerged during the fieldwork: money, spouse’s behaviour, sexual desire, trigger to go, and long-distance communication. The fieldwork offers mixed patterns about how FDWs struggle and cope with their married relationships, such as: (1) performing the ‘dual roles of women’; (2) maintaining the ‘traditional’ responsibilities; (3) accepting an extramarital affair or ‘contract marriage’ of their husbands as a normal situation; and (4) being an overseas domestic worker as a strategy to solve their marriage problems. Any of the multiple factors such as fragile marriages, unemployment and subsequent poverty, family disharmony and a sense of adventure, could be considered as the cause motivating them to seek overseas employment. In other words, migration and marriage have mutually constitutive effects, because whilst, migration affects the marriage in ways that can be destabilizing or affirming, at the same time, marriage norms and relations can also determine the particular migration decisions that are eventually made.