The Guardian ran a piece this week that stopped me in my tracks. Five people sharing what it really feels like to move countries for love — and to have it go wrong. Not wrong in a dramatic, obvious way. Wrong in that quiet, grinding way where you find yourself at a dinner party, someone asks why an Australian would live in Switzerland, and you realise the only honest answer is: love. And that love now feels like a cage.
I read those stories and I recognised every single one of my clients.
The part nobody talks about before you go
When you move abroad for a partner, there’s a negotiation that happens — sometimes spoken, often not. One person’s life becomes the container for the other person’s. Career, friendships, language, culture, climate, the way people queue at the supermarket — all of it belongs to one partner. The other is a guest. A permanent guest.
At first this feels like adventure. Then it feels like sacrifice. Then, if it’s not addressed, it starts to feel like resentment.
The resentment is the part that frightens people. Because you love your partner. You chose this. So why does it feel like their fault?
What’s happening inside you — through an IFS lens
In Internal Family Systems therapy, we work with the different parts of a person. When I sit with someone who’s moved abroad for a partner and is struggling, I typically meet a few very distinct parts:
The part that sacrificed. This part gave up a career, a social world, a language, a climate, a way of being in the world. It needs to be acknowledged — not fixed, not minimised. Just heard. When it’s not heard by your partner, it finds other ways to be heard: complaints, withdrawal, tears, anger.
The part that blames. This part knows you “chose this” but it also knows that the choice wasn’t really free. Love isn’t free. And so it quietly — or not so quietly — holds your partner responsible.
The exile who misses home. Beneath the resentment is often a deep grief. You miss who you were. The version of yourself who knew people, had a career that made sense, had a community. That person is still in there, waiting.
The protector who keeps it together. This is the part that goes to the dinner parties, learns the language, makes the effort, insists it’s fine. This part is exhausted.
When these parts aren’t given space — in therapy, or in genuinely honest conversations with your partner — they don’t go away. They go underground and run your relationship from there.
The particular pain of being the one who moved
There is a power imbalance built into the structure of this situation that most couples don’t talk about clearly enough. One partner is home. They have their family, their friends, their language, their professional network, their cultural fluency. The other partner has to earn all of that from scratch — while simultaneously being a partner, possibly a parent, and managing the grief of everything left behind.
Lauren, one of the people in the Guardian piece, described it perfectly: “My husband knows everyone, and our kids are basically German. I’m still a foreigner; the mother with an accent.”
That sentence is not just loneliness. That’s identity loss. And identity loss, when it’s unprocessed, becomes depression.
And the guilt of being the one who didn’t move
If you’re the partner who stayed in their home country — the one your partner moved for — you’re carrying something too. You may feel responsible for your partner’s unhappiness in ways that make it hard to really hear them. You might get defensive when they criticise your country, your culture, your friends. Because their unhappiness feels like a verdict on you and the life you brought them into.
Israel, in the Guardian piece, put it simply: “Candice feels terribly guilty and responsible.” That guilt, when it’s not spoken about, creates distance. The partner who moved stops sharing how they really feel because they don’t want to make the other person feel worse. And so both partners end up alone inside the relationship.
This is where therapy helps
What couples in this situation need most is a space where the full truth can be told — without it destroying everything.
In couples therapy, we create the conditions for those conversations. The part that sacrificed gets to speak. The part that feels guilty gets to respond without defending. The exile who misses home gets to grieve — and be witnessed in that grief by the partner.
IFS is particularly powerful here because it lets us separate you from your parts. You’re not a resentful person. You have a part that’s carrying resentment because it hasn’t been heard. That’s a very different conversation to have with your partner.
I’ve sat with couples who came in convinced they’d made a catastrophic mistake — that the geographic incompatibility was proof the relationship couldn’t work. Often, what we discover is that the relationship was never given a chance to process what the move actually cost. Once it does, things shift.
Not always. But often.
A note for the men especially
Many of the people in the Guardian piece who were most stuck were men — quietly getting worse every winter, not naming the depression, insisting they’re “integrated” while internally counting the years until the kids finish school.
I work with a lot of men in exactly this position. The version of masculinity many of us grew up with doesn’t have much room for “I gave something up and I’m not okay.” Men tend to cope. Then they stop coping. Then they leave — the relationship, or emotionally, which is a slower version of the same thing.
If that’s you: the thing you’re feeling has a name. It can be worked with. You don’t have to wait until it gets worse.
If any of this sounds familiar
I’m Alister Gates — a therapist and counsellor based in Europe, working online with individuals and couples across the UK, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and beyond. I’m from New Zealand, I’ve lived as an expat, I know what it is to be far from the world you grew up in.
I work with people navigating exactly these situations: the resentment that crept in, the identity that got lost, the relationship that needs a proper conversation it’s never been able to have.
If you’d like to talk, start with a free 15-minute call. No pressure. Just a conversation.