Why Couples Struggle After Relocation

This article examines the specific mechanisms through which relocation strains couples, and what research and clinical practice suggest about navigating them.

The Asymmetry Problem

Most international relocations are initiated by one partner's career opportunity, visa status, or family situation. Even when both partners agree to the move, the power dynamic embedded in that origin tends to persist. The partner whose career drove the move has a built-in social infrastructure from day one: colleagues, professional purpose, a reason to be in the new country that is legible and valued. The trailing partner — a term widely used in expat research, for better or worse — often has none of these.

The resulting asymmetry operates on several levels simultaneously. One partner has professional purpose; the other is building from scratch. One partner's identity is affirmed daily by their role; the other's is temporarily suspended. One partner experiences the move as an opportunity; the other may experience it as a sacrifice they are not supposed to name as such.

Research by Ackers (1998) on partner migration within the European academic community found that trailing partners — predominantly, though not exclusively, women — frequently reported a significant loss of professional identity and personal autonomy, with lasting effects on self-esteem and relationship satisfaction. Critically, this effect was strongest when the sacrifice was not openly acknowledged between partners.

Our Cascais practice has written about the trailing-partner experience from a more personal, day-to-day angle — worth reading alongside this piece if you recognise yourself in it.

Busyness Was Doing More Work Than Either Partner Realised

Many couples arrive at therapy — whether shortly after relocation or years later — reporting that things were "fine" before the move. In many cases this is true, in the sense that the relationship was functional. What is often also true is that the relationship was maintained by structure: two people with full professional and social lives, converging at home in the evenings and on weekends, with enough shared activity and enough individual exhaustion to make proximity feel like connection.

Relocation removes that structure, often for both partners simultaneously. Suddenly there is more time together, less external stimulation, fewer independent social outlets, and a shared environment that is unfamiliar to both. Pre-existing tensions — around communication, emotional intimacy, the balance of household labour, differing needs for social connection — that were previously managed by busyness now have no container.

The Role of Unexpressed Resentment

Resentment is one of the most clinically significant emotions in couples work, in part because it is so rarely named directly. It tends to accumulate quietly — in small withheld complaints, in the decision not to raise something again, in the gradual withdrawal of warmth or generosity — and surfaces not as a clear statement of grievance but as contempt, stonewalling, or disproportionate reactivity.

In the relocation context, resentment often has a specific structure. The trailing partner may resent the loss of career, social network, and identity that the move entailed — while simultaneously feeling that naming this resentment is unfair, because the move was agreed to, because the other partner is working hard, because things are objectively comfortable. This creates a bind: the grievance feels illegitimate, so it goes unexpressed; unexpressed, it compounds; compounded, it eventually emerges in ways that are confusing to both partners.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the approach used in couples therapy at this practice, is particularly well-suited to this dynamic. Rather than focusing on the surface conflict, EFT works to identify the underlying emotional needs and attachment fears that are driving it — which, in relocation cases, are often fears of abandonment, loss of autonomy, or the sense of not being seen or valued by one's partner.

Different Adjustment Trajectories

Even when both partners are broadly willing to relocate, they rarely adjust at the same pace. One person may settle into the new environment quickly — finding their footing socially, developing affection for the city, building a functional daily life. The other may take longer, remaining in a more disoriented and withdrawn state for months.

This differential trajectory creates its own relational problems. The faster-adjusting partner may feel frustrated by what looks like a failure of effort or positivity on the other's part. The slower-adjusting partner may feel pressure to perform adaptation they don't yet feel — and may also feel isolated by the growing experiential gap between them. The partner who has adjusted has, in a sense, already left; the other is still in transit.

Stroebe and Schut's Dual Process Model of coping (1999) — originally developed in the context of bereavement — is useful here. It describes how people oscillate between loss-orientation (focusing on what was lost) and restoration-orientation (investing in the new situation). Couples in which one partner is predominantly loss-oriented and the other restoration-oriented can feel profoundly out of sync, even when both responses are entirely legitimate.

When Children Are Involved

Relocation with children adds complexity in every direction. Children may struggle with the transition — with language, school, social integration — in ways that consume significant parental energy and generate anxiety, particularly in the parent who is at home more. The couple's relationship, already under strain, may be further deprioritised as children's needs take precedence.

There is also an identity dimension specific to parents. A parent who was professionally active before the move and is now primarily at home managing children and household in a foreign-language environment may experience a particularly acute form of identity disruption — and may find it difficult to access support for this, because the social narrative around parenting tends not to leave space for ambivalence about the caretaking role.

What Couples Therapy Offers in This Context

Couples therapy after relocation is not primarily about teaching communication techniques, though those may be part of it. It is about creating a structured space in which both partners can say what the move has actually been like for them — including the parts that are difficult to say in front of each other, because they might hurt, or because they feel unfair, or because saying them out loud makes them more real.

The therapeutic relationship provides a kind of containment that the couple cannot always provide for each other when they are both under strain. A therapist can hold the emotional complexity of both partners' experiences simultaneously — acknowledging the trailing partner's loss without making the other partner feel blamed, and acknowledging the initiating partner's own adjustment difficulties without minimising what the move has cost the other.

EFT for couples — which has one of the strongest evidence bases of any couples therapy modality — focuses specifically on attachment: on what each partner needs to feel safe and connected, and on how current interaction patterns are preventing those needs from being met. In relocation cases, these patterns are often directly traceable to the asymmetries described above.

Sessions are available both in person in Lisbon and online, which is particularly useful for couples where one or both partners travel frequently, or where scheduling makes in-person attendance difficult. Research by Wiebe and Johnson (2016) confirmed that EFT delivered online produces the same therapeutic processes and outcomes as in-person EFT — including the attachment-level emotional work that is central to the approach.

If you are navigating this, you might also find it useful to read about how I work and what to expect from a first session before reaching out.

References

1. Ackers, L. (1998). Shifting Spaces: Women, Citizenship and Migration within the European Union. Policy Press.
2. Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. PubMed
3. Wiebe, S. A., & Johnson, S. M. (2016). A review of the research in emotionally focused therapy for couples. Family Process, 55(3), 390–407. PubMed
4. HSBC Expat Explorer Survey (2017). Expat Explorer: Achieving Ambitions Abroad. HSBC Bank.