“I Moved Across the World for Him” Sounds Romantic Until It Isn’t
What happens when the relationship that made you relocate suddenly ends?
I’ve talked to over 15 people who packed up their lives and moved to another country. They are all of different ages, backgrounds and from different countries. But when I asked why they left their home country and moved to another one, it was either about the boyfriend who got a job abroad. The husband who cheated. The partner they’ve never lived in the same city as but are moving continents for anyway. A relationship they were slowly dying inside of and just needed an escape.
When it comes to moving abroad, there are certain things available for you like visa subreddits and facebook expat groups, but none of these things mention a romantic partner.
Think about how we talk about relationships and moving in the same breath or rather, how we don’t. When someone moves abroad for love we call it romantic, but what doesn’t get talked about is what happens six months later when the relationship that relocated you falls apart and you’re standing in a foreign city with a lease, a half-built life, and no exit plan that doesn’t feel like failure.
Roamer 16 knows exactly what that feels like. She moved from Germany to Sweden for a man and that relationship lasted a year after she arrived. But she stayed anyway — she had a son in school and a job. Then she met someone else, married him, followed him to Spain for an Interpol project because her job let her work from anywhere and it made sense until he decided he was more interested in other women.
We don’t say this enough but romantic partners don’t just affect you emotionally when you decide to move abroad. They determine what version of a foreign country you actually get to access.
Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway. She had one Norwegian friend and she said it herself, that if her partner had been Norwegian, it would have been a completely different life. A different country, almost. She would have been able to experience Norwegian dinners, Norwegian family, the inside of a culture that otherwise keeps its doors shut to outsiders. Without that, you’re living alongside a place rather than inside it.
We see this performed constantly online. The couple that moves to Italy and integrates seamlessly because one of them is Italian. The American girl who moves to France for a French boyfriend and is suddenly eating her lunch in two hours and wearing better shoes. We romanticize it. We follow their content. We don’t really ask or wonder what it means — that your access to a place, your experience of its culture, your ability to feel at home in it, is often contingent on who you’re sleeping with.
Roamer 17 has moved countries twice for love—Romania to Italy at 22 for a boyfriend who decided he was going there for work. Later, she moved from Italy to Spain for another man. Both relationships ended and she is now planning her third move to Costa Rica for a relationship that has existed entirely on a screen for four years. She has never been in the same country as this man, yet she is moving continents for him.
When I think about how the internet would react to that — the think pieces, the comments, the women in the comments telling her she’s being naive — I think about how confidently we’ve decided that moving abroad for love is either the most romantic thing a person can do or evidence of poor judgment. There’s no in between.
The couple’s content gets half a million likes.
The “I followed a man to another country and it didn’t work out” content gets a different kind of attention.
What we don’t really sit with is that both of those people made the same decision. They just got different outcomes. And yet, we judge the decision by the outcome, which is a completely backwards way to think about any of this.
The infrastructure around moving abroad treats it as a solo logistical problem that two people happen to be doing at the same time. It doesn’t account for the fact that you are making a decision that will restructure your daily life, support system, sense of home and doing it with or because of or in spite of another person who has their own fears and ambitions.
This isn’t something a Facebook expat group can solve. If it goes wrong, the fallout isn’t just emotional—It’s logistical and financial. It’s: whose name is on the lease, whose visa is dependent on whose employment, who has to leave the country they’ve built a life in because the relationship that made it possible just ended.
I don’t think the right question is if you have a partner or not. It should be about what role they’re playing in the move and whether you’ve actually talked about that honestly.
Are they the reason you’re going? Are they coming with you? Are they staying behind and hoping the relationship survives the distance? Are they the reason you need to leave? Is the move an adventure you’re both choosing or a compromise one of you is making? What happens to the relationship if the country doesn’t work out? What happens to the country if the relationship doesn’t?
Nobody asks these questions in the planning stage. They’re too uncomfortable and uncertain. It is like admitting that love is a variable you can’t control in a process you’re desperately trying to make controllable.
But it is a variable and until we start treating it like one in the conversations, in the guides, in the communities built around helping people move, we’re going to keep sending people into one of the biggest decisions of their lives missing the most important piece of information.
Which is: who is this person to you, really? And what are you prepared for if that changes?
The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad; what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.