Moving for work: what it does to the relationships you leave behind

“You’ll come back at weekends, won’t you?”

Your mother asks this on the phone while you are taping up the last box. You say of course. And you mean it. The new job is good, the opportunity is the kind that doesn’t come along every year, your partner has said they’ll come with you, your friends threw you a farewell dinner on Friday and promised to visit. Everything is sorted. Only somewhere beneath your breastbone something is tight, and you don’t quite know what.

Perhaps this is the part of moving for work that gets talked about least. People talk about the contract, the salary, the flat, the nursery, the commute. Much less about the fact that a move doesn’t shift only you, but a whole circle of people around you — those who come with you and those who stay behind. In this post I would like to look at what happens to each of these relationships, and what you can do so that you don’t lose them needlessly.

One person’s decision, many people’s move

In family therapy we see a person as part of a system: a family, a partnership, a network of friends, a workplace. When one part of the system moves, all the others have to adjust. That is why relocating for work is rarely just a personal decision, even if you are the one who signs. Your partner has to find a new life, your parents lose someone who was close by, your friends lose a companion for Sunday walks, your children lose their nursery, their classmates, the grandmother round the corner.

In Slovenia many people would rather commute every day than move — distances are short and attachment to one’s home town is strong. But when a move can’t be avoided, because the job is in another part of the country or abroad, it often happens that everyone looks only at the person moving for work. They are the one with the fresh start. The others are “just” coming along or “just” staying behind. The system, though, doesn’t work like that. Everyone in it goes through their own change, and if those changes aren’t talked about, they show up in other ways: as tension, as silence, as a feeling that nobody understands you.

Let me say straight away what this post is not. It is not about grieving for a homeland, a language and a culture — I wrote about that in Losing your homeland: moving abroad and quiet grief. Here I am interested in something narrower and at the same time more everyday: what happens to relationships when you move for work. Whether you are moving from Koper to Ljubljana, from Ljubljana to Munich, or from London to Ljubljana.

Why relationships aren’t just “nice to have”

When we weigh up whether to take a job somewhere else, we often put relationships on the side of the “emotional” reasons, which are supposed to matter less than salary and career. Research suggests otherwise.

In 2010 Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues published a meta-analysis combining the results of 148 studies with more than 300,000 participants. They found that people with stronger social relationships had roughly a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period than those with weaker ones. The effect was comparable in size to well-known risk factors such as smoking.

This doesn’t mean every move is a health hazard. It does mean that relationships are not a decoration on life but one of its load-bearing pillars. When you move, that pillar doesn’t disappear, but it wobbles. And because this happens slowly, you often don’t notice when it started.

The trailing spouse: the one who went “for you”

In English, the partner who moves because of the other’s job is sometimes called the trailing spouse. It isn’t a kind phrase, and many people dislike it precisely because it hits on something painful: the feeling that your life now runs behind someone else’s.

Research on moving abroad for work — mostly about people whose employers send them to another country — has shown since the late 1980s something that surprised companies. Whether an employee settles in and stays depends heavily on how their partner settles in. J. Stewart Black and Gregory Stephens were among the first to describe this link, and Margaret Shaffer and David Harrison later showed that partners adjust more easily when they build a network of people of their own and have support within the family, rather than only the role of companion.

The reason is simple once you see it. The person who moved for the job has a ready-made structure in the new place: a schedule, colleagues, tasks, a sense of being needed. The partner who came along often has an empty calendar. They may have left a job they loved. They may not be able to work in their profession in the new place. They may have stayed at home with the children, because somebody has to. And on top of all this, they are expected to be grateful, because it is “an opportunity for the whole family, after all”.

This is how a conversation might sound a few months after the move (composed, not a real person):

“How was today?”
“Fine. I went to the shop. And for a walk.”
“That’s great, isn’t it? You’ve finally got some time for yourself.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just … you’ve got people to talk to all day. I’ve got you. From seven in the evening.”
Silence. “I didn’t know it was like that for you.”
“I didn’t want you to know. You were so excited.”

This conversation holds the essence of the trailing spouse: their loss is often invisible because it comes wrapped as a gift. And because it comes wrapped as a gift, it is hard to talk about — anyone who complained would seem ungrateful. That is why one of the most important steps after a move is for the partner who moved for work to recognise that loss and name it: “I know you gave something up for me. I don’t take it for granted.”

