Moving to a new country comes with lots of costs. We explore a lot of these in our living abroad guides. But some costs are more abstract and don't really reveal themselves until much later. This is often the case with the relationships that we “leave behind” back home.
The “it will stay the same” delusion
A lot of expats begin their journey abroad with a common denialistic belief: nothing will really change. They tell themselves that they are just moving abroad for a while, they will stay in touch with family and friends, visit regularly, and their relationships will be safe and secure. This is especially true today when social media, message apps, and other ways to stay in touch make communication over oceans and miles almost effortless.
But as true as this may be, relationships also don't stay frozen in time. Beyond the regular status updates and WhatsApp chats, people continue to live their everyday lives. And these lives may now look quite different if you and your friends live in different countries.
Communication slows down
“When I first relocated, I had over a dozen group chats ready. One for family, one for close friends, then there was one for my classmates who wanted to hear about my life abroad, distant family, etc. In the first few months, I could barely keep up with all the messages. But then they started to fade away… Sometimes I forgot to share an update for a few days, sometimes I did, but nobody reacted… I now have only two active chats left: close friends and family. But even here we chat like once or twice a week, not every day as we used to…”, shares Kiril, a Polish exchange student in Japan
This seems like the natural flow of things. When you see people less, you start caring about their lives less. Not in a bad way, not because you don't like them anymore. But simply because they are no longer in your active circle. You get busy with everyday life, and updates from the other side of the world start to seem less relevant and, eventually, less interesting.
Timing matters
It's difficult to understand before you move how something as basic and simple as a time difference can affect the relationships you've had for years. But it happens.
Kasya, a US expat in China, tells us about it: "I had no idea how much timing mattered until I moved. I am now 8 hours ahead of my family and friends back home. When something interesting happens, I really want to tell them, and I do, but then I have to wait for the reaction till morning… But then I realized that my mom checks every message she gets for me, no matter when I send it, even if it's very late at night, thinking it could be an emergency. So now I check the time before I share anything, but it takes a lot away from the experience. By the time they get my message, and we can actually talk, I am back at work and the moment is gone.”
Small things can get really big. Being unable to share a moment of joy or sadness with your closest people makes you lonely. And when you feel lonely, you will most likely seek out others you can turn to for emotional support. This can create distance with people who used to be very close.
Shared experiences are not the same
“I was the last in my friend group to have a baby. By then, I had been living abroad for over a year, but I still kept in touch with most of my girlfriends back home. Once I had the baby, I thought we would become even closer because I could finally share that part of their lives. But I quickly learned that our experiences were vastly different. I was living in Thailand, had a live-in nanny, and spent a lot of time outside. But my friends back in the Czech Republic stayed home most of the time, and seemed too busy to talk to me when I reached out. I felt like what I thought would be a shared experience actually caused a big rift between us, simply because of how different that experience was. I moved on to a local group of friends with little kids. My friends back home and I just chat once in a while now”, says Anya, a Czech expat in Thailand.
This is another complication that some expats may run into: the “same but different” trap. Truth is, a lot of our experiences in life are very similar: school, college, work, sometimes marriage and kids. But what we often don't realize until we move abroad is that these experiences can look very different depending on where and how we live. In this case, while they are technically shared, they are also dividing. You simply don't really live through the same event, and the more you try to relate to each other, the bigger this divide may feel.
You yourself become different
Moving abroad is one of the most life-changing and character-changing experiences one can have. It affects every aspect of your life, and whether you want it or not, you will most likely change. These changes may be difficult to explain to your people back home, as they will not be living through the same experiences.
“Whenever I go back home, I feel like I have to get that old ' five-year-ago-me ' out of the closet and wear it as a disguise. My friends and even some of my family expect me to be exactly the same. But the truth is, time has passed, and I live in another country now, I speak a different language, have a new job, friends, everything about my life is different. But at home, I think it's very hard for them to accept", shares Kasya.
Cultures dictates different outcomes
In some countries, traditions and cultural norms “decide” your futures. In others, you have a lot more leeway. When you move from one of such countries to another, something majors gets lost — the way you see your future. As Hadija, an Algerian expat in Canada, puts it: “I grew up in Algeria. My family is quite traditional, and, in general, women in my region are expected to get married and have children by a certain age. I moved away for college; my parents did not like it, but agreed because I was getting a good degree. But I decided to stay here and build a career. I do stay in touch with my friends and regularly visit family. But we have very little to talk about. We stay polite and take interest in each other's lives. But all of my siblings and friends are married, have big families, and I can see that they don't understand my choices. They just don't want to ask to avoid disagreements. And to me, it looks like they are not interested in my life, just because it's not the same as theirs.”
Catching up becomes tiring
After the "newness" of your living abroad has worn off, you may start to notice that a lot of conversations with friends at home follow the same pattern. They often start with a simple "What's new?" But how do you really answer this question when everything around you is new? How do you sum up an eventful day in a new country within one sentence? More than that, how do you explain things that are different here?
I often share personal experiences in my articles, and this one hits closest to home. When I first moved to China, I was very eager to tell friends back home how things were here. But it quickly became difficult. When someone asked a simple question about my work, I had to go into overly long explanations about the different office dynamics here, because otherwise my answer would make no sense. But as I was trying to cover every detail, the ease of these daily exchanges was getting lost. I found myself sighing every time I had to explain something again. And I felt that my friends were also losing interest in my "lectures", they also wanted just to have a normal chat with me, like we used to.
Then again, it's hard to say whether the drift in the relationships back home happens just because we move. Or is the move just the catalyst to something that was inevitable?
As one user on Reddit notes: "There is no way avoiding this, we have been drifting apart, we live in different environments, our experiences are different, there are fewer commonalities. I only partially attribute this drifting to my immigration. Some drift happens even when people move to a different city, and some drift just happens because people focus on jobs, different interests, start their own families. So I don't dwell on this. I like my life abroad. I wish all the best to the people I left behind, even if we aren't as close as we would be if I were to stay put."
