I’ve been living abroad a long-ass time. Two decades, give or take. And in that time I have been treated to the sometimes welcome, usually not, opinions of other people about my choice to live abroad.
I’ve been told to go back to my home country more times than I can count. I’ve been told I was unwelcome in a place I’d chosen. I’ve been called a gentrificator. I’ve been made to feel guilty for leaving my family behind — how could you abandon the people who love you most? I’ve been criticised for moving somewhere I have no roots in. You don’t belong there.
Most of it rolled off my back. I’ll come back to the one that didn’t.
Then everyone and their dog started moving abroad. (Clearly I’m a trendsetter. You’re welcome.)
And the opinions stopped being about me. They went public, they went constant, and there are a great deal more of them now.
Europe won’t fix you.
Well, it might. But don’t move there anyway.
Move there, the economy needs you.
I rounded up the Europe version of this in Everyone’s Arguing About Moving to Europe last year, and it has only got louder since. What’s changed is its edge. The newer snipes are snipier:
Get out while you still can.
Stay and fight. Don’t abandon your country.
Both of those are said with real feeling. Both of them are aimed at people who are already awake at 2am running visa math and mortgage numbers and school calendars in their heads. And most of the people saying them have never had to make the decision they’re critiquing.
Which is the whole thing, really. Most of these comments are well-intentioned. Warnings. Advice. Nudges from people who care about you… or who care about something adjacent to you. They arrive with confidence because they cost the person saying them absolutely nothing.
The gentrificator one stung, though. It still does, a bit.
Partly because the person saying it meant it to. Mostly because there’s something in it that I can’t argue with. I’ve lived in places where my money stretched further than local wages. Where the rent I could comfortably pay helped set a number that someone born there couldn’t meet. Pretending that isn’t true would be more comfortable. It would also be false.
So I sat with it for a long time. Longer than I sat with any of the others, which mostly got the reception they deserved, which was none.
And then I kept living abroad. Differently. I stopped treating a place as somewhere I was passing through with good intentions and started treating it as somewhere I owed something to. Paying properly rather than at the foreigner discount everyone pretends is savvy. Learning the language past the point where it was charming and into the part where it’s hard. Spending locally. Staying long enough to be a neighbour instead of a visitor with a long lease.
That’s the part no comment section can do for you. A stranger can hand you the accusation. Only you can decide what to do with it, and you’re the only one who’ll be around to live with the answer.
Because at the end of it — and this is the whole point — none of these people are actually coming with you.
They will not be there at 11pm when the water stops and you don’t know who to call, or how to explain a burst pipe in a language you’re still learning. They won’t be there for the third trip to the same government office to submit the same document to a different person.
Equally, they won’t be there for the dazzling morning. The neighbour who leaves something from her garden by your door because she noticed you’d been ill. The breakfast you now eat every day that you hadn’t heard of three years ago and can no longer imagine living without.
And they certainly won’t be there in year four, when the place you chose stops fitting the person you’ve become, and you have to make the whole decision again from scratch.
You will be there for all of it. That’s the asymmetry, and no amount of confidence in someone else’s comment closes it.
Some opinions do count. Here’s the filter I use, and it’s short.
People who are coming with you. Your partner. Your kids. Your dog. Their views aren’t opinions, they’re terms (the dog may have trouble expressing these, however). If your partner is hesitant, that’s not an obstacle to route around, it’s information about whether this works. Take it seriously and negotiate it properly, out loud, before you’re standing in an empty flat in a new country having a conversation you should have had months earlier.
People who’ve done it from roughly where you’re standing. Similar age. Similar money. Similar complications — the health condition, the debt, the ageing parent, the job that has to travel with you. Someone who left at 26 with no dependants and a remote salary is describing a different sport. Find the person whose starting line looked like yours. Their experience is worth more than a hundred opinions from people who’ve never packed a box.
People who live there now. Especially the ones who were born there. Their read on what your arrival means for their town is more valuable than any take you’ll find online, including mine, and it’s the one most people skip.
Everyone else gets to have a view. They don’t get a vote.
I move to Spain in September (hopefully!). The opinions have already started arriving — about the town, about the timing, about the wisdom of doing the first month on my own.
A couple of them were useful. I wrote those ones down.
The rest can stay here. I’ve only got so much luggage allowance.
What’s the worst opinion anyone’s given you about your move? I want to hear it. Comments are open.
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