When your partner is the only person you have

In the first months after a move, something happens that can bring a couple closer or weigh them down — often both at once. Because there is nobody else, your partner becomes everything: confidant, company, friend for coffee, sounding board about work, the only person you can call when the car breaks down. No relationship can carry everything. When we force it to, tiredness starts to show — the one everyone leans on begins to withdraw, and the one who leans begins to seek closeness more. This dance is familiar to couples in which one partner has a more anxious attachment style, which I wrote about in Anxious attachment: why a partner’s silence sets off the alarm.

There is also another version: your partner doesn’t come with you. The job is in another city or another country, the other job stays at home, and the couple start living between two places. Sometimes this arrangement is the only sensible solution, but it brings its own challenges — from how to keep everyday closeness to who carries more of the load at home. There is more about this in A couple between countries: living across several homes.

The same holds in both cases: after a move, a couple needs to talk about how each of them will build their own network. Not as a sign that they aren’t enough for each other, but as a way of making sure the relationship isn’t loaded with more than it can carry.

The parents who stay behind

When an adult child leaves, more changes for the parents than it seems at first. It isn’t only that they will see each other less. It’s that a role changes: the one who was nearby, who helped with the shopping, who came round when something happened, is no longer available. And you, the one who left, often carry a sense of guilt — especially if your parents are older or unwell.

This is often where a triangle among siblings shows itself. The brother or sister who stayed nearby becomes the one who looks after them. You are the one who calls on Sundays and comes for the holidays. A quiet resentment can build between you — they think you slipped away, you think they see you as a traitor — and your parents may find themselves in the middle. There is more on what happens when caring for parents becomes a burden in the knowledge base entry Caring for an ageing parent.

What helps is not necessarily how often you visit, but how reliable the contact is. A short call at the same time every week can give parents more sense of connection than a long visit once every three months followed by silence. And if you have siblings, it is worth saying out loud how you share the caring — even if the share is uneven. In families, an unspoken division almost always turns into resentment. I have written more about how the relationship between adult children and their parents changes and can be repaired in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Friendships that thin out

At the farewell dinner, everyone promises to visit. Some really do. Most don’t. And when the first year has passed, you realise that the friends you used to see every week are now in touch only through the odd photo in a group chat.

This isn’t betrayal. It is, as I put it in the infographic, mechanics. Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar followed young people for eighteen months as they moved from secondary school to university or work, when many of them also moved away. They found that emotional closeness with friends declined when contact with them fell — whereas with relatives it remained much more stable, even with less frequent contact. Friendships, in other words, need maintenance. Family ties cope with less.

There is something else worth knowing: this decline is often slow and unnoticed. Nobody has done anything to anybody. There is no argument, no final conversation. The friendship doesn’t end, it thins out. The psychologist Pauline Boss used the term ambiguous loss for losses in which a person is at once present and absent. A friend who is still in your phone but whom you no longer see is that kind of loss — and that is exactly why it is hard to know whether and how to grieve for it. I wrote about the pain of a friendship ending without any ritual in When a friendship ends: a loss without a ritual.

What can you do? You can’t keep everyone. But you can choose. It helps, after a move, to answer honestly which two or three friendships matter so much to you that you will give them time and energy — regular calls, visits, shared plans — and with which you will accept that they will become something else. There is more about how friendships in adulthood form and change in the knowledge base entry Friendship in adulthood.

New friendships take hours

In a new place it seems as though friendships ought to happen by themselves. You’re open, after all, you’re making an effort, you signed up for that class. And yet six months go by and you feel you have nobody you could ring on a Saturday afternoon.

In 2019 Jeffrey Hall set out to estimate how much time together adults need for an acquaintance to become a friend. His estimates settled at around fifty hours for a casual friendship, around ninety hours for a friendship, and more than two hundred hours for a good friendship. What mattered was not only how much time there was, but how it was spent — conversation, joking and attention counted for more than simply sharing a space.

