Moving abroad for love: when the cost catches up

Why does moving abroad for love hurt more than I expected?

Because the move took your work, your friendships and your ordinary competence at the same time, and left the relationship to replace all of it.

• Competence goes first. Things you used to do without thinking now need a dictionary, a form and somebody else to help.
• The social circle narrows to one person. Your partner becomes the interpreter, the guide and the only adult who knows your history.
• The old life keeps running without you. Friends at home carry on, and you hear about it at a distance and after the fact.

Each of those is survivable on its own. Arriving in the same few weeks, they take away the ground a person stands on while the move is still being described to everybody as good news. That distance between how it looks from outside and how it feels from inside is where most of the difficulty I see begins.

Why can I not say any of this to my partner?

Because you chose the move, and saying that it hurts sounds like saying you chose wrong.

You start the sentence at dinner on a Thursday. You get as far as saying the week was hard, your chest tightens before the next clause arrives, and then you hear yourself add that you know it was your idea. That second half was not planned. It came to take the weight out of the first half, so that nothing you said could be mistaken for a complaint about the person sitting opposite you. Your partner agrees that it must be hard, the plates go in the dishwasher, and the thing you meant to say is still in you.

What keeps this in place is that the gratitude is real. You did want this, you would choose them again, and you are also keeping an account of the cost that nobody has seen. What a sacrifice is for matters more than its size: something given up in order to move towards something good sits better with a person, and with the relationship, than the same thing given up to avoid a row¹. Where the giving goes unregistered the regret follows it, and on days when people had sacrificed and felt less support from their partner, more regret turned up the next day². Neither study followed people who had emigrated and neither was an experiment, so take both as a direction rather than a measurement of your household. The direction is that a cost absorbed quietly to keep the peace does not stay quiet.

Is this grief or resentment?

Grief is about what the move cost you, and resentment is about who you hold responsible.

They arrive in the same week, which is why they are hard to tell apart from the inside.

• Grief has an object. A street, a job title, a language you were funny in.
• Resentment has an address. It needs somebody to have done this to you, and the only candidate is standing in the kitchen.
• Unheard grief looks for somewhere to go. A loss nobody acknowledges does not stay a loss, and in my experience it comes back as a charge against the person who gained from it.

Why does my partner get defensive when I raise it?

Because what reaches them is a verdict on the move, and the move was also their homecoming.

Their own adjustment was never tested. They kept the language, the family and the work, so nothing in their week runs parallel to your difficulty. You say the country is hard, what arrives at their end is that their people are hard, and they answer the sentence they heard instead of the one you said. Then come the suggestions, which are an attempt to help and also stop the conversation hurting.

I would not read your partner as dismissive on purpose. Feeling well in a new country and functioning well in it are 2 different things, and they do not run on the same ingredients: the first goes with social support, social difficulty and how much of your life changed at once, the second with how long you have lived there, how far the culture sits from your own and how much contact you have with local people³. Your partner has had the second since birth and has no reading at all of the first. That does not make the load equal. In a move like this most of the adjusting sits with one of you, and saying so out loud is not an accusation.

How do I stop the move costing the relationship?

Say what the move cost as a fact about you, and keep it apart from the question of whether it was a mistake.

• Name the loss, not the country. That you have stopped being good at things lands where Denmark is cold never will.
• Give the conversation a start and a finish. A difficulty with an end to it stops being the weather in the house.
• Ask for one thing a week that is yours alone. Something you are competent at, in which your partner plays no part.
• Stop auditioning the decision. Let go of whether the move was right and keep the question of what it needs now.
• Say what you want your partner to do with it. Being heard and being helped are 2 different requests, and only one of them gets met by accident.

I offer these as starting points rather than as a sequence, and a week in which one of them happens is not a failed week. They stop working where the move is standing in for a decision neither of you has made out loud, with one of you still privately intending to go home, because no amount of better conversation about Denmark will settle that and it belongs on the table first. They are not enough either where the low mood has stopped lifting at all and has spread well past the move, because then what needs attention is you rather than the household arrangement. Where every version of this turns into a defence of Denmark, or where one of you has stopped starting it because of how the last 3 attempts went, expat couples therapy is built for that point: the move examined as something that happened to both of you, with neither of you on trial for it. The free 30-minute call is a sensible way to find out whether it fits before you book a session.

Questions people ask

Does therapy help if only one of us will come?

Yes, and one person working on it alone changes what the other is responding to. I would rather start with whoever is willing than wait for an agreement that might not arrive.

Is this couples therapy, or something to work on by myself?

Couples therapy fits when the cost of the move keeps turning into the same argument; individual therapy fits when the grief is yours to carry and you want somewhere to put it. Say which of those sounds closer in the first session and I will tell you which I think fits.

What happens in a first session about a move like this?

I ask what the move took and what it gave, in that order, and I ask the same of both of you. Most of that hour goes on getting the losses said out loud without the decision going on trial.

Will therapy push me towards staying or towards going home?

Neither, and it is worth asking any therapist that before booking. My job is to get the question properly described, so that whichever way it goes you have decided it rather than drifted into it.

What if I am not sure the relationship is the problem?

That uncertainty is a reasonable thing to bring rather than something to settle first. Part of the early work is telling apart what the move cost and what the relationship is doing, and those separate more easily out loud than alone.

If you moved here for love and the cost is now catching up, I built my trailing spouse psychotherapy for exactly that experience.

Sources

1. Impett, E. A., Gable, S. L. and Peplau, L. A., Giving Up and Giving In: The Costs and Benefits of Daily Sacrifice in Intimate Relationships, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005
2. Righetti, F. and Visserman, M., I Gave Too Much: Low Self-Esteem and the Regret of Sacrifices, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2018
3. Ward, C. and Kennedy, A., Where is the Culture in Cross-Cultural Transition? Comparative Studies of Sojourner Adjustment, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1993

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.