When One of You Wants to Go Home: Making the Decision Without Losing the Relationship

It usually starts somewhere stupid.

For Marta and Tom it was a Sunday in November, in the car, somewhere between the recycling centre and home. She said something about her mother's knee operation. He said something about how they should book flights soon. And then she said the thing she had apparently been holding for about eight months, which was: I don't want to book flights, I want to go back.

He pulled into the driveway and neither of them got out of the car for a while.

Here is what makes this particular fight so much worse than it looks from the outside. Nobody is wrong. He is not being selfish for loving the life he has here, the job that finally uses him properly, the friends it took him four years to make. She is not being weak for having reached the end of something. There is no compromise available either, no meeting in the middle, no splitting the difference. You cannot live sixty per cent in Rotterdam.

And so most couples do the only thing that seems available, which is to not decide, for months, sometimes years, while it quietly eats everything.

Why is this harder than other arguments?

Because it cannot be managed the way most relationship conflicts are managed. The Gottman Institute's research found that "Sixty-nine percent of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems", meaning most of what couples argue about is never solved, only handled well or badly over decades. You can coexist with different views on tidiness forever. You cannot coexist with two countries.

That is the structural difference, and it is worth naming out loud, because a lot of couples in this position feel like failures for not being able to talk their way out of it. You are not failing at communication. You are dealing with the rare kind of conflict that has an actual answer and demands you pick one.

The Gottman research is useful for a second reason. It found that what predicts whether a couple survives a hard disagreement is not resolution, it is the ability to keep talking about the thing without contempt creeping in (The Gottman Institute). Which is more or less the whole task here. The decision will get made one way or another, by you or by circumstance. What you have real control over is whether you are still speaking properly to each other when it does.

Two people can want opposite things without either of them being the problem. Most of the damage in this situation comes from the point where one of you starts treating the other's need as an obstacle rather than a fact.

There is also a reason this is so common that companies have built policies around it. Global mobility surveys have for years pointed to partner or family dissatisfaction as one of the most frequently cited reasons international assignments end early. Take that with the caution any industry survey deserves, but the direction is consistent and the pattern is old. You are not the first couple to hit this wall by a very long way.

Is this actually about the country?

Often it is not. "I want to go home" is a real feeling but a vague diagnosis, and it is worth spending a few weeks working out what sits underneath it before either of you rearranges an entire life. Sometimes the answer is genuinely the place. Frequently it is something more specific, and more fixable, wearing the country as a costume.

The four things that most often hide inside it:

A person, not a place. An ageing parent. A sibling going through something. A friend group that has moved on without you. When people say they miss Ireland what they very often mean is that they miss eleven specific people in Ireland, and that is a different problem with different solutions.

Loneliness that has been going on too long. If you have been here three years and have no one you could call at 11pm, the country will feel unbearable, and it would feel unbearable anywhere you had no one. That is loneliness abroad rather than a geographical error, and it does not follow you home automatically, but it also does not always disappear when you land.

A stalled life. Career going nowhere, no language progress, a house that still feels temporary. Going home can look like the only available forward motion when everything else is stuck.

Grief that never got processed. Something ended when you moved and nobody held a funeral for it. That is closer to homesickness, and it is treatable, and it is not usually solved by relocation.

None of that means the wish to leave is illegitimate. Sometimes a place genuinely does not suit a person and no amount of insight will change that. But the couple who works out which of these it is has a real conversation available to them. The couple who does not just has a standoff.

A question worth asking your partner, calmly, once: if the three hardest things about being here were fixed, would you still want to go? A yes and a no lead to completely different next six months.

If it turns out you are still in the trough of adaptation rather than at the end of the road, culture shock has a shape and a timeline, and knowing where you are in it changes the calculation.

Why waiting is the worst option

Not deciding feels like the kind, neutral thing to do. It is neither. Every month you defer, the person who wants to leave accumulates evidence that their life is being spent, and the person who wants to stay accumulates a low-grade dread that never quite switches off. Nobody is happy, nobody has agreed to anything, and the relationship pays for it daily.

Watch what actually happens in the drift.

The one who wants to go stops investing. Why learn more Dutch, why take the promotion, why get attached to anyone new, when you might be gone by summer. So they become less happy here, which then gets read by their partner as proof they never really tried.

The one who wants to stay starts managing rather than talking. They stop mentioning good news about work. They avoid the subject at dinner. They quietly start hoping the feeling will pass, which is a strategy in the way that ignoring a noise in your engine is a strategy.

