On identity, intimacy, and the quiet cost of an opportunity.
We moved for the opportunity of a lifetime, yet one of us feel like they have quietly disappeared.
It’s one of the most common things I hear from couples who have relocated abroad for a career, and it almost never arrives in those words. It arrives sideways. One partner is thriving - a new role, a bigger remit, colleagues who already know their name and what they have achieved. The other is, by every outward measure, free: no commute, a beautiful home, maybe even some help in the house and free time. And yet it’s the free one who is quietly coming apart, and neither of them quite understands why. They moved together, for a shared future. So why does it feel as though only one of them made the journey intact?
Two saplings, one tree
There is something that happens in woodland that I have come to think of as one of the most honest and beautiful pictures of a long partnership. When two young trees grow close enough, the wind moves them against each other, season after season. The rubbing wears away the outer bark where they touch, until the living layer beneath, the part that actually grows, meets the living layer of the other. And then, sometimes, they fuse. The two trunks graft themselves together and go on growing as one. Foresters call it inosculation, from the Latin osculum, a kiss. Such trees are traditionally called marriage trees.
Now imagine taking that joined tree, years into its growing, and moving it somewhere new: a bright, prized position, but one where the sun reaches only one side. One flank is suddenly bathed in light. It thickens, leaves filling out, and is admired by everyone who passes. The other flank, the same living tree, falls into shade. And from the path, all anyone sees is how well the tree is doing.
The asymmetry nobody wanted
When a couple relocates for one person's work, they tend to imagine they are making the same move. They are not. They are making two entirely different ones.
The working partner arrives into a structure already built for them. There is a desk, a title, colleagues who need them by Thursday, and within weeks, people who know their name and value what they do.
The accompanying partner arrives into none of that. Researchers have a dry phrase for what they lack - an institutional anchor, and it captures something precise. The one who follows must rebuild an entire daily life from nothing, in an unfamiliar place, often in another language: the housing, the healthcare, the schools, the bureaucracy, the finding of a doctor, dentist and the right places to get what they need. They become, as one description has it, the CEO of a household they did not apply to run. And they do all of it without colleagues, without a peer group, without the daily hum of people who already know their worth.
So the very same relocation hands one person a reason to get up and a room full of recognition, and hands the other a list of logistics and a silence. That is not a difference in attitude. It is, at least in part, a difference in architecture. And much of what can follow - the flatness, the resentment, the slow disappearing, may owe far more to that imbalance than to any failure of character in the person experiencing it.
Who were you, before you were here?
The psychologist Ortal Slobodin, in a close study of trailing spouses, described exactly this. Where the working partner is sheltered from what she calls identity discontinuity by the institutional frameworks around them, the accompanying partner often faces a sudden loss of the very things that establish an identity - a sense of belonging, professional achievement, the ordinary daily texture of social interaction. Many have given up careers that took years to build. And a career is never only an income. It’s a story about who we are, told back to us every working day. Remove it without warning, and for many people the question that surfaces is not practical but existential: who am I, if I am no longer the person I was there?
This is why the standard reassurances land so poorly. Telling someone "but you're so lucky" look at the house, look at the lifestyle, look at the freedom, can miss the point, and sometimes makes it worse, because it answers a question about circumstances when the ache is a question about self. Often the person is not ungrateful. They are unrecognised, sometimes most of all by themselves.
Whose eyes are we seeing ourselves through?
There is a quieter layer to this loss, and it concerns where the partner who followed goes looking for an answer to who am I now? Very often, they look to their partner, or more precisely, to what they imagine their partner now thinks of them.
Research on how we form a sense of self offers a useful caution here. A well-known review of the evidence by Shrauger and Schoeneman found that people's views of themselves agree substantially with how they believe others see them, but show no consistent agreement with how others actually see them. In other words, the verdict we feel most certain of may be one we have written ourselves.
In my clinical work, I often hear the partner who followed describe, with real conviction, how their partner must now see them: as less interesting, less capable, someone who "does nothing all day." When that belief is finally said aloud, the partner is sometimes astonished by it. Sometimes, though, the view really has shifted, and that deserves to be heard just as honestly. The point is not that the imagined view is always wrong. It is that it so rarely gets checked.
This matters because a self that rests on an imagined verdict can often also quietly hand its rebuilding to someone else. If my sense of worth depends on what I think you think of me, then, without either of us intending it, you become responsible for restoring it. It’s a pattern drawn from practice rather than trial evidence, but it raises a question worth sitting with: when I decide what you think of me now, how often have I actually asked you?
What the bedroom feels first
There is a part of this that couples almost never raise in the first session, and often not in the fifth, and in my experience it is often where much of the distress has gone to live. When one partner stops feeling like themselves, the change can show up in their intimate life before either of them has words for it.
One plausible link is this - How we inhabit our bodies and how freely we can let ourselves be desired may both depend, to a surprising degree, on whether we feel at home in ourselves. A systematic review of the research on self-esteem, body image and sexual satisfaction found that people who feel less self-conscious during intimacy tend to report greater satisfaction. That is an association rather than proof of cause, but it fits what I often see: desire seems to need us to be able to stop watching ourselves from the outside. And a person whose sense of self has just been shaken may find themselves doing a great deal of that watching, assessing their own worth like a stranger. It’s hard to be freely, unselfconsciously open with a partner while that appraisal is running.
So desire can quietly withdraw. Not necessarily because the love or the attraction has gone, but perhaps because the self that desire requires - the one that can be present, playful, unguarded - has gone temporarily into hiding.
