After living overseas for many years, suffering a severe illness and nearly dying, I am desperate to return home to be nearer my family and friends. However, I have a good life where I am living with my husband (we don’t have children): we both have good jobs (I managed to change profession after my illness and landed a really good new role), and a lovely house in a good area.
I feel quite lonely here because despite my husband and colleagues I have few friends. I also keep getting sick as my immune system has been damaged and I have a couple of autoimmune issues. I’m desperate to go home and imagine an idyllic life living in a beautiful little house seeing my family and friends. Ideally not having to work much but spending more time with my parents in their retirement years.
I know it won’t be perfect and that we take ourselves and our problems with us but some days I am so homesick it hurts. It will be a huge upheaval and cost but I want to go home. My husband is concerned about the finances of the move, his ability to find work and is concerned that I won’t be happy there either. I’ve tried here but making friends as deep as those at home is impossible. When I go back I slot right back in as if I’ve never been away. What should I do?
Eleanor says: Of all the experts who could help us with this, the voice that kept coming back to me while reading your letter was David Byrne’s: “how did I get here?” You can have a beautiful house and still think, “this is not my beautiful house!” It sounds like your husband notices the “beautiful” things: lovely area, good jobs, stable income. And you notice the things that don’t feel like mine.
You already know what’s in the pros and cons columns. You’ve been through a huge amount; you’re desperate to go home; you’re in a lot of pain from homesickness. Money is (a bit) replenishable, parents and old friends are not. But, there’s a huge risk of idealising home. You left many years ago; lots of what you miss is in the past. And there would be an enormous cost to your husband. This might mean asking him to feel more dislocation so you can feel less. The problem, as always, is how to weigh things that don’t share standardised units.
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I want to make a meta point: don’t make this decision by stacking up days you didn’t make the decision.
Because you’re the person who wants the change, you’re vulnerable to status quo inertia. For you to not get what you want, all that has to happen is that, day after day, you and your husband think and talk about other things. It’s not the right time; I’m tired from work; it doesn’t feel like a feasible option. Each day of not engaging adds up to you not leaving.
This is true for all of us with that back-of-the-mind screaming that someday things need to be different: if nothing changes, we will die in the situation we’re currently in. I know we all know that already, but if you’re anything like me, knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean acknowledging it.
One way to resist the inertia is just to start. You can just start. Start looking for work. Start looking for a house. Start building social networks in his professional area. Get moving on any paperwork you’d need if you did decide to move: visas? Pet documentation? Proof of your relationship? Confront and plan for some of the hard details about life at home outside the fantasy – so your husband isn’t cast as a naysaying realist.
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This feels like a violent strategy, because it looks like you’re deciding to move without his agreement. But the point is not to enact your will by brute force; you’re not actually going to get on the plane. The point is just to challenge the inertia.
That feeling of, “wait, what? This seems like a big decision we should be making together” – that’s exactly what you’d be trying to provoke. That’s what happens for you every day you don’t jointly resolve this: a big decision is enacted. If you start treating returning home as a serious option and turn some wheels, the default of not thinking or talking about it no longer produces the result “we stay here”.
I’m not saying move. You can torch a lot of value by chasing an idealised past. I am saying that whatever you do together, don’t let it just be days of not deciding.
*Letter has been edited for length
