My partner doesn’t understand how hard Denmark is

Why does my partner not understand how hard this is?

Because nothing in their ordinary day carries the weight that yours does, so the cost of it reaches them as a mood rather than as information.

By the time you get through the door you are not angry and not even sad. You are flat, and flatness gives a listener nothing to hold on to. Your shoulders have been up since the morning meeting, your jaw aches from a language you were half following, and what comes out of your mouth is that it was a long day. Your partner, who has never once been the one being decoded, hears a long day and believes you.

There is also an asymmetry in the house that neither of you chose. You are the one doing the adjusting, in the language, the paperwork, the small talk and the slow business of making friends, while the life your partner already had carries on around you. A review of expatriate family adjustment points to a harder situation for the accompanying partner than for the person whose work prompted the move, with isolation, the loss of a working identity and strain on the relationship among what it records¹. It is a narrative review drawing mostly on cross-sectional studies, so read it as a description of where the weight falls and not as a measurement of it.

Why do I end up saying less than I meant to?

The one person who could understand it is also the person it lands on, and you make that calculation in the half second before you answer.

Your partner asks how the day was. You have a particular 10 minutes in mind: standing in the staff kitchen while the room switched to Danish, following about a third of it, deciding not to ask anyone to switch back. By the time you answer, those 10 minutes have become fine, a bit tiring. The sentence is not a lie. It is a shorter version, chosen because the longer one would put your partner in the position of defending a country they did not design.

Then the evening goes on and something stays unfinished. You are shorter with them than the day warrants, or quieter, or you reach for their hand and change the subject in the same minute. From where they sit there is a mood with no account attached to it. They ask what is wrong. You say nothing is, and that answer is the second edit of the same 10 minutes.

Why does talking about it make things worse?

Because the conversation turns into an argument about Denmark instead of a description of your week.

• A country is heard as a person. Say the place is cold, and the person who grew up in it hears an accusation, after which the rest of the hour goes on whether the claim was fair.
• Solutions close the subject. Join something, learn the language, give it time. Each answer is reasonable and each one ends the sentence you were still in.
• The scale gets argued. Whether it is really that bad becomes the topic, and the week you were describing is never reached.
• Your listener has a stake in it too. They are hearing their home described badly by someone they love, which is not a neutral thing to sit through quietly.

Does being understood matter on its own, when I already feel loved?

It does, and the 2 are not interchangeable. Your partner is kind, steady and glad you exist, and you still go to bed feeling that nobody in the flat knows what your Tuesday was like.

That gap is worth taking seriously rather than talking yourself out of. Feeling understood by a partner predicted how central the relationship was to a person’s sense of themselves 8 months later, where feeling cared for and feeling accepted did not². On days when one partner felt responded to, satisfaction was higher that day for women and men alike³.

Neither study followed couples living between 2 countries, and in the experimental parts of the first one the effect showed up more clearly in friendships than with romantic partners, so I would not hand either of them to you as a method. What they support is narrower and still worth having: being understood does work of its own, which is why an affectionate partner who keeps missing this one thing leaves you lonely in a relationship that is otherwise sound. What nobody can tell you from the outside is how much repeating it takes in your particular house before being understood once turns into being understood generally, and that is the part I would want to watch with the 2 of you.

How do I change the pattern?

Give one specific hour instead of a summary, say in advance what you want done with it, and ask for it back in their own words.

• Give the detail, not the verdict. Not that Denmark is hard, but what happened in the staff kitchen and what it cost to keep standing there.
• Say the ask before you start. Tell them you want it heard rather than solved, instead of correcting them once they have got it wrong.
• Ask them to say it back. Not agreement. Just the facts returned to you in their own wording.
• Keep it short and regular. 10 minutes most evenings does more than a 2 hour reckoning once a quarter, and I offer that as a suggestion from my practice rather than a measured threshold.
• Name their side as well. They are watching someone they love struggle in the place they come from, and nobody has told them what is being asked of them.
• Let a good hour get reported too. A partner who only ever hears the losses stops being able to hear them.

These steps assume a partner who wants to understand you and keeps missing. They are the wrong tools where there is contempt or intimidation in the room. They are also not enough where low mood has settled in and follows you into places your partner is nowhere near, because then the move is no longer the main subject. Where you have asked plainly several times and the account still comes back as a verdict, or where you have stopped offering any account at all, the 2 of you have lost the ability to interpret each other unaided. Expat couples therapy is built for that stuck point, and the free 30-minute call is a sensible way to find out whether it fits before you book a session.

Questions people ask

Should I start therapy on my own if my partner will not come?

Yes, and it is a reasonable first move rather than a second best. Working on how you describe the difficulty, and on what you do with the answer you get, changes what happens at home even when only one of you is in the room.

What happens in a first session about this?

I ask each of you to describe the same ordinary week, and I listen for the point where the 2 accounts stop matching. Most of the first session goes on getting both versions into the room without either one being corrected.

Is couples therapy or individual therapy the right place to start?

Couples therapy fits when you both want to be understood and keep missing each other; individual therapy fits when the difficulty follows you into rooms your partner is not in. If you are unsure which it is, say so in the first session and I will tell you which I think fits.

Does it help to see a therapist who has moved countries himself?

It helps mainly because the cost of the move does not have to be explained from scratch. I work in English in Copenhagen with people living between 2 cultures, and what matters more than my own history is whether both of you feel heard in the same hour.

How will I know whether the therapy is doing anything?

The first sign is usually small and specific: one conversation at home that ends differently from the way it used to end. If nothing in the ordinary week has shifted after several sessions, say so in the room, because that is useful information rather than a failure.

If your partner cannot see how hard life here is for you, I help them really hear it in mixed-nationality couples therapy.

Sources

1. Filipic Sterle, M., Fontaine, J. R. J., De Mol, J. and Verhofstadt, L. L., Expatriate Family Adjustment: An Overview of Empirical Evidence on Challenges and Resources, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
2. Auger, E., Thai, S., Birnie-Porter, C. and Lydon, J. E., On Creating Deeper Relationship Bonds: Felt Understanding Enhances Relationship Identification, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2024
3. Candel, O. S. and Turliuc, M. N., The Role of Relational Entitlement, Self-Disclosure and Perceived Partner Responsiveness in Predicting Couple Satisfaction: A Daily-Diary Study, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.