Relationship problems after moving abroad: what helps

Why did the strain only start months after we arrived?

The first months run on practical urgency, and the strain surfaces when the urgency runs out and there is nothing left to do but live here.

A flat, a registration number, a bank, a school place, a bike. While that list exists you are a team with a task, and the relationship borrows energy from the project. Then the list ends, and a flatness arrives that neither of you expected: this is the life now, and it is smaller than the one you left.

The stressors of an international move are slow ones. Cultural novelty, the loss of home, a changed social world, uncertainty and isolation reach every member of a family, and each person meets a different version of them¹. None of it resolves in a fortnight, which is why in my consulting room the trouble gets dated to the fourth or sixth month, not the first week.

There is a second reason, harder to say out loud. The move was a decision, and rarely an equal one. Once it stops going well, every ordinary disappointment carries a question about whether coming here was right. If the low arrived late, culture shock describes that curve on its own terms.

Why does one of us seem to be coping and the other is not?

You are adjusting on 2 different timetables, and the partner whose work, language or family was already here has footholds the other does not have.

• Work. One of you has colleagues, a title and a reason to leave the flat. The other gave up a post to come.
• Language. One of you can follow the room at a party. The other spends the evening 2 sentences behind.
• Family. One of you has parents 20 minutes away. The other has them on a screen.

So your partner comes home pleased about a good week, you go quiet, and the quiet reaches them as a charge against them for doing well. Their competence is part of what leaves you further out. Your need for help is part of what leaves them feeling accused. You are both describing the same evening and neither description is wrong.

Responsibility here is not equal. The partner who gained a career and a family network has more spare capacity to notice what is happening, and more of the noticing reasonably falls to them. That is about who has a hand free, not a verdict on either of you. See also why small things become fights with a Danish partner.

Why has the same argument started repeating?

The real stress sits outside the relationship and cannot be argued with, so the argument moves to whatever inside the relationship is available.

You cannot argue with a residence queue, a tax office, or the fact that nobody here knows your jokes yet. You can argue about the washing-up, the weekend, the tone of a message. The subject is wrong and the heat is real, which is why nothing settles.

Something strange happens in the language itself. When one partner talks about stress from outside the relationship, the other uses the word we less, and in a laboratory study of 41 couples that drop in we-talk went with the stressed partner rating the conversation as better rather than worse². Small sample, artificial setting, and a design that cannot show cause, so hold it lightly. What I recognise in it is that being heard by someone standing a little apart from you can steady a person more than being folded into a pair.

What each movement is reaching for matters more than how it looks from the other chair. Pressing harder is an attempt to be reached. Going quiet is an attempt to stay steady. Neither arrives the way it was meant. If one argument keeps returning in the same form, why the same argument keeps coming back takes that cycle apart.

Did we lose the relationship, or lose what was holding it up?

Much of what feels like lost closeness is lost infrastructure, because the move removed the friends, routines and third parties the relationship rested on.

At home a relationship is held up by more than the 2 people inside it. A sister takes the complaint about the in-laws. A colleague absorbs the work rant. An old friend finds the same things funny. Here, all of it arrives at one person, who is also tired, also adjusting, and also the subject of half of it.

What helps is not the number of people you know. Among migrant students studying in a second language, it was how well their local friends knew each other that went with lower communication stress, while the size of the network did not³. That was a survey taken at a single moment, so it describes rather than proves. It matches what I see: 10 acquaintances do less for a person than 3 people who know one another.

A couple who have lost their supports need supports, not a verdict on whether they still love each other. See also how to deal with loneliness and identity crisis.

What is the move like for the partner who was already at home here?

Less gets said about this position, and it has a difficulty of its own. They watched someone they love get smaller. They offered the obvious help, the translations, the introductions, and it kept landing badly. What settles on them is that their own country, their own family and their own fluency have turned into things to apologise for.

From there they start editing. The good parts of the day go unmentioned, because they seem to cost you something. You notice the editing and conclude they are keeping their real life somewhere else, which is close to the reverse of what is happening. Both of you are now handling each other with care and telling each other less.

How do we stop this, and when is that not enough?

Separate the strain of the move from the faults of the relationship, then give the partner who is further behind something here that belongs to them alone.

• Name the timetable. Say which of you is further behind, and in what, instead of arguing about who is harder to live with.
• Read the ledger outside an argument. The partner who gave something up says once, calmly, what it was. The other listens without defending the move.
• Rebuild third parties on purpose. Aim at a few people who know each other rather than a long list of contacts.
• Send the ordinary complaints elsewhere. Not every frustration with this country is material for your partner, who did not design it.
• Keep one thing from the old life. A language, a sport, a standing call, not arranged by the other.

Give that 2 or 3 months of honest effort before you judge it. That is a suggestion about sequence, not a clinical threshold.

Those steps do not reach every situation. Where contempt has entered, so that one of you speaks about the other with a curl of the lip, the move is no longer the live problem. Where one partner has privately decided to leave and is handling the other rather than talking, the work rests on a false premise. Where the low does not lift even in the good weeks, the relationship is the wrong place to treat it. Telling those apart from the inside is hard, and worth doing slowly with a third person who has no stake in the outcome, which is what expat couples therapy in Copenhagen is for. The free 30-minute call is a reasonable way to test it.

Questions people ask

Should we come as a couple, or should I come alone first?

Come as a couple if you both want the relationship to change, and come alone if you need to work out what you want before you say it to your partner. Either is a legitimate start.

Will couples therapy help if only one of us thinks the move is the problem?

Yes, provided both of you are willing to be in the room, because the disagreement about what the problem is turns out to be the problem. I would rather work with that openly than have you agree on a diagnosis first.

What happens in a first session about a move?

I ask each of you what the move asked of you, what it cost and what you expected, and I listen for where those accounts stop matching. You should leave with the pattern described in plain words.

Does therapy in English work when neither of us speaks it first?

It works, and a shared second language makes it easier to say some things that are too loaded in a mother tongue. If one of you is much less fluent, say so early and I will slow the session down.

How do we know whether to work on the relationship or on settling here?

Where you are kind to each other in the weeks when things outside the relationship go well, the work is mostly about settling here. Where the unkindness continues through the good weeks, the relationship needs attention in its own right.

When a move abroad strains your relationship, I see couples in expat couples therapy who are facing exactly this.

Sources

1. Filipic Sterle, Fontaine, De Mol and Verhofstadt, Expatriate family adjustment: an overview of empirical evidence on challenges and resources, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
2. Lau, Randall, Duran and Tao, Examining the effects of couples real-time stress and coping processes on interaction quality: language use as a mediator, Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
3. Doucerain, Varnaamkhaasti, Segalowitz and Ryder, Second language social networks and communication-related acculturative stress: the role of interconnectedness, Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

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.