Attitude Is Everything

In the ten months I have been in Brussels, I have met a wide range of expats. I think I am a fairly good read of people and after meeting so many expats, I think a company should hire me to meet prospective expats and go on and tell the company whether they will survive living abroad or not to help save everyone money and heartache.

I can almost tell by meeting someone one time whether they will make it or not. It is so obvious in their demeanor and attitude as to how they are adjusting. The other day I was speaking with a woman who is working on her PhD relating to expats and she said that there is a high correlation to the failure rate (meaning the family goes home earlier than their expected return date) and the wife's resistance to moving in the first place. Basically, the wife is going to get her way one way or another, either by just never saying yes to an expat move, or causing such misery once they move that the family will move back earlier than expected. When the husband goes home every night to his wife complaining about how much she hates the country and horrible her day has been, I think he will eventually move them back just to shut her up.

I am not saying that I soley blame the wife for not adjusting. I partially blame the husband for refusing to accept the fact that the wife never wanted to move in the first place. And I will also note (and this is supported in a lot of literature about expats) that the trasition is much harder on the wife than it is is on the husband. Most often, the man gets to stay in his American bubble of English speakers and American internet for 10 hours a day at work, while the wife is going through the culture shock of buying food in a different language, helping the kids adjust to school, figuring out how to drive the kids everywhere, creating a new social circle, finding new doctors and pharmacies, and so many other little things necessary for life.

The bottom line is that neither person is to blame, it just all goes back to listening to your intuition and your gut feeling. When Kyle and I were travelling in Australia in 2001, I was never that gung-ho about scuba diving. I always had a slight hesitation about the idea. One day, at the spur of the moment, two spaces opened up for a four day scuba certification class. Two days were spent in the pool learning scuba technique and two days were spent actually scuba diving in the ocean. I was still hesitant about the idea, but we only had 5 minutes to decide and I thought since Kyle was doing it that I should too. After the first day I almost had a panic attack while I was under water (and this was just in the deep end of the pool!). I ended up dropping out of the class and losing my $200, but my peace of mind was worth it. Now I just regret that I didn't listen to myself before hand.

I am sure these families that have not had a good transition over here had some of those same warning signs and feelings, but they refused to listen to them. Now that mistake is costing the company over $300,000. Before telling our friends about the move, Kyle and I tried to predict each of their reactions. Sure enough, some of them thought it was the greatest thing in the world and were jealous of our opportunity, yet others were happy for us, but could never really grasp why we would want to do something like this. Hopefully the ones that could never really understand why we would want to do this will not eventually talk themselves into being expats too.

Another factor that I have found affects how people adjust to life abroad is if the idea of an international move was a possiblity before you got married. We didn't know we would be moving to Brussels before we got married, but we both knew that with Kyle's job as a journalist that an international move could be a possibility. When you think you will be in Sumter, SC the rest of your life and then all of the sudden you are in Brussels, Belgium, I can understand the shock to the system one might endure.

A third aspect of adjusting is how much the person clings to their life back in the States versus embracing their life and time in Europe. It is amazing when you meet people here that still continue to have such an American life while living in Europe. There are so many American women I meet that chose to spend all 3 months of summer vacation back in the States. Obviously I think the States are great, but if you are only going to be in Europe for 3-5 years, why spend an entire summer in Chicago when you could be in Rome?

A great quote I recently heard was, "Being happy doesn't mean everything's perfect. It means you've decided to see beyond the imperfections." If only some people here could realize that, I think they would be a lot happier.