Please give me advice. My wife and I have never been close with our families. They are okay people but just so different than we are. Well, We moved away once, for 18 months, and we both missed our families, oddly enough to us. Well we moved back, moved really close to family, and now feel like wtf were we thinking. One week is fine next week is drama and terrible behavior on their part. They don’t think they’re ever in the wrong, they won’t communicate about it, it’s frustrating. We want to move away again and this time for good as it was planned to be last time. How do we break through that barrier of missing our families after some time apart but leaving it be just that, fond memories and seeing each other during holiday and not getting all depressed and existential about wanting to go fishing with dad and making dinners with mom.
Edit: we won’t be moving just an hour away, the two places we are interested in would be either a) a 6 hour plane ride, or b) a 13 hour plane ride.
I think it’s just human nature unfortunately. We tend to love our families unconditionally, regardless of our faults.
In many ways, I really hate my father, a very self absorbed man who rarely thinks about anyone but himself…and yet there’s a part of me that still wants to have a connection there.
Best I can suggest is to spend time with them and communicate with them in a way that is most comfortable to you.
my exact scenario
You are going to miss people. That happens. call them every now and again. Visit them when you can. Just because you move away doesn’t mean the line of communication is completely severed.
My family, or what’s left of it, is a 12 hour plane ride away and I always make a holiday of it. Visit a new city in the US and then head over to their area for two weeks. Say hi, catch up, and have a good time. But at the end of the day, I’m reminded why I left.
Other than that, there isn’t much you can do. If you visit for the holidays when you can, call when you can, and still really want to be around them, expat life may not be for you.
I would go for the 13-hour plane ride.
Sometimes to live better you have to love from afar.
Sometimes the people we love don’t being anything to our lives but complications.
Your both loving children. You have tried. Have a happy relationship and if you want kids make a family with better emotional skills. Your not a bad person
If I want to go “home” its a 30 hour trip door to door. At first I was a bit homesick, but after a few trips home, I realised I was missing the idea of ‘home’, not the reality of ‘home’. You tend to only remember the really good stuff and gloss over the rest.
For example I missed white Christmases and all the holiday cheer. Then I’d go home for a visit and experience the hectic visits to all the relatives in shitty weather. Experience the sleet, snow and slush rather than the blinding white snow in my memory. I’d remember amazing summer evenings camping, in reality, they were mosquito ridden nightmares!
Also weirdly, my mother and I now have a pretty good relationship whereas when I lived at ‘home’ or spent extensive visits with her, we would argue and be miserable
This sounds like those toxic Indian families.
Embrace suffering, i know the feeling, you can’t live at 2 places at the same time, pros and cons kind of thing