And a decision gets made anyway. Just not by either of you. A contract ends, a parent gets ill, a job appears, and you find out what you were going to do by having it happen to you.

An open-ended maybe is more corrosive than a difficult yes. Set a date to decide. Not a date to leave, a date to decide. Three months, six months, after the school year. Then let each other live normally until then.

That last part matters more than people expect. A deadline is not a countdown to doom, it is permission for both of you to stop negotiating in every conversation for a while.

Who should give in?

This is the wrong question, and it is the one every couple asks first. Research on sacrifice in relationships suggests the outcome matters far less than the motive. A study of daily sacrifice found that giving something up to move towards something good, like your partner's happiness or the relationship itself, was linked to better wellbeing and better relationship quality. Giving something up to avoid conflict or guilt was linked to worse outcomes on both counts, and was particularly damaging to the relationship over time (Impett, Gable & Peplau, 2005, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

Read that again if you are currently about to cave to end an argument.

It means there are two completely different ways to make the identical decision, and they produce opposite results five years later. Staying because you genuinely choose your partner's wellbeing over your preference for this city is durable. Staying because you cannot face another Sunday like that one in the car is not. Same outcome, same city, same flat. Utterly different marriage.

The version that poisons is the one made to stop a conversation. If you find yourself agreeing mainly so the discussion ends, you have not agreed to anything. You have deferred the bill, with interest.

The practical implication is uncomfortable but useful. Before either of you concedes, you both need to be able to say what you are moving towards, out loud, in your own words. If the only sentence available is "fine, whatever you want", stop. That is not a decision, it is a hostage statement.

Fixable here, or wrong country?

Most of the stalemate comes from arguing about the conclusion instead of the evidence. It helps enormously to separate the things that would genuinely improve with effort and time from the things that will not change no matter what either of you does.

	Probably fixable where you are	Probably not fixable where you are
Social life	You have not built one yet, or you built one that left	Repeated real hostility, or a culture where you have honestly tried for years
Career	Language, recognition of qualifications, wrong employer	Your profession does not legally exist here or cannot be licensed
Family	Missing people, manageable distance, flights	A parent needs hands-on care now, not calls
Climate and daylight	Untreated winter low mood, no routine	You have tried everything and four dark months still flatten you
Belonging	Early days, still adapting, language gap	Years in, fluent, and still visibly held at arm's length
Children	Adjustment wobbles, school fit, friendships forming	Real needs the local system cannot meet

Two people can look at the same row and disagree, and that is fine. That disagreement is much more productive than "you never gave it a chance" versus "you never listen to me", which is where most of these conversations end up at midnight.

What if one of you gave up a career to come here?

Then the decision is not being made between equals, and pretending otherwise will make it worse. If one of you moved for the other's job and lost their own professional life in the process, the ledger is already lopsided before anybody says a word about going home.

The person who moved often cannot articulate the strength of the pull cleanly, because it is entangled with resentment they feel guilty about having. The person whose job caused the move often hears any mention of leaving as an accusation, because on some level they think it is one.

Neither of you is going to negotiate well until that history gets acknowledged directly rather than treated as background. It usually only takes one honest conversation, but it has to be a real one. Our guide for the accompanying partner covers what that loss actually does to a person, and is worth reading by the partner who did not experience it.

If one of you has already sacrificed once, "it's your turn" is not an argument, it is an invoice. Ledgers work fine for splitting bills. They are terrible for deciding where to live.

What about the children?

Children are almost always used as evidence by both sides, and they are genuinely poor evidence, because you can build a good case in either direction and both cases will be sincere. What is more useful is being honest about which child, which age, and which specific need, rather than talking about "the kids" as a single argument.

The things that actually seem to matter: how old they are right now, whether they have close friends here or are still floating, whether they have a real relationship with grandparents or a screen-based one, whether the local school genuinely fits them, and how they are doing in each language.

What almost never works is deciding for them without asking them. Older children usually know more about the tension in the house than either parent believes, and being consulted, even without being given the vote, changes how they carry the outcome for years afterwards.

When to bring in someone else

Bring in help when the same conversation has repeated more than a handful of times without moving, when one of you has stopped raising it at all, or when the subject has started contaminating unrelated parts of your life. Also bring in help if the disagreement has begun to feel like a verdict on the relationship itself rather than a decision inside it.

