My Relationship Is Falling Apart After Moving Abroad

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

Expat couples therapy for relationships falling apart after relocation. Marriage counseling for expats that understands the move didn’t cause the problem. It removed everything that was hiding it.

You moved to a new country together. Maybe it was for one person's job. Maybe it was a mutual decision, a fresh start, an adventure. Either way, you were supposed to be doing this as a team. Instead, you're fighting more than you ever have, or worse, you've stopped fighting and started coexisting in a silence that scares you more than the arguments did.

What's actually happening is not what you think.

The move didn't break your relationship. It pressure-tested it.

Back home, you had separate lives that fed you. Your own friends, your own work, your own routines. You came together in the evening as two people who had enough. Enough stimulation, enough support, enough identity. The relationship was one important thing among many important things.

Now it's the only thing. Or close to it.

No relationship can bear that weight. Not because yours is bad, but because no relationship is supposed to be everything. And when you ask it to be everything, it starts failing at most of those jobs, and you start resenting each other for failures that aren't really failures at all.

The trailing spouse problem nobody talks about honestly

If one of you moved for the other's career, there's a specific pattern that's probably eating you alive. The working partner feels guilty but also resentful. Guilty because they know their partner sacrificed, resentful because they feel the weight of that sacrifice as a debt they can never repay. The trailing partner feels lost but also guilty about feeling lost, they're supposed to be supportive, they agreed to this, they should be making the most of it.

So both of you are performing. The working partner performs gratitude: "Isn't this amazing? We're so lucky to be here." The trailing partner performs contentment: "I'm fine, I'm exploring, it's great." And underneath both performances, resentment builds.

The thing about resentment: it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from unspoken needs. The trailing partner needs acknowledgment that what they gave up was enormous and that their struggle is real, not something to be solved with a language class and a meetup group. The working partner needs permission to enjoy their work without it being an act of betrayal against the person who gave up theirs.

Neither of you is wrong for needing what you need. And neither of you is wrong for struggling to give it. You're two people in an impossible situation trying to protect each other from truths that feel too dangerous to say out loud. And the loneliness of expat life means there's no one else to absorb any of the pressure.

What the fights are actually about

You're fighting about dishes. About who forgot to do the thing. About whether to go to the expat meetup or stay home. About money, or plans, or the tone someone used when they said something innocuous.

You're not fighting about any of that.

You're fighting because one of you feels invisible. Because the other feels trapped. Because you're both terrified that this move was a mistake and saying so would mean the whole thing (the upheaval, the expense, the goodbyes) was for nothing. Because you're both lonely and the one person who's supposed to fix your loneliness is the person you're most frustrated with.

That's not a sign your relationship is broken. It's a sign your relationship is trying to process an enormous amount of stress with no external support. At home, this stress would be distributed across a network: friends, family, coworkers, the therapist one of you used to see. Here, there's no network. There's just the two of you, staring at each other across the kitchen table in a country where neither of you feels fully at home.

The way through

Stop trying to fix each other's experience. You can't make your partner feel at home. They can't make you feel less guilty. What you can do is stop pretending everything is fine and start telling the truth about how hard this is. Not as an accusation, but as a fact. "This is harder than I thought it would be" is not a complaint. It's an invitation.

Recognize that the intensity of what you're feeling toward each other (the irritation, the disappointment, the loneliness) is proportional to how much you've lost, not to how much is wrong with your relationship. You didn't become incompatible. You became each other's everything, and that's too much for any two people.

Build separate lives. This sounds counterintuitive when your relationship is struggling, but it's the single most important thing you can do. You each need something that's yours, a class, a routine, a friend, a project. Less about you need space from each other, and more about you need to come back to each other as whole people rather than as two halves desperately trying to make one functional whole.

And if you can't find your way there alone, which is completely understandable given that you're trying to repair a relationship while simultaneously going through one of the most stressful experiences of your lives, talk to someone who gets it.

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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