A Narrative Inquiry of One Female Married-Single: A Story of Loneliness and Isolation

Abstract

The Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD, 2013) reported that, during the past three decades, there has been a steady rise in the number of international students studying outside their countries of citizenship. Those figures rose from 0.8 million in 1975 to almost 3.7 million in 2009, and to 4.1 million in 2010. There is an associated growing body of research that explores the experiences of international students in general; some exploring the experiences of married international students studying abroad with their families (see Arthur, 2004);but little exploring the experiences of married students studying abroad without their families with them (Wa-Mbaleka, 2013). Wa-Mbaleka and Joseph (2013) uncovered a phenomenon they termed “the married-single phenomenon,” referring to married persons who were studying abroad without their spouses or children. This narrative study documents the experience of one female doctoral student while studying in the Philippines without her family. Data was collected through extensive and repeated interviews, oral and written, formal and informal, an examination of the participant’s retrospective journal, and participant observation. The findings do not show differences between how this married-single woman coped with loneliness and isolation and the strategies reportedly used by other international students in previous studies.