A couples therapist is not there to tell you which country to live in. What they do is stop the conversation collapsing into the two positions you both already have memorised, and surface what is actually being asked for underneath them, which is often not what either of you has been saying.

Two practical notes. It usually helps if the therapist has lived abroad, because a lot of what you need to explain is invisible to someone who has not. And working in your own language matters here more than in almost any other kind of therapy, because you will be trying to describe belonging, and belonging is the first thing to go when you translate. That is the basis of therapy for expat partners, and it is worth insisting on rather than settling for whoever is available.

How Expathy can help

Expathy matches couples with licensed psychologists who speak their languages, understand both cultures involved, and have lived internationally themselves. For this particular conversation that last part is not a nice extra. A therapist who has never held a residence permit or rebuilt a friendship group from zero will keep treating the country as a detail.

You answer a short questionnaire, see the therapists who fit, choose together, and book a free 20-minute introductory session before committing to anything. If you would rather start alone, that is also completely normal, and it is often how this begins.

You do not have to arrive at therapy already agreeing. Disagreeing well, in front of someone who can help, is the point.

Find a therapist for you and your partner

Whatever you choose, choose it out loud

Marta and Tom stayed, in the end. Not because he won. Because it turned out that most of what she wanted was to be near her mother for whatever was coming, and they worked out that four trips a year and a genuine agreement to move within three years was a thing she could live inside. He gave up the assumption that this was permanent. She gave up the idea that leaving was the only way to be taken seriously.

That is not a fairytale ending, it is a negotiated one, and it holds because both of them can say what they agreed to and why.

The couples who come apart over this are rarely the ones who disagreed hardest. They are the ones who never actually decided, who let it run for three years, who each privately concluded the other did not care. The decision is survivable. The silence around it is what does the damage.

Frequently Asked Questions

My partner wants to move back home and I don't. What should we do first?

Work out what is underneath the wish before you argue about the conclusion. "I want to go home" often means a specific person, a specific loss, or a stalled career rather than the country itself. Ask what would change if the three hardest things here were fixed. Then agree a date by which you will decide, so that neither of you spends the next year living provisionally while the question stays open.

Should I move back for my partner if I am happy where we are?

You can, and couples do it successfully, but the reason matters more than the choice. Research on relationship sacrifice found that giving something up to move towards your partner's happiness is associated with better outcomes, while giving in mainly to end conflict or avoid guilt predicts worse outcomes and more damage over time. If you cannot say what you are moving towards, you are not ready to agree yet.

Is it normal for couples to disagree about staying abroad or going home?

Very. It is common enough that global mobility research repeatedly names partner dissatisfaction among the leading reasons international assignments end early. Two people rarely adapt at the same speed, and the one whose work drove the move usually integrates faster because a job supplies colleagues, routine and status automatically. The gap between you is a predictable consequence of the situation rather than evidence that something is wrong with your relationship.

How long should we take to decide whether to stay or leave?

Set an explicit deadline rather than leaving it open, and make it long enough to gather real information but short enough to end the limbo. Three to six months suits most couples, or the end of a school year where children are involved. The point of a deadline is not urgency. It is that it lets both of you stop negotiating in every conversation and live normally until the date arrives.

Can couples therapy help when we disagree about which country to live in?

Yes, though not by choosing for you. A therapist's role is to stop the discussion collapsing into two rehearsed positions and to surface what each of you is actually asking for, which is frequently not what is being said. Therapy also helps prevent the decision from becoming a permanent scorecard afterwards, which is the outcome that damages relationships more than the move itself does.

What if my partner has already decided to leave without me?

Treat that as information rather than an ultimatum, and slow down before responding. Some people announce a decision because it is the only way they can get the conversation taken seriously after months of feeling unheard. Others genuinely have decided. Finding out which one this is matters enormously, and it is often easier with a third person present than in another conversation at the kitchen table.

How do we decide what is best for the children?

Get specific instead of arguing about "the kids" in general. Their ages, their friendships, how well the school actually fits each of them, their language levels, and whether their relationship with grandparents is real or screen-based will all point in clearer directions than a general principle will. Older children should be consulted, even if they do not get a vote, because being asked changes how they carry the outcome later.

Will moving back home actually fix how my partner feels?

Sometimes, and less often than people expect. If the difficulty is genuinely the place, going home can help enormously. If it is unprocessed grief, loneliness or a stalled career, those tend to travel, and returning can bring its own disorientation that catches people completely off guard. This is the strongest argument for diagnosing the cause carefully before rearranging your lives around a guess.