These numbers can be sobering and reassuring at the same time. Sobering, because they show that new friendships can’t be hurried by goodwill alone. Reassuring, because they show there is nothing wrong with you if you haven’t made any after six months. If you spend three hours a week with someone, two hundred hours takes more than a year to add up.

What helps is repetition. The same class every Tuesday, the same run on Saturdays, the same people in the same café. Friendships in adulthood rarely grow out of one big meeting; more often they grow out of many small ones that repeat until someone says: “Shall we go for a drink?” A new job can be one such place, but don’t expect it to replace everything. I wrote about why the first months in a new team are emotionally draining in The first ninety days in a new team: why it is more emotionally draining than you expect. And if you work from home, the path is harder still, because even the corridor where you might bump into someone disappears.

One more thing: you don’t have to wait for the move to start building. If you know you will be moving, you can look beforehand for anyone you know in the new place — an old classmate, a friend of a friend, a club like the one you belonged to at home. One familiar person in a new city is often a bridge to many others.

Exercise: a map of your relationships before and after the move

You can do this exercise on your own or with your partner — each on your own sheet of paper. It takes about half an hour.

1. Draw yourself in the middle of the page and the people who matter to you around you. The closer they are emotionally, the closer you draw them. Don’t forget colleagues, neighbours, people from clubs and groups.
2. With a second colour, mark which of these relationships depend on your being physically nearby — a shared coffee, a walk, help moving a wardrobe.
3. Choose two or three relationships you want to keep at a distance, and for each write down one concrete habit: a Sunday call, a visit every few months, a series you both watch and talk about.
4. On the other side of the page, write down where in the new place you could meet people — not once, but regularly. A class, sport, volunteering, other parents at the nursery.
5. If you are doing the exercise with your partner, compare your sheets. Who loses more? Who has more ready-made opportunities in the new place? Talk about how you will make sure each of you has people of your own as well.

The exercise is a simple version of the Map of your support network tool. If you also want to see how your relationships connect to the wider environment — work, school, healthcare, community — the ecomap can help.

When the move isn’t the problem

Now I want to say something that runs against everything I have written so far: not every difficulty after a move is caused by the move.

Sometimes a move simply reveals something that was hidden before. A couple who got along at home because each had their own circle of people to cushion the tension finds itself, in the new place, face to face with questions that were there all along. The move didn’t create them — it just pulled back the curtain. And sometimes the move itself was an attempt to escape: from family, from an unresolved relationship, from oneself. Then it turns out the problem moved along with the boxes.

The reverse is true too: many people feel better after moving for work than they did before. Some only discover far from home who they are without the expectations of the place they grew up in. Some couples grow closer in a new place because, for the first time, they depend on each other in a good way. A move is not necessarily a loss. It is a change that has a price — and that price is higher for some than for others.

And one more limit: if for weeks after a move you feel drained of energy, sleep badly, take no pleasure in anything or feel there is no way out, that is not just loneliness that will pass once you meet people. It may be depression that needs attention. In that case, see your GP. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (between 7 pm and 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

How talking can help

In therapy, which I practise under supervision along the lines of relational family therapy, a move often brings up things that aren’t said out loud elsewhere: guilt towards parents, resentment towards a partner who “chose the job”, the sense that you gave up something that mattered to you and aren’t allowed to regret it, because it was your own decision, after all. It often turns out that these feelings are carried not by one person but by the whole system — and that they are easier to carry once someone puts them into words.

Talking can also help before a move, while a couple is still deciding. Not so that someone decides for you, but so that each of you can say what you fear and what you are giving up before the decision is made. A decision in which both of you were heard is carried differently from one that left one partner “trailing behind”.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana. I also work in English, so if you have recently moved to Ljubljana for work — on your own or with a partner who came along — you are very welcome to get in touch.

What to remember

• Moving for work isn’t just a personal decision — it shifts a whole system of relationships, including the people who stay behind.
• The trailing spouse often carries an invisible loss; it helps when the partner who moved for work recognises it and names it.
• With parents, reliable contact matters more than frequent visits; how siblings share the caring is worth saying out loud.
• Friendships without contact thin out — it isn’t betrayal, it’s mechanics; choose which ones you will consciously keep.
• New friendships need many hours of time together; feeling you have nobody after six months is expected, not proof that something is wrong with you.