In today’s globalized world, people are looking to live, work and study abroad. Moving abroad may make you scared and insecure with millions of thoughts running through your mind initially, but you need to embrace this new phase of life, you have to get outside your comfort zone because in the end, you will be thankful for everything.
The comfort zone is the place where your growth stops. As a result, you are not able to think clearly about your goals, ambitions and feel the real you. When you put yourself in an environment where nobody knows you, you face challenges and that helps you become a new person both personally and professionally.
It is always hard for relatives or friends to understand that your priorities and lifestyle is going to change and it will somewhere impact the relationship dynamics with them. No wonder we have advanced technologies to video chat, call or email our friends and family to stay in touch, but there are a lot more factors which affect old relationships.
Different lifestyle
Living an expat life, forces you to meet new people, change your old routine, doing your daily chores alone, and learn new things. It’s just not about changing jobs or home, you are changed too, you can’t take anything for guaranteed not even your relationships which had a huge impact on your life. You face challenges with new people, work culture and sometimes new language.
This new life makes it hard to keep up with old friends and stay in touch. Even if you are in a romantic relationship, sometimes it is hard to keep up because either because of time differences or different priorities. It takes both patience and understanding to work long distance relationships.
If another person is not able to “keep up” with the above problems or fail to make an effort, it is better to move on with old friends or relations. It’s not a bad decision, rather, it’s a fact that you have to lose a part of your life behind while moving ahead in your life. Many of us even living in the same city are hardly in touch with our school friends, it doesn’t mean that we don’t value their relationship anymore. It applies the same when we move to a different country.
Staying positive in the relationship
As mentioned above, with cutting-edge technology it is quite easy to stay in touch with others and maintain relationships whether it’s friendship, familial or a romantic. If you have to make it work, you and others need to understand that you will evolve and thus your relationships too. Technology can’t make up for everything. The lack of physical connection in long-distance relationships do affect the quality of relations. The meeting either with a partner or family member won’t be frequent. You can’t rush to your friends and family, when they call you as meeting with them will require planning.
Healthy relationships, strive to get better at by looking at the positive aspects. Staying positive even when you have different goals and realizing that eventually things and relationships will change for better and as a human being we need to adapt to make things work out.
Living an expat life makes you realize that even if you want, sometimes you can’t change the fact that you are missing a lot of happy and sad moments of your relationship with others and even if you want you can’t go back and cherish those moments. It’s natural to part ways in a relationship when life changes and you change with time. If you are living aboard away from loved ones, do drop us a comment sharing how life is changed for you?