Life Abroad: The Arranged Marriage Nobody Warned You About
On why long-term expats fall in and out of love with their adopted home over time.
At the end of a workshop I delivered, someone said something I haven’t been able to shake.
We were talking about the phase past adjustment, past integration — when your life abroad works and something still feels slightly off. Someone asked how they would describe it.
The response? It’s like an arranged marriage, they said.
They meant: you chose it once. You packed your things, arrived, built something real. The choice was real.
But at some point — and I don’t know exactly when this happens, only that it does — your new place becomes a context rather than a decision.
You stop choosing it and start inhabiting it. The way you inhabit a role you’ve had long enough that you’ve stopped remembering you could leave.
Chosen once. Not continuously.
When the honeymoon phase of life abroad fades
I’ve called Madrid home since 2010.
I can navigate this city with my eyes closed. I know which local haunt to take someone to for their first jerez — where they still hand-write each order in chalk on a centuries-old bar. I know which immigration office to queue at, depending on which paper or appointment I need. I know which version of myself emerges speaking Spanish with people I love versus speaking Spanish in a room where I’m the only foreigner.
Sixteen years of that kind of knowing.
And occasionally — not in a broken way, not in a way that disrupts the day — the awareness that knowing a place and having chosen it are different things.
Authenticity, attachment, and the hum
There’s a tension I keep noticing — in my own life and in conversations with long-term expats — between two things that look similar from the outside but feel very different from the inside.
Authenticity. And attachment.
Authenticity is the version of you that exists before the adaptation. The one with opinions about how things should work, preferences that don’t translate, a way of being in a room that doesn’t always match the room’s expectations.
Attachment is what you do to stay in your new home. The softening, the adjusting, the reading of cues. The slow calibration toward legibility.
Authenticity is the version of you that exists before you landed. Attachment is what you do to stay in your new home. Neither is wrong. Both are necessary. But over the years, they start to pull you in different directions.
Neither is wrong. Both are necessary. But over years, they start to pull in different directions.
And the question that eventually surfaces — quietly, usually in the middle of something ordinary — is which one have I been choosing?
Most content for people living abroad treats belonging as the reward for sufficient commitment. Stay long enough. Integrate hard enough. The hum will stop.
That’s not what I’ve found. Not in my own life. Not across the nearly thirty conversations I’ve had with long-term expats and globally mobile folks in the last few months.
The hum doesn’t stop. It gets quieter. Which is different from being gone.
The gap between functional and chosen
What the arranged marriage metaphor names — and why I keep returning to it — is that the arrangement can be genuinely good and still leave something unresolved.
Arranged marriages can contain real love. Real life. Real commitment.
They’re just not the same as choosing again, every day, with full information.
Wait — is this still what I want?
Not a final decision. More like a draft.
A question that surfaces in the middle of something ordinary and then recedes, because the answer isn’t available yet, or because the day requires you to move on.
Most of us weren’t given language for this.
We were given language for the beginning — visas, culture shock, the thrill of arrival. We were given language for crisis — homesickness, burnout, the decision to leave.
Nobody gave us language for the long middle.
For what it feels like to have built something real somewhere that didn’t originally choose you back. To have commitment without belonging, or belonging without the feeling of having fully chosen it.
That gap — between functional and chosen, between committed and at home — is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself.
It deserves language before it deserves a verdict.
Sitting with the arrangement
This month’s audio guide is for that moment.
The quiet moment — when you realize you’re living something you chose once but haven’t chosen recently, and you’re not sure yet what to do with that awareness.
Living With the Arrangement is a guided practice for sitting with what’s actually true, without rushing toward what you think you’re supposed to do about it.
It’s for long-term expats and globally mobile folks who are:
Functional, fluent, and still carrying something slightly unresolved
Somewhere in the long middle — past adjustment, not yet at a crossroads
Ready to get honest, even just with themselves, about the gap between committed and at home
It won’t tell you to stay or to leave. It won’t ask you to recommit or to grieve.
It will just sit with you in the arrangement, for less than ten minutes, and ask a few questions worth carrying.
This month's audio is for paid subscribers — a guided practice for sitting with the arrangement, without rushing toward resolution.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.
If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.
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