Why does my partner not see how hard living abroad is?

Why can my partner not see how hard this is for me?

Nothing in their normal day weighs what yours weighs, so your effort reaches them as a mood instead of as news. When you come in you are neither furious nor tearful. You are flat, and flatness gives the person listening nothing to grab. Your shoulders have been tight since the morning meeting, your jaw is sore from straining to follow a language you only half catch, and all you manage aloud is: long day. Never having had to decode a room for hours, your partner hears exactly that and believes you.

There is an imbalance in the household that neither of you picked. You are the one adapting, to the language, the forms, the small talk and the slow work of building friendships, while the life your partner already had simply continues around you. A review of research on families who relocate for work describes particular strains for the partner who follows rather than the one whose job prompted the move, including isolation, the loss of a professional identity and pressure on the relationship¹. It is a narrative review built mostly on studies that measured people at one point in time, so I take it as a picture of where the weight tends to land, not a measure of it.

Why do I say so much less than I mean?

The one person who could understand is also the person it would land on, and you weigh that up in the split second before you reply. Your partner asks about your day. You are thinking of a particular 10 minutes: standing at the office coffee machine while the conversation slid into the local language, catching perhaps a third, choosing not to ask anyone to switch. By the time you answer, those minutes have shrunk to fine, bit tiring. It is not untrue. It is the short edition, picked because the full one would push your partner into defending a place they never designed.

Then the evening carries on and something is left hanging. You are snappier than the day deserves, or you go silent, or you take their hand and steer the talk elsewhere. From their side there is a mood with no explanation. When they ask what the matter is, you tell them it is nothing, which becomes the second shortening of the same few minutes.

Why does talking about it make it worse?

The conversation slides into a debate about the country rather than an account of your week.

• A place gets heard as a person. Call it unfriendly, and the partner who grew up there hears criticism, so the next hour is spent on whether that was fair.
• Solutions shut the door. Take a class, join a club, give it another year. Every one is sensible, and every one interrupts the sentence you had not finished.
• The size of it becomes the topic. Whether it is truly that bad gets argued, and the week you wanted to describe never arrives.
• Your listener is not neutral. They are hearing their home criticised by someone they love, which is hard to sit through without reacting.

Is being understood important when I already feel loved?

Yes, because being understood and being loved are different needs. Your partner is kind, reliable and glad you are in their life, and you can still lie awake feeling that nobody in your home knows what Tuesday was like. That gap deserves attention rather than being argued away.

In a diary study, couples who felt their partner was responsive on a given day also reported more satisfaction with the relationship that day, for women and men alike². The participants were 99 young couples, mostly students, followed for a week, and the design shows a link rather than a cause, so I would not offer it to you as a technique. What it does support is narrower and still useful: feeling understood seems to matter in its own right, which may be why a loving partner who repeatedly misses this particular thing can still leave you lonely inside a relationship that is otherwise good. How much repetition it takes in your particular home before one moment of understanding becomes a habit is something nobody can predict from outside.

How do I break the pattern?

Offer one concrete moment rather than a summary, say first what you need from your partner, and ask to hear it back in their words.

• Share the moment, not the conclusion. Not that this country is hard, but what happened by the coffee machine and what it took to keep standing there.
• Name what you want before you begin. Say you want to be listened to, not fixed, rather than correcting them after they have guessed wrong.
• Ask them to repeat it back. Not to agree. Only to give you the facts again in their own phrasing.
• Little and often. A few minutes on most evenings tends to do more than a long reckoning every few months. That is a suggestion from my practice, not an established rule.
• Acknowledge their position too. They see someone they love having a hard time in their own home country, and no one has told them what their part is.
• Report the good hours as well. A partner who only ever hears losses gradually loses the ability to hear them.

These ideas assume a partner who is trying to understand and getting it wrong. They do not fit if there is contempt or intimidation between you. They are also not enough if low mood has taken hold and stays with you even where your partner is absent, since the relocation is then no longer the central problem. If you have asked clearly several times and your account still comes back as a judgement, or you have stopped offering one at all, you have probably lost the ability to read each other without help. That is the point where couples work tends to be useful, and a free 30-minute call is a gentle way to see whether it fits.

Questions people ask

Can I start therapy alone if my partner will not join?

Yes, and it is a sensible first step rather than a fallback. Changing how you describe what is hard, and how you respond to the reply, can change the atmosphere at home with only you in the sessions.

How do video sessions work if we live in different time zones from you?

Sessions are by video, and we agree a regular time in Copenhagen time that suits where you are. Couples can join from the same room or from two places.

What does a first session look like?

Each of you tells me about one ordinary week, and I notice where the two stories diverge. Most of the first hour goes on hearing both accounts without either being corrected.

Should I choose couples therapy or individual therapy?

Couples therapy suits you if both of you want to feel understood but the attempts keep failing. Individual therapy suits you when the difficulty follows you into places your partner is not.

How will I know if therapy is helping?

The first sign is usually small: one conversation at home goes differently than before. If nothing in the ordinary week has changed after several sessions, say so, because that tells us something useful.

If your partner struggles to see how hard life abroad is for you, I can help you both hear each other in online couples therapy, by video.

Sources

1. Filipič Sterle, Fontaine, De Mol and Verhofstadt. Expatriate family adjustment: an overview of empirical evidence on challenges and resources. Narrative review. Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.
2. Candel and Turliuc. The role of relational entitlement, self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness in predicting couple satisfaction: a daily-diary study. 99 couples over 7 days. 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.