It’s important to mention that this is not the only possible explanation. Lower desire after a move can also reflect depression, grief, exhaustion, hormonal change, medication, or difficulties that were already there before anyone packed a box. Some of these need their own care, sometimes starting with a GP. What I am describing is just one common thread, not a diagnosis, and part of the work is finding out which threads are actually present.
And here is the hard twist, the one that turns a private struggle into a shared wound. The research on self-esteem and intimacy suggests that when one partner withdraws in this way, the other may misread it. They may not see a person struggling to feel desirable. They see a person who no longer seems to want them and they may conclude, quietly and painfully, that they are no longer wanted. The withdrawal that was really about the disappearing partner's relationship with themselves gets heard as a verdict on the relationship. One person is thinking I no longer feel like anyone worth wanting. The other is thinking they have gone off me. Neither says it aloud. And a second distance opens on top of the first, built largely out of a misunderstanding.
The question that can change the room
When couples in this situation reach me, the working partner often arrives with a version of the same question: how do I fix my unhappy partner? How do I cheer them up, get them out of the house, help them see how good things really are? It’s asked with genuine love, and I think it’s often the wrong question - not because the care behind it is wrong, but because it quietly keeps the problem on one side of the room. It casts one person as the patient and the other as the well-meaning helper, and that arrangement can be part of what keeps the trailing partner small.
So I tend to turn it round. Not how do I fix the one who is struggling - but what is it in the shape of our life together that has left one of us carrying all the loss, and what would it mean or look like, to carry it together?
It was never one person's problem
There is good reason to think this reframing is not merely kinder but more accurate. A consistent finding in research on expatriate families is that one partner's adjustment affects the other's. The distress tends not to stay politely on one side. It can cross over. When the accompanying partner is isolated, low in self-worth, or locked out of work, that state rarely remains their private burden; it can seep into the working partner's own adjustment, into the couple's or young family’s whole climate, and researchers describe how this can become a downward spiral of losses - which at its worst can bring assignments or relationships to an early end.
Attachment theory offers one way of understanding why. We’re not sealed units who happen to share a kitchen. Partners shape each other's emotional states constantly, much of it below the level of speech. A partner who comes home each evening to someone quietly drowning often struggles to stay buoyant themselves for long, however well the job is going. This is the hidden engineering of the whole situation: the move was framed as one’s opportunity, a single person's career lifted and carried abroad. But a couple is one system. A cost rarely falls on only one of them. Return to the tree for a moment. Its shaded side is not a separate plant that happens to be struggling next door. It’s the same trunk. Whatever dies back there, the whole tree eventually carries.
The tell
Not every pair of trees that looks fused has truly joined. Sometimes the bark grows together and, from the outside, the union looks complete, but the conductive tissue, the channels that carry water and nourishment, never actually connected. Foresters call this a false graft. Two trunks, one silhouette, and nothing flowing between them.
It’s only an image, but I find it a useful. The more revealing question is often not whether a relationship looks joined. From the path, many relationships do. It’s whether anything still moves between the two sides. Does the recognition, the energy, the sense of mattering that one partner brings home each evening actually travel, or does it stop at the bark?
What makes me hopeful about these couples is that the very thing that brought them here - the willingness to uproot an entire life in pursuit of something better - may be exactly the courage the repair requires. People who can move across the world are rarely people who lack the capacity to change. Sometimes they have simply, this once, applied all of that courage to a career and forgotten to spend any of it on their marriage.
Five questions to ask each other
None of this has to wait for a therapy room. But there is one more thing worth naming first, alongside everything above. The imbalance a move creates is real. So, often, is something harder to admit: when our sense of self has been shaken, it can be tempting, usually without noticing, to hand the work of rebuilding it to the person closest to us. And the person closest to us can be just as tempted to take it on. Neither is a failing. Both are worth getting curious about.
The questions below are not a checklist or a test, and they are not meant to assign blame. I would ask only one in an evening, and then do the harder thing: stay quiet long enough to hear the whole answer.
For the partner who followed, a question about what was lost: What did this move cost me that I have not yet let myself grieve, and have I let you see it? If not, get curious as to why?
A second, about what comes next: Since I stopped being who I was at work, do I know who I’ve been waiting to become, and if so, what exactly am I waiting for?
A third, perhaps the hardest: Which parts of my unhappiness here have I quietly hoped you would fix, and what would it ask of me to take them back?
For the partner whose career made the move: Where have I been trying to carry your new life for you, and does my carrying it leave you any room to find your own?
And one to ask together: Who is each of us becoming here that the other has not yet met, and what would it take for us to be curious about them?
A closing question
If you recognise yourselves here, I would leave you with one question. Not how do we get the struggling one back to normal, because the old normal is in another country now. But this: if the move cost one of you a self, and you have both been treating that as the price of one person's opportunity - what might change, tonight, if you decided it was a change the two of you owed each other to explore more deeply, and set about growing differently together?
Sources and further reading: Ortal Slobodin, "'Out of time': A temporal view on identity change in trailing spouses" (2019), on identity discontinuity and the loss of belonging, professional achievement and social interaction; Frontiers in Psychology research on expatriation stressors and the well-being of accompanying partners, and on crossover and spillover effects between partners' adjustment; research on self-esteem, body image and sexual satisfaction, including the link between lower self-consciousness during intimacy and greater satisfaction, and the tendency of partners to misattribute sexual withdrawal to loss of attraction. J. Sidney Shrauger and Thomas J. Schoeneman, "Symbolic interactionist view of self-concept: Through the looking glass darkly", Psychological Bulletin 86 (1979), 549 - 573, on self-perceptions tracking perceived rather than actual appraisals. Headline "expat divorce rate" figures circulating online are not well substantiated by peer-reviewed evidence and are deliberately not cited here.