My Friends Back Home Don't Understand My Life Anymore

What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.

Expat therapy for the distance that grows between you and the people back home. An expat loneliness therapist understands this specific kind of loss.

You called your best friend last week. The one who always gets it. The one you used to talk to for two hours without looking at the clock. You told them about the thing that's been eating at you: the isolation, the weird grief of living somewhere beautiful and feeling nothing, the fight you and your partner keep having that neither of you can resolve.

And they said: "But at least you're in Europe!"

They didn't mean it dismissively. They meant it kindly. They were trying to offer perspective, the way good friends do. But something caved in your chest when they said it, because you realized: they don't get it. Not because they're bad friends. Because they can't. The experience you're having doesn't translate across the distance, and every conversation you have about it confirms this a little more.

The distance that isn't geographic

The flights are long, and the time zones are annoying, but that's not the real distance. The real distance is experiential. You are living a life that has no equivalent in their frame of reference, and they are living a life that you're slowly losing access to.

They talk about the restaurant that opened where the old hardware store used to be. You haven't seen the old hardware store in two years. They reference a mutual friend's divorce, and you realize you didn't know about it until now because the information travels through social channels you're no longer plugged into. They ask about your weekend and you describe something that sounds exotic to them, a train to another country, a language barrier that turned into a comedy of errors, and they say "that's amazing" and you think: it wasn't amazing. It was Tuesday. And I was alone for most of it.

The gap isn't anyone's fault. It's structural. Your daily realities have diverged so completely that the shared context (the thing that made conversation effortless) is eroding. And shared context, it turns out, is most of what friendship runs on.

The performance you don't realize you're doing

Here's something I notice with almost every expat I work with: without meaning to, they've started curating their life for the audience back home. The Instagram version. The "we went to Bruges this weekend" version. Not because they're dishonest, but because the honest version is too hard to explain.

How do you explain that you spent Saturday crying in a foreign IKEA because the overwhelming sameness of the furniture was the only familiar thing you'd encountered in weeks? How do you explain that you've started dreading the weekly video call with your parents because the performance of being okay is exhausting? How do you explain that your marriage is under more strain than it's ever been, and you can't talk about it with anyone because all your friends here are also your partner's friends?

You can't. So you don't. You show them the cobblestones and the croissants and you let them believe the story, and the story becomes a wall between you and the people you used to be closest to.

The guilt underneath

There's a specific guilt that comes with this, and it compounds everything: you left. You're the one who moved away. You're the one who chose a life that, from the outside, looks like an extended vacation. When friendships fade, you feel like it's your fault, because you broke the proximity, you disrupted the rhythm, you stopped being available for the Tuesday night dinners and the spontaneous Saturday coffees.

And mixed into the guilt is something harder to admit: relief. Because some of those friendships were already running on fumes. Some of them were held together by habit and geography, not by depth. And the move, by removing the habit and the geography, revealed which ones had roots and which ones were just… adjacent.

That's a painful thing to see. Especially when the friendships that turn out to be rootless are ones you thought were deep. Especially when the person who says "but at least you're in Europe!" is someone you would have called your closest friend two years ago.

The friends who surprise you

Not all of them fade. Some of them (often not the ones you'd have predicted) rise to the distance. These are the friends who call and say "I have no idea what your life is like, tell me." The ones who don't offer perspective or advice or silver linings. The ones who just listen, and let it be hard, and don't try to fix it.

Those friendships often get deeper after the move, precisely because the easy proximity is gone and what's left has to be more intentional. The conversations become less frequent but more real. You stop catching up and start connecting. The friendship loses its casual layer and what's underneath turns out to be stronger than you thought.

But this is cold comfort when you're standing in your kitchen at 11 PM, having just gotten off a call where you felt more alone than before you dialed.

The loss you haven't named

What I think is actually happening, underneath the frustration and the guilt and the growing distance: you're grieving. Not a person, a version of yourself. The version that existed in the context of those friendships. The version that was known, that was funny in a way that landed, that had a role in a web of relationships that reflected back a self you recognized.

That version of you is gone. Not dead. Just inaccessible. You can't be that person on a video call from a different continent. The context that made you you, in their eyes and in your own, has dissolved. And what you're left with is someone you're still getting to know.

This is a different kind of loneliness than not having local friends. It's the loneliness of being misunderstood by the people who are supposed to understand you. And it can't be solved by calling more often or visiting more frequently. It can only be met by acknowledging what's changed, grieving what's been lost, and beginning, slowly, awkwardly, with the kind of vulnerability that feels like a risk every single time, to let new people know the person you're becoming.

Aaron Platt, MA (Counseling, La Salle; Sociology, UC Berkeley) is a therapist offering individual and couples therapy in English to clients worldwide. His psychodynamic approach focuses on the patterns that keep people stuck, not the surface symptoms, but the underlying structure.

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