At a glance
You moved for someone you love, and you are quietly mourning the life you left to do it. Because the move was your choice, the loss often goes unspoken, and silence is where resentment tends to grow. This article helps you put the cost into words without putting the decision, or your partner, on trial.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The loss arrives late. Clients often get through the first year or so on effort and novelty, and feel the full weight of the old life only once everything is unpacked and ordinary.
- Choosing it seems to cancel the right to complain. The partner who moved frequently treats each difficulty as something they have no standing to raise, even when nobody around them would see it that way.
- Unspoken loss leaks elsewhere. What cannot be said about the new country tends to come out about the flat, the working hours, the in-laws or the way a holiday was planned.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does it hurt this much when I wanted to come?
The move removed your work, your friendships and your everyday competence all at once, and asked one relationship to stand in for every one of them.
- Ordinary skill disappears. Tasks you once handled without a thought now need translation, paperwork and someone else’s help.
- Your world shrinks to one person. Your partner becomes guide, translator and the only adult nearby who knows your past.
- Home carries on without you. Friends keep living their lives, and you hear about it later, from far away.
Any one of these is bearable. Landing together within a few weeks, they can knock the ground from under you while everyone still describes the move as wonderful news. The gap between the outside view of your life and the inside experience of it is where much of the pain I hear about begins.
Why can I not tell my partner how I feel?
Because the move was your choice, and admitting it hurts can feel like admitting the choice was wrong.
You begin to say that the week was difficult. Something tightens in your chest, and before you can go on you find yourself adding that you know this was your idea. You had not planned that addition. It slipped in to soften what came before, so that nothing could be taken as blame aimed at the person across the table. Your partner says it must be tough, the evening moves on, and the thing you wanted to say stays inside.
What holds this in place is that your gratitude is genuine. You wanted this, you would pick your partner again, and you are also carrying a private tally of costs nobody else has seen. In my clinical view, why something was given up matters as much as how much: a loss taken on to build a shared life sits differently from one swallowed to avoid friction. My reading of the research is that regret tends to follow sacrifices that go unacknowledged. In a study of 130 couples followed day by day, people who made a sacrifice and felt less supported by their partner that day reported more regret about past sacrifices the next day1. That study was not about emigration and was not an experiment, so treat it as a pointer rather than a description of your home. The pointer is that a cost absorbed in silence to keep things calm rarely stays silent.
Am I grieving, or am I resentful?
Grief concerns what the move took from you. Resentment concerns whom you hold accountable for it.
They often show up together, which makes them hard to separate from the inside.
- Grief points at something. A particular street, a job title, a language in which you could be funny.
- Resentment points at someone. It needs a person who did this to you, and the obvious candidate is the one you live with.
- Unheard grief looks for a target. When nobody acknowledges a loss, I find it tends to return as a complaint against whoever seemed to gain from it.
Why does my partner bristle whenever I raise it?
Because what they hear is a judgement on the move, and for them the move may also have been a return to the familiar.
Their own adjustment was never put to the test. If they kept their language, family or career, nothing in their week mirrors your struggle. You say this place is hard, and what lands with them is that their world is hard, so they respond to what they heard rather than what you meant. Then come the practical suggestions, which are meant to help and also bring the painful conversation to an end.
I would not assume your partner means to brush you off. Feeling at ease abroad and managing well there are separate things with separate roots. As I read the research on people living abroad, how well people felt was linked to social support, social difficulty and the number of life changes they faced, while how well they coped with daily life was linked to time spent there, cultural distance and contact with local people2. Your partner may have the second without effort and little sense of the first. None of this evens out the load, and pointing out that most of the adjusting falls to you is fair, not hostile.
How can we keep the move from wearing down the relationship?
Describe what the move cost as something true about you, and keep it apart from any judgement on the decision.
- Name the loss, not the place. Saying you no longer feel capable reaches your partner in a way that criticising their country never will.
- Give the conversation edges. A difficulty with a beginning and an end stops hanging over the whole household.
- Keep one weekly thing that is yours. Something you are good at, which has nothing to do with your partner.
- Stop retrying the decision. Set aside whether moving was right, and ask what the move needs from both of you now.
- Say what you want from your partner. Being listened to and being helped are different requests, and only one of them happens by chance.
These are places to begin, not a programme, and a week where only one of them happens is still a reasonable week. They will not help where the move is covering for a decision neither of you has said out loud, such as one of you privately planning to return home, because better conversations about the new country cannot settle that. They are not enough either if low mood has stopped lifting and has spread well beyond the move, because then you need attention in your own right. If every attempt turns into a defence of the place you live, or one of you has stopped raising it after the last few tries, online couples therapy can look at the move as something that happened to you both, with nobody on trial. If the grief feels like yours to carry, online psychotherapy gives it room of its own.
Questions people ask
Can therapy help if only I am willing to come?
Yes, and your own work changes what your partner finds themselves responding to. I would rather begin with whoever is ready than wait for an agreement that may not come.
Should this be couples therapy or individual therapy?
Couples therapy suits a cost that keeps becoming the same argument, and individual therapy suits grief that is yours to hold. Tell me which sounds nearer in the first session, and I will say what I think fits.
Can I have sessions by video from the country I moved to?
Yes, all my sessions are by video and in English, wherever you live now. Many people find it easier to start from their own home.
Will therapy steer me towards staying or going back?
No, and it is a fair question to put to any therapist before you begin. My aim is to help you see the question clearly, so that whatever happens is a decision rather than a drift.
What if the relationship might not be what is wrong?
Bring the doubt with you rather than settling it beforehand. Early on I help you separate what the move cost from what the relationship is doing, and that is easier aloud than alone.
If you moved for love and the cost is catching up with you, online psychotherapy gives you a place to say so, from wherever you now live.
Sources
- Righetti and Visserman. I gave too much: low self-esteem and the regret of sacrifices. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2018.
- Ward and Kennedy. Where’s 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.
