Living Abroad: When Does a Country Stop Being Just the Place You Moved To?
On the relationship we gradually build with a place, and why the number of years we’ve lived there only tells part of the story.
When I first moved to France, I was very aware of the fact that I was living in France. Almost everything reminded me of it. I was learning the language, figuring out how things worked and discovering places for the first time. I was here on a student visa, and although I'd moved to be with the man who would become my husband and intended to build a life here, there was still something temporary about being a student. I hadn't yet built much of a life of my own.
Eventually, that changed, although I couldn't tell you exactly when. There wasn't one big moment when France suddenly stopped being the country I'd moved to and became home.
Instead, my life began to build and take root. I got married here. I found a job in an international law firm and had colleagues I saw every day. There were family traditions with in-laws and dinner parties with friends. There were buses and trains I took on autopilot, and restaurants I'd been to enough times that they were no longer discoveries. I had an ordinary routine of getting up, going to work and coming home.
France gradually stopped being something I noticed all the time — it became the place where my life was happening. For 16 years, that life unfolded on Île Saint-Louis, a small island in the middle of Paris where I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up with a skyline view. Despite being in the city center, it’s always had something of a village vibe to it, and when I lived there, there were people I crossed paths with often enough that we’d recognize one another. A lot of the shopkeepers knew me, too. On the way home from work, I’d often stop in for a baguette and a quick chat, then weave in and out of a couple of other shops to pick up some cheese or find just the right bottle of wine for dinner.
None of this felt particularly significant at the time…it was just life.
I live in another part of Paris now, but from time to time, I still go back to the island. It’s changed a lot over the years; with the arrival of Airbnb, there are fewer full-time residents, and more short-term visitors. Some of the shopkeepers I knew are still there, though, and there's something heartwarming about seeing their eyes brighten when they recognize a familiar face.
I still meet up with friends at some of the brasseries there. And when summer arrives, one of the things I still enjoy doing is going back to Berthillon for the first ice cream cone of the season. It's a small tradition of mine. But looking back over those 16 years, I realize that the island stopped being just a “nice place” in Paris—my own history had become woven into it.
It makes me wonder about the relationship we develop with the places where we live. We talk a lot about time when talking about life abroad, especially how long we’ve lived in our host country. And time does tell us something, but I'm not sure it tells us as much as we sometimes think it does. You can spend years somewhere without necessarily developing much of a relationship with the place itself, and I suspect the opposite can also be true. A place can become meaningful to us relatively quickly because of what happens there, who we become there, or the memories we begin making there.
For me, the relationship has been built so gradually that I didn't really see it happening. Once the novelty of my first years had disappeared, France simply became the backdrop to my life, and going to work in Paris wasn't particularly different from going to work anywhere else. I'd arrive, put my things down, get a coffee, check my emails, talk to colleagues, do some work, have lunch and eventually go home. Metro, boulot, dodo.
I wasn't waking up every morning thinking, I'm living in France — I was simply living.
Now, I find myself deeply entangled with the country. I care about what happens here, when my neighborhood café changes ownership or when my favorite cocktail bar gets torn down. I have opinions about what happens in France (sometimes very strong ones). And there are plenty of times when it frustrates me, too. I can turn eight shades of annoyed when a transportation strike makes it impossible to get where I need to go, and at the same time feel very protective of people's right to protest.
Living somewhere for a long time doesn't necessarily make you less critical of it. In my case, perhaps the opposite has happened. I know France well enough to be frustrated by it and attached to it at the same time. There's no idealized version of France left for me to protect…there’s just the country where I've spent most of my adult life.
Maybe that's why the word relationship feels more accurate to me than attachment alone — a relationship allows for complexity. I've invested something of myself here over the years: in relationships, work, routines, memories, and a future I still imagine having here. And in return, my life here has given me something, too. There are people who know me, places that hold parts of my history, and memories that belong to the life I've built here.
I don't mean that transactionally. France doesn't owe me something because I've spent 26 years here. I mean that I've put a lot of myself into building a life here, and over the years, that life has given a lot back to me.
I wonder whether that's something we overlook when we think about feeling at home abroad. We can become very focused on the visible markers of a life: how long we've lived somewhere, whether we speak the language, whether we have friends, whether we understand the culture, whether we've learned how everything works. Those things can matter a great deal. But there’s a different question, now, that I’m becoming increasingly interested in:
What kind of relationship are we developing with the place where our life is happening?
I don't think there's one correct answer to that. Perhaps the relationship with a place isn't even particularly important to everyone's experience of home. That’s one of the reasons I'm wary of turning my own life-abroad experience into another checklist of things people living abroad are supposed to achieve.
But for me, France is no longer just the location of my life: there are pieces of my history here now.
A street can remind me of who I was 15 years ago. A shopkeeper can remember me from another chapter of my life. An ice cream cone can mark the beginning of summer and the first mulled wine the arrival of cooler autumn days. I can watch something change in Paris and realize how much I care because I remember what was there before.
None of those things happened because I decided I needed to “integrate better”. They happened because, little by little, I stopped simply “living” in France and started building a history with it.
Maybe that's the distinction I've been trying to understand all along…
Time can tell us how long we've lived somewhere, but our history with it tells us something about the life we've built there.
If you're building a life abroad, come join us.
Thrive On Through Life Abroad is my free Skool community for people who want to talk honestly about what it means to build a life in another country, beyond the practicalities of simply living there.
It's a place to share experiences, explore some of the questions that come with life abroad, and connect with other people who understand that there's often much more to making a life somewhere than learning how everything works.
